Two GREEN Thumbs Up!

One of my favorite things to do in the summer is garden! Like many of the plants I grow at home, I too am a transplant, from Oklahoma to California. Here in Cali there is not a lot of yard space to garden flowering plants or food bearing plants. But, with a little ingenuity, anyone can garden anywhere!

Currently, I am practicing the art of container gardening, which is basically using any pot or container that will hold soil and growing your plants in them. People use everything from tires, to baby swimming pools, to old shoes, to simple gardening pots. I am currently using just some cheap plastic pots to grow tomatoes, yellow bell peppers, and serrano chiles. I am seeing the first of my new fruits in two small baby bell peppers (still green, but will turn yellow eventually).

If these plants seem like too big of a commitment for you, try starting off with some simple herbs in a window. Herbs like basil, cilantro and peppermint do very well inside the house if they get enough sunlight. So, just try to place them in a window that receives at least 6 hours of light each day, and you will be amazed how easy it is to grow your own herbs.

If you are growing food bearing plants or herbs, I recommend using an organic insecticidal soap that will naturally repel little pests that also want a piece of this pie! I use Earth-Tone Insecticidal Soap for Organic Gardening. This spray comes in a 24 oz. orange bottle for about $10 and works well. And, you can even use this spray up to the day of harvest, which means it is will not hurt you if a little is consumed.

If you are looking for other plants that are easy to grow (i.e., hard to kill), I recommend something in the succulent or cacti family. My prima, Sulema, just gave me several starter plants of this kind from flowering succulents to medicinal aloe. I simply put them in a plastic container and placed the end of the starter plants in water. They are already sprouting roots and I will plant them in cactus soil in week or so. Again, these do very well in Cali with lots o' sunshine, but as long as you put them next to a window or on a patio where they receive a good amount of light, it is really hard to kill them!

I think two of my favorite plants from the cacti family are my flowering house cactus, that I affectionately have named Luna, and my Echeveria Lila cactus, which looks like a small rosette. The lila cacti are beautiful little plants native to Nuevo Leon, Mexico and found at any garden store in So Cal.


Finally, if you just don't feel like gardening at home you still have options! At least two viable options to be exact. First, can join a community garden where you have a plot of ground alongside other community members and you go to the garden every few days to maintain your plot and grow your food. Here, you can also share plants and seedlings with other community gardeners, meet new peeps, and find out interesting gardening tips from others who are learning with you! A great community garden in my area is the El Sereno Community Garden located on Huntington Drive. This is a pic of some of their garden plots.

And, option two, maybe my ultimate favorite is called Guerrilla Gardening! This means that you find any plot of land that isn't yours, but is wasted ground (like a bare median plot, a plot of dirt along a public sidewalk, or even ground in a public park) and you plant a little garden there. You can either spend time to till the soil and plant food bearing plants, or you can do this as an art project to spice up the plot a little by adding color with bright flowers. This best website dedicated to this type of gardening is called Guerilla Gardening and they refer to this latter method as "Pimp Your Pavement!" I love this! If you check out the site they have a lot of pics of pavements that have successfully been pimped! They also have an amazing guide to "seed bombs" which are various balls or grenade shaped "bombs" of soil filled with seeds that you can throw into gardens, etc. in order to spontaneously garden!

Make this summer one of growth!