: Pieris japonica (pronounced Pie-air-iss juh-pon-i-kuh)
Pieris japonica (also known as Japanese Pieris, Lily-of-the-Valley Shrub, or Andromeda) is a compact, evergreen shrub with much appeal as a landscape plant. It’s versatile and works well in the shrub border, as a foundation plant, or massed in the woodland garden. Its attractive leaves emerge bronze or red, and it bears snowy white pendulous blooms in late winter and early spring.
There has been renewed interest recently in including native plants in the home garden landscape. Native plants are typically considered to be those that were found naturally growing in a region as far back as pre-Colonial times.
I can already taste them. Juicy and warm picked fresh from the vine. The hardest part is getting them to last the short trip from the garden to the kitchen.
Tomatoes are warm season lovers. They pout and throw fits if you plant them out too early with cool night temperatures and unexpected cold breezes from the north. We plan on no earlier than Memorial Day weekend but will postpone if the weekend’s overcast and cool. And it’s worth the wait to have those seedlings spring to life under the hot summer sun and bulk up quickly in preparation of yielding handfuls of fruits.
Location, location, location. Tomatoes need as much sun as they can get. South or southwest locations are best where they get about 7 hours of sun per day or more.
These sun worshippers also appreciate being well-fed. Some compost or aged manure plus a handful of low-nitrogen fertilizer mixed into the soil does the trick. The soil should be fertile and well-drained since tomatoes are big feeders and resent wet feet.
It’s also best to plant them in places where you’ve planted them in the previous three years or so to discourage problems from soil-borne diseases. Containers work well for the small space gardener where crop rotation just isn’t feasible. And you can locate these easily in the sunniest parts of your yard.
Cherries, Beefsteaks, Heirlooms, or Paste. They all top the list of my summertime favorites.
text and photos by Ann D. Travers
The road in front of our house is a steep hill that people like to zip their cars up and down at a pretty good clip. The only thing that stands between our front yard and the street is a privet hedge that provides a good degree of privacy as well as protection from the cars.
Last year’s broods of bluebirds have returned and are squabbling over the available birdhouses spaced along our pasture fence. At the hardware store, additional pine bluebird houses cost $25 apiece and were nothing to sing about! Instead, we spent $10 apiece on 8-foot cedar one-by-six planks and made two stout bluebird houses and a smaller wren house from each one. More birds mean more mosquito control, too!
Storage inside and out of our 19th Century Victorian has always been an issue. Closets are scarce (one of our girls’ rooms doesn’t even have one) and outdoor storage is limited on our narrow lot of just under an acre. As a result, we utilize spaces to their fullest potential and create storage by reconfiguring existing, underused structures whenver we can.
Convenient storage of trash and recycling receptacles can be tough. Add to that the desire to keep them out of sight and you’ve got yourself quite a project. Just ask my husband.
There’s a side entrance to our house that used to have a long narrow porch with the door located halfway down the side of the house. The 6 feet beyond the door was empty since it was not easy to get around the doorway and over to that end of the porch.
Because we never used the end of the porch, my husband came up with the idea of taking off the floorboards and installing a cubby to hold the trash and recycling buckets. He framed in the space with 2 x 4s and mounted a piece of exterior plywood with asphalt shingles. The space is now a functional storage cubby for our buckets.
Concrete benches may not be the most comfortable to sit on, but they are practical. Get one in your yard and you’re good the long haul – no real maintenance required and you’ll have years of sitting.
But are concrete benches a DIY project?
Turf Scientist Jim Baird of the University of California at Riverside is attempting to bioengineer a type of grass that needs less water to proliferate.
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