Greengeniecpa's Blog

April 11 – new classes

greengeniecpa — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:06:53 +0000

April 11 we start teaching people about gardening. Sundays 9-12 for 4 weeks.

Classes will be at the Orcutt Horticultural Center in Canoga Park, CA

Getting good response!

The critters won, peach tree lost

greengeniecpa — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 22:36:33 +0000

Our peach tree was saved by our dogs by critters who were eating all of the peaches.

Unfortunately, the peach tree was broken in half when the attack by the dogs were made.

The critters got the peaches, the dogs got the tree and once again we get to wait until next year for peaches.

The K & J Gardening Initiative

greengeniecpa — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 19:12:58 +0000

We are trying to live sustainability in the garden while being Los Angeles City folk.

We are going to teach it to Los Angeles residents and are discovering it is not easy and at best not convenient.

Today, I am feeling overwhelmed by it and maybe I need to keep it in baby steps.

More to come tomorrow.

Dogs and Peach Trees

greengeniecpa — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:54:30 +0000

I walk into the backyard and see fresh leaves all over. It looks like Ken’s avocados.

Oh boy, he is going to be upset. He loves those avocados, as much as he loves his three dogs. Somewhere I am also in the count.

I call him out and we discover it is our peach tree being eaten, not the avocado.

The peach tree with all the new little peaches being formed. We are worried about critters eating them. We hadn’t thought about our lab, Sierra as one of the culprits.

All the lower branches are all over the back yard. The peach tree has a fence around it now.

We feed our three dogs veggies every day. I guess they like fruit too!!

Protecting the fruit from critters

greengeniecpa — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:21:52 +0000

How do you protect your stone fruit from critters? Last year, we had at a full harvest on our peach tree. As they ripened, they disappeared. Almost overnight. We had babied and nurtured our tree to feed the squirrels and tree rats.

This year we have more varieties of stone fruit and the peaches are about the size of a kumquat.

How do we protect them? The only answer is to encase the trees. Ken has an old canopy frame and now this canopy frame is around the majority of the stone fruit trees. We will be ordering bird protecting netting (?) to put around the frame. Will it help? Who knows.

We have artichoke plants over 5 feet tall and we counted 8 artichokes on one of our plants. As I was weeding, today, I discovered under the artichoke plants, 4 endive plants that were thriving.

btw.. the plugs that wilted are now dead….

Wow…..

Aahhh… Killed plugs!

greengeniecpa — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:59:46 +0000

We are supposed to be gardeners and we are plug killers! We have about 200 seedlings that we are sharing with two other MG’s for the classes being held next month. The heat yesterday disintegrated about a third of them. And one of the MG’s is coming tomorrow to pick up the plants.

I guess it was our plugs that died! Ken is out there now trying to create a mini watering system, so that hopefully the plants will come back. Plants are amazing creatures.

We pruned some grapes last month and we saved some of the pruned branches, because very often you can take those cut branches and plant in the ground. We stuck them in a bucket of water and forgot about them.

A couple of days ago, I noticed that the grape branches in the water were leafing out!! They were alive and growing!

As Ken would say ” It’s the yin and the yang”

Check out the Victory Garden Blog!!!

greengeniecpa — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 23:50:17 +0000

See the Grow LA Garden Initiative blog. We are participating by teaching anyone who wants to learn to create and grow their own veggie garden.

Check out the link for this Garden Blog!!

http://bit.ly/aw4wea

Spring has sprung in the garden

greengeniecpa — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 18:40:21 +0000

My wisteria is blooming. It is magnificent! First time as a full blooming tree. I have trained it to be a small tree. We have 27 fruit trees on our city lot. Normal size city lot. We also have a 1000 sf veggie garden. We haven’t purchased any veggies from the store in several years.

We are teaching people to start a Victory Garden. These classes will be held in the West San Fernando Valley starting in April at a beautiful place called Orcutt Ranch.

We have the K & J Sustainability Project whereby we are trying to keep as much of the garden in our garden or on our property, including energy use, weeds, and everything else that can have some sort of impact on our already polluted city.

But, in the end we are city people who are also of the land and begin each day getting our hands dirty and connecting with the soil as people have done forever.

Can You Compost Weeds??

greengeniecpa — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:01:55 +0000

For the die hard gardeners composting weeds is the big NO NO. Won’t compost. Heat won’t kill seeds….

Well for the K & J Sustainable Project, what do you do? Throw it into the Green Bin and let Los Angeles deal with it!!

What did they do in the “old” days when there weren’t Green Bins??

Incinerators… I remember we had one in the back yard of the home I grew up in. Bad for the environment??

Anyone with comments are welcome. How do we keep this simple question within the boundaries of our land and with a positive solution?

A bit about ourselves

greengeniecpa — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 18:36:54 +0000

We live on a city lot with three dogs and two cats. The garden takes the place of our lawn in the backyard. The garden is about 1,000 SF. All but the fruit trees is fenced.

We have been growing most of our veggies for about 4 years now. We are kind of a messy garden. We don’t weed as often as we should and we let a lot of the veggies go to seed. that means we allow them to complete their entire life cycle and don’t pull them out of the ground. This produces seeds and the seeds end up all over the garden and now we have new veggies each year.

We harvest food every day and I can’t imagine doing it any other way.