shift in focus

So the original intent of this website was for me to document what we are growing in the New Era Community Garden and what I am learning about growing vegetables. In the meantime though I realized that I am just as excited about the various flowers and plants we have been growing around our yard. When we moved into our house 1 1/2 years ago, all we had was a big weedy, dirty piece of ground surrounding our house. It has been very exciting the changes we have been making to our landscape. This process has been going on ever since we moved in and will be ongoing for years. I am jsut as excited about this as the vegetables, so I am expanding the scope of what I will be documenting here.

bamboo

So, our backyard goes right up to an apartment complex. Honestly, it isn't the nicest complex either. All of the bathrooms look down on our yard and the owner just doesn't take the best care of it. It is a very interesting experience. Well about a year or more ago, Jason discovered that bamboo might be just the thing to screen our backyard from the apartments. We have just been kind of putting off buying it because I think it seemed like an overwhelming project.

However, in the paper last weekend there as an artile about a guy up in Rocklin who has a bamboo nursery and was having an open house. We figured we would just go up and check it out and, if nothing else, learn a little more about what type of bamboo would work in our backyard. We had already determined that we wanted clumping instead of running bamboo. With the running bamboo the roots go crazy and grow all over the place and can ruin the foundations of buildings.
Tangent aside, we drove on up to Rocklin and ended up in a residential neighborhood. It seemed an odd place to have a nursery. Well it turns out that it was this guy's house and he was selling bamboo out of his backyard. There really were a lot of people there, most likely due to the newspaper article, so we really didn't get to chat with him much. However, we did end up bringing home our first bamboo to start our screen.
We got an Alphonse Karr bamboo. It is clumping, likes full sun, and should grow to be 20-25 feet. It has a really pretty stripe going up the stalks(?)/shoots(?). So project "screen our backyard from neighbors bathrooms" has begun. Here is a picture.

bulbs

This probably isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but I am just tickled. We put paper white bulbs in the ground last year. They grew nice big green leafy stalk things, but never flowered. I was concerned that maybe they didn't get enough sun, or just didn't like it where I put them. But this year, there are a ton of buds, and....voila, we have flowers!