Tall Cineraria - The sought-after weed

You may know Cineraria from the cute little potted flowers sold all over the country for indoor, seasonal color. But it turns out, this highly hybridized version of the flower can go native here in the Bay Area and the resulting plant looks nothing like its commercial cousin.

The Mystery

I discovered this when I found a few weeds growing in my garden and thought the leaves had nice, generous shapes to them and wondered what they'd grow into. So I transplanted them into pots and set them aside to do their thing while I cleaned up the garden. At first bloom, the colors were a vibrant purple but the petals scraggly and weak. So I shrugged them off as just a purple weed and went about gardening intended to toss those out and refill the pots at some point in the future. Then the scraggly petals unfolded and made me glad I had kept them around.

You can see the milkweed-like buds on this flower. They really don't hint at how large and vibrant the blooms will be. It takes them a few days to open up, stretch out, and unfold.

As I walk around the Bay Area, I'm seeing the leaves of these plants popping up in random places. They aren't really planted with much intention. Rather, they seem to be welcome but uninvited guests.

In my research, I discovered that purple was only the start and, amazingly, these Canary Island natives can do well in San Francisco shade and fog. Officially, you should put them in part shade, but it doesn't take much sun to get them to bloom like this.

For more information, and other people's photos of these fun flowers, see here:

Golden Gate Gardener

Daves Garden

Building the Raised Beds

I have a dog. A large dog. And the one thing I'm not interested in (okay, one of many things) is my dog lifting his leg on my lettuce crop. No! Bad Dog! And that, dear reader, is why I've opted for a raised bed that is higher than my dog can lift his leg. Well, that and saving water and providing a better soil than what I have on this hillside and saving my back and knees from having to bend over to garden on the ground. So maybe I shouldn't entirely blame the beast that shall not be named. (But if you ever find yourself in my dining room, note that my vegetables are organic and wiz-free.)

I did a lot of research on raised beds and I've had such good luck with tomato grow boxes with self-watering reservoirs in other places that I thought I'd give that a try here on a larger scale. This cool guy that goes by the name "Albo Pepper" over on YouTube recommended a specific design for a sub-irrigated planter (SIP) that made sense and was easy to assemble. So, I followed his lead and built two of them 3x8(ish) feet. I've got a fence on the Northwest side of the yard that gets good sunlight most of the day so that's where they went. The fence blocks wind and provides an easy surface to attach trellises for support.

You can find Albo Pepper here: albopepper.com I recommend his YouTube channel if, like me, you're both a nerd and a gardener.

So I built a redwood box from lumber I got at our local hardware store. I bought an HDPE tarp (don't use PVC as it leaches BPA) and stapled it into the bed with large hardware staples. I bought a large role of 4" perforated french drain pipe which will act as the water reservoir and air gap. Notice how the pipes are all bent from being wound in to circle for a long time? Yeah, that was annoying. [If you run a 2x4 through the pipe and let it sit in the sun, that'll straighten in out.]







Next, grab some standard landscape cloth and duct tape and make a simple cap for each end to keep the potting mix out of the pipe.








Here I've used the heavy bale of peat moss to weigh the pipes down in the sun and try to get them to straighten out a bit. It sorta worked. The 2x4 method worked much better.

Notice the pattern with the pipe ad the head here and there's another pipe just like it at the foot. The header pipe here will get a water feeding tube dropped into it and the footer pipe will get the drain. Water flows into the reservoir here. It doesn't directly connect to the footer for easy draining, which is a good thing. You want the water to come into contact with the potting mix as it percolates through the bed.





Here's a view of the footer where the drain will go. Notice the gap between the pipes? This gap will get peat moss shoved into it and will act as the wick which will pull water up into the bed.



And here you can see the peat moss is in (I've exposed pipe for the picture) and I've started dumping the soilless potting mix into the bed.

Note that not pictured is the 1" PVC drain pipe that punctures the wood framing and tarp and goes into the top of the footer pipe. This drain keeps the water from flooding the bed and it lets air exchange. Air is critical to healthy plants.


Here we have a full bed. If you look in the upper right corner, you'll see a few inches of PVC pipe sticking up. This is the feeding tube for the water reservoir. It's wide enough to stick a hose into, though I'll likely insert a high gallon-per-hour drip tube in the to reduce the amount of manual maintenance required to water the plants. You can also build a funnel out of a two liter soda bottle and that's great for dumping your shower warm-up water into the bed to save potable water. This is California, after all. Water can get scarce.

If you use grey water to water this bed, never plant root crops. No carrots, beets, potatoes, or anything like it. Grey water should never touch the part of the plant you eat. I'll stick with potable water here because I love root crops and use my grey water on the fruit trees and ornamentals.


If you're going to use the square foot gardening method, which I highly recommend, now is the time to drop down your grid. I chose to use brightly colored cording because it was easier to work with than a wood grid. I'll need to reset it when I put the cap on the bed, but I couldn't wait to plant and needed the grid for that.



I cheated and bought two frames from the hardware store to make a trellis for my sugar snap peas. The garden is ready for plants.






One down... one more to go.

Cloud Forest Gardening

I've gardened in central California, Nevada, Florida, and now here I am in the oddest climate I've ever lived in. As a gardener, I consider tomatoes an "indicator species." It tells me a lot about a place once I know how one grows tomatoes. I've grown them in Nevada where the sun cooks fruit on the vine and in Florida where the constant Summer rains will rot the fruit before it even ripens. But never have a lived in a place where tomatoes cannot be grown until here. It just doesn't get hot enough here to do it. Guess what else? Lettuce doesn't bolt here--ever. San Francisco doesn't get hot enough nor cold enough to satisfy the needs of many varieties of edible plants. We are stuck in a perpetual chilly day with many a year without a single frost or a single day above 80 degrees. And, to make matters even stranger, our hottest days are in the Fall and not Summer. When some fruit are expecting a good Summer heat to push them into ripeness, we linger into Fall before things warm up enough and by then the season is over. A great example is avocado. Yes, here is a place in California that can grow the trees quite well but they rarely set good fruit because it's too cold in the Summer. Just. Plain. Odd.

What we have here is an unusual and fairly rare climate called a "cloud forest." There aren't many of these around the globe. Two famous ones are the Andes in South America and the Islands of New Zealand. So, there are a lot of things I won't be able to grow. But I have this pretty rare opportunity to grow things other people can't. There are some pretty cool veggies and fruit you rarely see in most American markets that I get to play around with. So there's that, at least. And hey, I bet I could fit a small greenhouse in the back yard to handle the tomatoes.

So, to get started, I bought and read a book on local gardening. This is key to growing food in San Francisco because our micro climates will drive even the most experienced gardener bonkers. I live just a few blocks off of Mission street in the Ex and what I can grow is measurably different than what someone who lives just 2.5 miles North of me on the same street can grow. And here is the very best book I could find from someone who is clearly respected in the San Francisco gardening community:

http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Gate-Gardening-3rd-Edition/dp/1570616175

I purchased the Google Books version but some folks like to get their hands on real paper. Whichever you choose, this is the best book for talking about the variety of challenges and undocumented features that come with urban gardening in San Francisco. From this book, I gleaned a list of those vegetables I enjoy that supposedly do well in the Ex.

However, as I mentioned earlier, we are a cloud forest climate not unlike the Andes and so I started looking at things that are native to that region to see what fun and unusual stuff I might have a decent chance with.  There are two plants I'm particularly curious about and have already acquired the seeds for one of them:  tamarillo (also called a tree tomato) and a high mountain passion fruit with a local cultivar called "mission dolores." Tamarillo is grown for profit in New Zealand as well, which gives me some hope that this fun plant will adapt well to our local climate. Tamarillo seeds are easy to obtain online. The Mission Dolores passiflora is, sadly, much harder to locate.

Stay tuned for progress reports!




Hat Tip to Pam Peirce: http://goldengategarden.typepad.com/

Hello World!

Hello Neighbors!

We moved into the Excelsior in August of 2015. It's taken me this long to pull the blog together, though we've been exploring a bit since moving in. Like many new residents in San Francisco, we had difficulty finding a place to live. As we navigated the house-hunting ritual here in Foggy City, we learned to pare down our expectations and really focus on those things that mattered the most and ignore those things that aren't necessities. We quickly threw away expectations of having much of a choice in the style or age of our new home. I was hoping for a place with a sunny yard and a good Southern exposure but knew that this was also something I'd have little say over. Knob and tube wiring were such a huge problem for our home in Tampa I was shocked at how prevalent and accepted it was here and quickly got over that too.

What we focused on was access to reasonably decent public transportation, walking distance from shopping, and a structure that wouldn't require a lot of updates and repairs to make it comfortable. It had to have enough of a yard for the dog because, by that point, I was done with getting up in the wee cold hours to walk him. There needed to be a dedicated parking place for the jeep. And so here we are, in one of the few areas of town we could afford and find these must-haves.

In summary, I find that Excelsior has moderately good access to public transportation with the BART station being the key feature. We can walk to BART in about 15 minutes or take the 29 bus in 10. That means we only need one vehicle and we have access to the core of the city whenever we like via the subway. The Ex has shopping--lots of it. But let's be honest, it's mixed in appeal. There are too many boarded up places and a few illegal gambling parlors but if you see the world as it can be, then our stretch of Mission street has a great deal of potential. What it excels in today is a variety of world cultures; you can taste yourself through Latin America, Southeast Asia, Northern Asia, and the South Pacific. You can even find a Zagat rated spot to have dinner (shout out to Henry's Hunan!) Oh, and the neighbors have been pretty cool. Several came over to welcome us on our first day here. That's worth a lot to me.

So here we are, in a 102 year old Arts & Crafts bungalow, learning how to live in the Ex.