Our Big Plant Weekend

This weekend we spent a lot of time on the plants. On Saturday we went to the Flower and Garden Show at the Cow Palace.

We scored a lot of loot!


We got four bulbs that I planted on one of our trees. They were Jolanda Asiatic Lilys. I hope I forget all about them and then in the summer we will have some wonderfully Lilys. If all goes well they should come back every year. One of our goals is to have at least one plant that is fixed on each tree. We can fill in the others will perennials.

We also got a Pelargonium Shanti that we planted out side and it is beautiful. Lots of little red and white flowers.

In additon to all of our new plants we also rebuilt the last of the fences that the Grumple distroyed, reseeded that tree with some fun new seeds. Things are looking up. We are very excited to see what all of the new sprouts turn into.

Meet the Grumple, the #1 enemy of neighborhood beautification

Meet The Grumple. I first saw him on the Simpsons Christmas special this year but I realized he has been living in our neighborhood for some time.

The problem with street gardening is the complete lack of control one has over the outside world. When planting flowers on the street you have to be ready to loose it all at an instant. This was a very hard lesson for us to learn. When we first scattered wildflower seeds in 2005 they grew amazingly well.

Up until someone decided to pull them all up one night We made a nice bouquet from the remains we found on the street. Despite this we vowed to keep planting. The positive effect flowers have on the neighborhood is AMAZING! People stop me all the time and tell me how wonderful the block looks and how much they enjoy walking by every day and seeing what pops up.

This morning was especially hard for me. The grumple came by at about 1:30 am last night and decided to do his thing

This one was hard to handle. I have two Saturdays building these fences not to mention cleaning up the trees. But the Mr Grumple can not keep us down. For every act of vandalism he does we are coming back with double the amount of love. WE WE REBUILD and the flowers will THRIVE. Some days are harder than other. If you are going to do this you have to stay strong. The amount of good the flowers do far out weighs the pain caused by Mr. Grumple.

Sprouts!

It has been less than a week since we put down seeds and thank to some unexpected San Francisco sunshine WE HAVE SPROUTS! I can't wait to see what the turn out to be!

Oh How They Grow

I have to remember to have some patience.

Over the course of a few months last year one tree went from this ...









To This!

Our first post

Welcome to our first blog post!

It is March 03 and we finally got our seeds planted for the new year. It is also the perfect time to start this blog!

If you have walked by the first block of Fillmore street in San Francisco last summer, you saw a lot of wild flowers blooming around the trees. That was the result of a little experiment we tried. We wanted to see what we could grow around the trees in our neighborhood. It turns out that after cleaning up a lot of trash, and putting down a little extra potting soil, you can actually grow quite a bit. We had so much fun keeping working on the flowers we wanted to do it again this year.

This year we built fences around 5 of the trees on the first block of Fillmore.
We used wood and some green fencing that we think will hold up a little better than the ones did last year. One of the trees has a daisy bush that we planted last year and it has really taken off. We are going to leave that to continue growing and really take root. We are going to do one other tree with some annuals but the remaining three on the block will be wild flowers. They really worked well last year so we hope they will again. We planted one tree of "Oregon Wildflowers" another tree has a "Bird and Butterfly" mix and the last one has a "Cut Flowers" mix. We have picked these up at various places over the last year. Lets hope they all bloom.

Now is the hardest part. Waiting for the seeds to sprout.