ABC Wednesday: "J" is for Junk!

Welcome to the weekly online collaboration known as ABC Wednesday! My choice for the letter "J" is Junk. These birdhouses were on display at last weekend's Perennial Plant Club Sale in Sacramento. Aren't they charming? The green roof was made from an old Doughboy pool liner!

My friend, Lynn, at Inside Red Studio is a garden designer and an artist who especially loves working with recycled materials.

Back last Fall, I posted a couple of items about these great these outhouse/tool huts made by a father and son in Davis out of wood scraps and junk found at the dump.

I really admire these artists' ability to take some ordinary and discarded thing and with imagination and creativity, turn it into art. It's really something.

UCD Seminar: Backyard Edible Gardening

Here's something interesting...Saturday, April 25th from 9 - 2, Backyard Edible Gardening: Growing a Successful Vegetable Garden, a "one-day seminar designed as an overview on how to establish, maintain, and utilize the many benefits of a productive backyard edible garden."
The event is sponsored by UCD's Good Life Garden, an edible landscape project designed to teach and inspire, located on campus at the Robert Mondavi Institute of Food and Wine. I'm intrigued by this concept which recognizes the importance of vegetables to a "good life"; eggplants and radishes finally get their due! The website has details of all the crops grown on the campus site, even recipes.
But, back to the seminar. I want to go, how about you?

ABC Wednesday: "I" is for IPM

ooh, ooh, ooh...10 more minutes to go...I have to choose. I think I'm going with something dull and academic, but which I think sounds worthy...it's

Integrated Pest Management (or)

IPM

This year my green goal is to become more organic gardening friendly...IPM could help me with that, I'm sure, if I only understood it...I think I'll pass this off to a blogger I admire, a recent Master's Degree recipient from the UC Davis campus...I'm sure she had to digest it all.
Till then, however, here's the link to the program, http://www.ipm.ucdavis.edu/

Whoops, 2 more minutes! PUBLISH!

Happy Saint Patrick's Day

When I was a young girl, my mother had a dance studio. She had recitals and this is one of the songs I remember singing. The shamrock of the song has many forms, but all of them, according to my Sunset Western Garden Book, are likely to become weeds. And if weeds they are, so be it...and perhaps it speaks well of us Irish transplants...that we're so willing to grow and so crafty in our charm that we thrive like weeds, and have songs written about us.

I'm looking over a four-leaf clover, that I overlooked before.
One leaf is sunshine, the other is rain,
third is the roses that bloom in the lane.
No use explaining, the one remaining, is somebody I adore.
I'm looking over a four-leaf clover, that I overlooked before.

- Words by Mort Dixon, music by Harry Woods
(Written in 1927 - popularized in 1948 by Art Mooney)

Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day - March, 2009

My forsythia is gloriously blooming in my front yard. So pretty, so yellow. They're not very exciting when they're out of bloom, but, at this time of year, they're a gardener's prize, a "wow...look at me!." I used to feel envious of gardens with these early blooming shrubs, but now I have my own. This one came from a neighbor who was propagating in his back yard. Maybe this year I'll try some cuttings, myself...they're suppose to be easy.
Go to Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day and see what's blooming all over the world.