My name is Ben & I am in Roseville CA. I garden for the peace it brings to my life. I am currently growing the following in my 3 10x4 raised beds. Swiss Chard, Buttercrunch lettuce, Romaine lettuce, Collard Greens, India Mustard, radish, Brocolli & California early Garlic.

How about you?

I'm retired now and my DH retires in a few months. He hasn't had to buy me flowers in years, LOL! We grow only a few food crops: Meyer lemons, Bearss limes, a few herbs. I wish I had room for more roses, dahlias and hydrangeas, but it's all I can do to keep up with what we have now.

In addition to approx. 500 sq ft of raised beds for veggies, I have a pond, bog garden, tropicalesque garden, desert garden, woodland garden and natives garden.

As you might guess, I spend a lot of time out in the yard. I'm almost glad that winter is approaching, because now I'll have a little more time to do other things besides weeding and watering... The only garden that will get much attention for the next few months is my 100 sq ft winter vegetable garden.

I like perennials and bold colored flowers. I do my toms in raised beds and am treating a heavy clay with lots and lots of steer manure this winter and will top with compost in the spring.

My soil is heavy clay which gets waterlogged in winter and bakes hard in summer. I made raised beds in the front yard of recycled concrete and filled those with purchased soil so those beds drain almost too well now. I had hoped to get by with watering only once every two weeks in the front yard, but they really need water twice a week to look really good, and they get by on water once a week. During the big storm a few weeks ago I was out in the pouring rain digging ditches to catch the water so it could soak in instead of drain off down the slope. The yard is pretty happy now and I have various reseeders popping up all over.

I have big plans to redesign the back yard and have started lots of seed of winter annuals and perennials to get into the ground before Christmas.

I currently have three raised veg beds that have become holding beds for some perennials I recently purchased for the newly designed spaces that aren't ready yet. My tomatoes didn't do well this year, a tree has given the veg beds more shade each year, and it is just too much now. The tree will get thinned and topped a bit over the winter, and the veg beds will be moved 10' north to get out of the eventual shade that will grow back.

I have two kids, a daughter 8 and a son 3. I put in my entire back yard when DD was 2-4, and then it got neglected when DS was born, and am just now getting back to it, so I hope to really get a lot done this fall. I do most of my gardening in November and December, with a break during the rainy Jan-March and back at it in April and May. By June kiddos are out of school and all I usually get done is watering. I really need to get my drip system working again, when I turned it on in May it didn't work, and I haven't taken the time to figure out the problem.

Okay, that is probably more than I needed to write LOL.

I started guerrilla gardening the 280S Mariposa St offramp curve in December of last year. Caltrans and DPW have gone on to approve of it all, and encourage me! I named the garden Pennsylvania Garden as the offramp feeds traffic out onto Pennsylvania Avenue.

My garden is mostly drought-tolerant perennials (food crops are forbidden due to contamination in the dirt) with a lot of succulents and cacti.

You can see my garden blog below...

We are slowly re-invigorating our yard's landscape. The former owners planted junipers in lava rock in the front and on parts of the side yard, and ivy most everywhere else. This past summer we finally got rid of the last of the junipers, and I'm working on getting rid of the most visible of the lava rock now. It is going slow as I screen each shovel, trying to separate the rock from the dirt & detritus. It is killing my back. Any ideas/suggestions? Anyone want to come over and help? hehehe

Out front, in the rock garden (where other junipers were), we've planted a number of perennials and are watering them by hose-in-hand until we get a soaker-irrigation system put in. We also have (at various locations throughout the yard) some dahlias, some roses, an apple tree, an avocado tree, a fig tree, a couple of citrus trees, and several other fruit tree seedlings in trash cans for now until we get to planting them. Finally, we have a number of orchids, and indoors we have some underwater gardens with freshwater plants.

We haven't lived here long and we still have lots to do before the place is really presentable.

I enjoy the fact that Santa Cruz allows me to "double dip": I get to grow very tropical things right next to temperate plants that need medium to high chill in the Winter. It's fun to see bing cherries flourish right alongside cherimoyas, there just aren't many places where this can be done, we are very fortunate on the Central Coast and in the Bay area.

it's taken a few years to work this place into a garden, I got beaten up by drought, freezes, gophers, high winds, and lost quite a few of plants on the way. I must have hauled out a few tons of sandstone. But persistence pays off, and slowly, it looks like something neat is emerging.

The upper garden has morphed into a tropical paradise with a waterfall surrounded by rare palms from the cooler tropical montane regions of South America and Asia, and New Zealand, with cool growing tropical fruits mixed in, including cherimoya, mountain papayas, lucuma, white sapote, bananas, tropical guavas, macademia and avocados. As things are slowly growing out it's starting to look nice and lush.

The lower garden has turned into a fruit orchard paradise with just about every imaginable fruit growing there. We have a dedicated citrus orchard in the hottest part. Nature did it's selection work; besides the citrus, most tropical stuff died down there, and what has survived is a temperate fruit orchard with lots of apples, peaches, apricots, plums, pluots, pears, figs, cherries, the list goes on and on.

The soil here is not very good, too sandy, fast draining and nutrient poor, so we've been terracing, using drip irrigation, and mulching with wood chips for a few years now with stellar results. Slowly the fruit trees have come into production and we now have something to eat in the garden virtually year-round. it's taken quite a few years to figure out what will do well here, but slowly, we're getting to pick out some real winner varieties of fruit.

First year in our home and we live a few blocks from my parents.

Between our 2 gardens we are growing:

Veggie garden:
Tomato
Broccolli
Cauliflower
Basil
Cilantro
Spinach
Lettuce
Swiss chard
Arugala
Beets
Peas
Chives
Sage
Mint

Fruit trees:
Santa rosa plum
A few apples
Figs
Cherries
Oranges
Meyer lemons
Peach

Tropicals (in pots for now)
Cherimoya
4 mangos

I am enjoying reading about everyone's gardens. I haven't posted on the Garden Web for several years, but decided to give it a try again because I am looking for permanent plants for my front yard and driveway area for the Scott Valley house. It gets to 100 degrees in the summer and it is cold and snowy in wintertime. It has been known to have a frost on the 4th of July, so weather can be "iffy" I need a lesson in "Cold Climate plants for Dummies" so I can plant something pretty and hardy. Currently, there are mostly native plants in the landscape surrounding the house. Lots of Cedar, Pine and Oak trees and for large plants: Spirea, Lavender, Red Bud, Rose of Sharon and other plants that I cannot remember the names of. In May and June, the wildflowers are in abundance on the sides of the roads and it is just beautiful. Shasta Daisies grow wild en masse, so I know I could plant them.

If anyone has a similar climate and knows a good shrub or two, I'm looking for advice. The soil is extremely rocky and when it is dry it is dusty and like silt. Totally different than my clay soil in Southern California.

The deer migrate through my property and chew on everything they can. There are voles, fox and quail. The apple and pear trees are deer food. The vegetable garden has always had a high fence around it, to keep the deer out but it hasn't been worked much last year or this.

West Oakland is a former dumping site, that I have turned into a (mostly) native garden. This garden has more snails than you could possibly imagine, but it also has hummingbirds and lizards and many types of bees, which is pretty sweet, since it's in a totally industrial part of town.

East Oakland is where I just bought a little house. The garden was terribly neglected, but there's a lot of potential. Beautiful old lemon tree, a huge plum, a persimmon that someone BUTCHERED in the name of pruning, and a mulberry that's about to fall over. I've got all sorts of bulbs coming up. I may have more calla lilies than I know what to do with, and perhaps the largest population of little onion-y plants in all of Northern California. We're overgrown with vines and jasmine.

I'm a transplanted East Coast girl, so I'm giving the garden a year, just to see what it does. Other than taking out the mulberry, and hacking back at the jasmine and weeds, I'm just working on my soil, and watching what comes up. I've got a huge compost pile, which is cooking away nicely.

The birds love our yard, and the Western Scrub Jays are always burying acorns. We've got quite a randomly spaced crop of Coastal Live Oaks, which I've transplanted into what will hopefully become a native shade section of garden.

I'm also trying to figure out which of my formerly apartment dwelling orchids can go outside, and which get to go outside for part of the year.

It's all very exciting!

Last year garlic did really well for me and produced 45 heads, which were consumed by Sept, so this year I ordered garlic online and put in 14 varieties expecting over 300 heads next year.

I'm only starting to landscape the yard, but I'm planning on lots of succulents and xeric perennials.

I have 32sq ft of vegetables split between 3 raised beds, a salad table, and have started containers (again). I also have a Dwarf Meyer Lemon Tree, and three trees that came with the house: Comice Pear, plum, and sour orange. We're renting, so an added challenge for me is to get things looking/staying pretty without renovating the place, spending a ton, and making any changes removable if need be.

You're more than welcome to check out my blog to see what I'm currently attempting to grow. ;-)

Thanks for the roll call!

Go Giants!
CB