Things are starting to grow again!

It's always exciting to see new growth coming onto your plants.  :)  I've been working so hard on the hardscaping that I haven't had much time to update or put any special care into any particular plant.  But now that the yard is mostly done, I can refocus on cultivation.

This baby agave americana variegated kept a red edge on it's leaves.  Unusual, and very nice.

This is my Shohin Bonsai bench.  Mostly traditional bonsai material with the exception of the fockea edulis.  Two of my rooted cuttings are doing well also.  One was a crepe myrtle from the tree in the front yard.  The other is a boxwood cutting.  Everything is super green.

Our E.G. Waterhouse camelia has petite bright pink flowers.

These are flowers from our Coral Bells Kurume azalea shrub.  The shrub is still a baby at barely over a foot tall.  It's a toughie but still alive!  :)

This is a flower from our Goldmine nectarine tree.  The flowers are very similar to cherry blossoms, peach, and purple leaf plum.  It'll be tricky to compete with the animals for some fruit.  Last year we lost.

My first Japanese Black Pine.  New candles are coming up.  I will work on energy balancing on this guy soon.  April is feeding time.

This is my third Japanese Black Pine.  I bought it specifically to grow and train as bonsai.  It was originally about 5 feet tall.  I chopped it to about 20".  It's got some movement going on in there.  I like it.

Squirrel 1 - Me 0.  Now we know who's taking one bite out of every avocado and running off.  He isn't scared of us at all.  I think he might have eaten the few we had last year nectarines too.  I think he's threatening me with his stiff tail.

This wisteria was a bonsai inherited by me from my Dad's original collection.  A family friend adopted it when my Dad was no longer able to take care of his plants.  I didn't have the space to take any plants at that time.  It turned out that the family friend was too busy to take care of it also.  That was when I adopted it.  When I first received it, it was just a bunch of tangled up vines that were about 5 feet long.  I didn't do much.  Just a little trimming and fertilizer brought this tree a long ways.  It's had a tough past but hopefully it'll be on it's way to recovery now.  Wisteria has a very strong and pleasant fragrance.  I really love this tree it was moved very close to the house so that we could enjoy it more.

Here we are enjoying a wonderful weathered Saturday afternoon after a good lunch at Porto's.  :D

Our Howard McMinn Manzanita is flowering tiny white flowers.  :)  Yay!

At 6" off the ground, they seem a little low for humming birds, but who knows!

Xeriscaping Ninjas

Xeri is Greek for dry. Xeriscaping refers to a method of landscape design that minimizes water use.

We decided that our main goal was to create a beautiful garden without using as much water. Saving water is saving money, and our local law doesn't let us water often enough to keep the grass consistently green anyways.

We are ninja because we work in the night. Our neighbors wake up and see something new every once in a while. We thought it was a more fun than being Gnomes anyway.

Our first landscaping call to adventure comes from the need to improve our front yard. During a big rain storm, one giant branch from our Maple tree fell on the garage roof and put a two feet wide hole through the shingles. After I patched the roof up we saw that the tree was hollowed out by a gigantic bee hive. We didn't want to maintain the giant maple so we hired professionals to remove it. Then it was time to do some landscaping!

Other than looking at our parent's homes for inspiration and ideas, I bought some books to learn about drought tolerant plants. My favorite three are Designing with Succulents and Succulent Container Gardens by Debra Lee Baldwin, and Desert Gardens by Gary Lyons. These books were essential to teaching me not only what the names of each plants were, but also how to care for them, and how to display them in a setting. In addition, we looked at everyone's yard that we drove past. We looked at how businesses and schools had their landscape designed and looked at their plant selections.

My wife bought us a one year family membership to the Huntington Botanical Gardens. The funny thing is that one of my friend's father is the current curator for their Desert Garden. This happens to be the most important Desert Garden in the world!

We visited there often and took lots of photos and notes. This place was our main source of inspiration for designing our own private desert garden in the front yard. Our next step was to make a list of plants that we absolutely loved and had to use. We tried to choose plants with different shapes, sizes, textures, and colors. My wife wanted a very vibrant and colorful landscape design and I agreed. So we decided to use orange and blue because we loved this set of complimentary colors. The other options were red and green, or yellow and purple. Our main blue plant is senecio mandraliscae (blue chalk sticks) which we decided to place in the front and contrast it against our main orange plant which was euphorbia tirucalli (sticks on fire), the smaller shrubby form that often shows more orange. The plan was to place this orange plant in the back. There were two other plants we immediately knew that we must have, the Krauter Vesuvius (purple leaf plum) and the manzanita native to our area of Southern California. Both are very drought tolerant once established in the ground. The other plants we chose were more flexible depending on our budget.
So off to the drawing board I went! Here's what I came up with.





The next stage is plant aquisition, materials, budgeting, and construction. We needed plants, edging, and gravel. I provided the labor. We were on a shoe-string budget so we had to be flexible when it came to the secondary plants choices in our drawn out plan. More on this later.