Palm Springs and Palm Trees

So on Friday I received my most recent Amazon purchase, Palm Springs Style Gardening by Maureen Gilmer and liked it just as much as when I got it out of the library. It is wonderfully arranged, starting with an introduction to desert/southwestern gardening and how it differs from other climate zones.  Particularly, it addresses choosing plants that will survive the heat  and how to help them do it. Although San Diego is quite a bit more temperate than the high-desert, I do like that she focuses on drainage and soil conditions.  Putting a cactus or succulent into poorly draining potting soil is just asking for trouble.


She then moves on into the various classes of plants in each chapter, with one on Palm Trees, Succulents, the Cacti, Euphorbia, Grasses, etc.  Enough to get a good idea of what direction to go, but not overwhelming.  I particularly enjoyed the chapter on Palms and the distinctions between the Mexican and Californian Fan Palms and the pinnate leafed varieties.  I think we really lucked out in that the two specimens in our front yard are California Palms (although that does mean they may grow up to 60 feet tall!!) 

However, reading the book also made me realize that I really did need to do some trimming of our trees, as they have several quite heavy looking fruit-bearing branches and according to some, pruning of these branches will help devote more resources towards nice healthy fronds and deep root growth. So I got our recently purchased bypass loppers and the ladder and went up.  The one towards the front wasn't too bad, it's only 15 feet or so up, but the larger one, wow, I had the ladder nearly the whole way extended.

 

Of course, I forgot to take before pictures, but here's what the two palms looked like after.  And the yard waste that I now need to go get a new garbage can for! (for yard waste recycling they don't provide the containers and up till now we had been throwing the small amount of weeds we picked into the trash...*cringe*)

Landscape design software

Good landscaping design software is hard to find.

I spent part of my day yesterday downloading and playing with some of the options online, and was quite disappointed. 

The first one I tried was Garden Planner. Sounds simple enough, but the user interface was the least intuitive design and within an hour, I was frustrated by just trying to draw the outline of our property!

How can it be that difficult to draw straight lines? I have no idea, but they do!
This is their sample screen shot, but if the normal user is anything like me (and I like to think that I'm quick at picking up new software) this would have taken DAYS to design.

Next I tried the Better Homes and Gardens "Free" Interactive Plan-A-Garden.   Unfortunately, you have to use one of their 27 stock photos to design on (none of which looked similar to ours). Although you can upgrade for $9.99 and use a photo of your own house. Blegh, I hate paying for software.  But even if you use their stock photos, the perspective on items you insert into the landscape design aren't always the same.  And then half of the plants in the program aren't available without upgrading either. All in all sloppy.  Why not just do overhead planning? It's so much cleaner and simpler.  Everyone is obsessed with 3D this and 3D that, I want 2D!  Definitely less frustrating than Garden Planner, but still a fail.

Overall, pretty disappointing. And some of the other options on download.cnet.com although looking promising, were $99.95 for the full version (with 15 day trial). And for that kind of money, I think I'll just go down to Lowes, buy a ruler and some drafting paper, and draw it out myself!

Anyone else have recommendations?

The grass is always greener...

I've been quite frustrated recently with our yard. I'm becoming more and more convinced that they must have just thrown the sod down on top of the gravel that was there previously. The back yard grows wonderfully; nice, thick, dark green grass that I'm cutting at least once a week.  But that section was already grass before the flip (at least on google maps - right) unlike the front, which remains brown and anemic despite more watering.

In fact, the only thing that's growing well in the front is crabgrass! I took the mower to the front half today and it had basically not grown at all in nearly two weeks. So instead, I spent the next forty-five minutes pulling out all the crabgrass I could find. On the upside, I must agree with you, mom; weeding is somehow very satisfying sometimes.

I did some more reading on crabgrass about preventive measures and have changed our sprinkler timers so that we only water three days a week but for a longer time.  Hopefully that will allow the fescue to grow deeper (if there's actually soil under there!) and slow the crabgrass down.
This does give us even more incentive to start planning that California native plants garden!  This weekend we're going to map out the yard so we can decide what areas will be pulled up to make room for all the succulents and decorative grasses!