Perfectly Natural Weed & Grass Killer

I was sent a bottle of Perfectly Natural Weed & Grass Killer to try and the timing was perfect because I've had a weed explosion in the gaps between my flagstones and in the crushed gravel paths surrounding my vegetable beds. You get a little busy and suddenly you've got a lot of weeds. I tried hula-hoeing some and pulling others, but really didn't have the time to get on my hands and knees and pull every single weed in my yard.

Enter Perfectly Natural Weed & Grass Killer.

I'd read about homemade vinegar concoctions as weed killers but also read that the typical 5% acetic acid concentration in table vinegar wasn't really enough to kill weeds while the recommended 20% concentration was strong enough to blind a person.

Perfectly Natural Weed & Grass Killer, however, has the following breakdown.

Active Ingredient: Clove oil..... 8%
Inert ingredients: Vinegar (maximum 8% acetic acid in solution)..... 90%... Lecithin.... 2%.




It's reportedly "100% Organic and Family Safe"

Manufacturer recommendations include wearing eye protection and gloves during application, but it's nice not having to worry about lingering herbicide toxicity in the garden. The bottle label doesn't boast OMRI certification, so I will need to look into the caliber of approval it's receiving from other respected organic gardening organizations and practitioners. Having OMRI "cred" really makes it a no-brainer for me.

Would I buy this product or something like it? Very likely. In fact, I'll bet if I'd used this fast-acting herbicide sooner, I probably wouldn't have been faced with a weed explosion at all. It would have been more of an easily-handled weed situation.

It's nice to have another weapon in the "less toxic" weed-control arsenal. Wonder if it's sold by the gallon. Peaceful Valley Farm Supply sells a similar product called BurnOut II, containing 4% Clove Oil and 93% vinegar (which I assume to be 5% acetic acid), lecithin, water, citric acid and mineral oil.

Perfectly Natural is sold online at Unique Products Are Us and locally at nurseries, KMart, WalMart, and Fred Meyer.

S.F. Chronicle plugged my blog!

Ok, so it was merely listed as a regional blog "worth visiting" in a larger article about sites by Dave's Garden, GardenStew, GardenVoices, You Grow Girl, Amy Stewart, Karen Hess, Pam Peirce and Marta Acosta, but I'll take it!

What's shakin', Bay Areans? ;-)

Blogs get to the root of gardeners' thinking
Sophia Markoulakis, Special to The Chronicle

Saturday, June 17, 2006
Garden musings are no longer private thoughts between our plants and ourselves. Through blogs, we can now share our most intimate gardening thoughts with the universe.

Short for Web log, a blog is a personal journal posted online for public access and scrutiny. A blog is highly interactive, with the author's profile made public. Snazzy tech advances such as permalinks that direct readers to related Web sites and blogs, and trackbacks and pingbacks that connect readers and bloggers with one another streamline this interaction. So garden blogs, in essence, allow gardeners from all over the world to share images, experiences, anecdotal information and expert knowledge...

... "Some Northern California blogs worth visiting are:

-- sacgardening.blogspot.com

-- mybayareagarden.blogspot.com

-- uncletomsgarden.blogspot.com

-- Also check out nature-trail.blogspot.com for some eloquent and feline-friendly writing; inmykitchengarden.com for a California transplant making it in rural Missouri; and cabopulmo.blogspot.com for stunning desert succulents."

read entire article

Some great choices... and thanks for the mention, Ms. Markoulakis!

Flirting with triple digits

Without warning, our lovely spring weather has succumbed to summer scorch. Valley heat scares the un-acclimated. We natives deal, though. You garden in the cool mornings and early evenings. During midday? Well, you stay inside in a preferably air-conditioned building or seek deep shade outside. Don't go jogging. Don't do roofing or lay asphalt.

Every morning I have the same ritual. I get up, go downstairs and pee my dogs in the backyard. While they're doing their business, I walk the yard. It's cool, birdsong arrives on cue, and the light is soft. In fact, my backyard is mostly in shade in the mornings because it faces south and west.

The front of my house gets most of the morning sun, but except for retrieving the paper in whatever god-awful ensemble I deemed "pajamas" the night before, I tend not to hang out there in the mornings. Not private enough, and you don't really want to bump into me before I'm holding a cup of fresh-brewed coffee. Not because I'm unpleasant. I'm just a little bit mute. Clouded. Whatever they put in coffee... it brings clarity and after a few minutes I am awash with this overwhelming sense of... civility.

Here's what caught my eye this morning, pre-coffee.


'Munstead' lavender and 'Moonbeam' coreopsis



Purple fountain grass (Pennisetum) and Miscanthus 'Morning Light'



Yellow zucchini squash



'Celebrity'



'Black' (heirloom)



'Costoluto Genovese' (Italian heirloom)



'Costoluto Genovese' (foreground) and 'Early Girl' (background)



'Black from Tula' (foreground) and 'Copia' (background)



Peace stake in purple eggplant



Tri-color beans climbing bamboo teepee



Immediately after peeing, lie down and sun yourself before coming inside for breakfast. Yeah, it's a dog's life around here..."



This is my "sunny Mediterranean" bed, where I grow all the really fun stuff like lavender, phormium, echium, verbena bonariensis, a hot-pink flowering sedum, etc.




Props to Costco for their affordable teak furniture and to Smith & Hawken for their portable firepit that doubles as a grill.



Succulents planted in a rusted metal bowl



Ornamental millet, angelonia, celosia and heuchera in a green ceramic pot



My garden has an inconvenient truth.



Lilium



'Medallion' roses and an old watering can



Hanging tomatoes ('Sun Sugar') and strawberries



Delphinium... also hanging because it's the only way to save it from certain snail death.


Weed disclaimer: You will see some...times-a-lot-of weeds in my flower and vegetable beds. That is because I am lazy, just like the late, great garden writer Henry Mitchell, who confessed--

"Fortunately, I am myself as lazy a man as ever lived and you are in no danger whatever of reading here that you should stand on your head and bow thrice before planting basil in the full moon's paralactical ecliptical balderdash the third hour after the fifth rain in March."

You da man, Henry.

Strawberries and Yellow Zucchini... because you are what you eat

Staying trim was never a problem for me... until I had a child. I don't know if childbirth does something funky to your metabolism, or that by tending to another's needs it becomes more difficult to tend to your own. I do know that many adults spend way more time sitting than we did when we were young and especially when we were carless. Not careless... "car-less"... as in "I walk everywhere". We car-driving grownups sit at desks... we drive, we sit, we drive, we sit, we drive. Whether you have kids or not, modern adult life can be much more sedentary than it should be.

Whatever the cause of my added poundage... the reality is that I now have to watch what I eat. Oh yeah, and exercise.

Weight Watchers has been a big help to me because its Points system makes it very easy to keep track of how much food I'm consuming. On Weight Watchers, you are allotted a maximum number of points per day and once you're out of points, you're out. That's it. Step away from the fridge. The other really cool thing about Weight Watchers is that vegetables and fruits have been assigned very low points values. Many vegetables count as 0. What? Free food? How clever is a diet that encourages you to eat more fruits and veggies? Very!

While my diet resolve waxes and wanes, having home-grown fruits and veggies is giving me added incentive to stay "on plan" until my summer trip to Mendocino. What happens in Mendocino... stays in Mendocino.

Sauteed Yellow Garden Zucchini

Slice zucchini (about 2 to 3 cups), saute in 2 teaspoons olive oil. Season with garlic salt and cracked pepper. Enjoy.

W.W. Points for 1 cup zucchini = 0
2 teaspoons olive oil = 2 points

Garden Strawberries

1 1/2 cups = 1 point

25 to 27 Points per day is a typical maximum, so you see you can stay quite full eating healthfully from the summer garden.

School's Out

School's Out

Watch the video

Music: "Swinging on a Star" by Tony Bennett, from the CD, The Playground

Heading into summer color...

A backyard retreat/ office/ guest room

I would sooooo love one of these when we finally ditch my teenage son's swingset.

Want to major in Organic Ag? Now you can.

UCD plows ahead, but lags on organic ag major
By Edie Lau -- Sacramento Bee Science Writer

For the first time this fall, a university in the United States is offering a major in organic agriculture.
It's not at the University of California, Davis, one of the nation's foremost agricultural schools, nor is it anywhere in California, the top state in certified organic cropland.

The program is at Washington State University, which is leading a movement among agricultural schools to put organic farming in the curriculum.

Read the rest of the article.

By the way, WSU is in a quaint college town called Pullman, Washington, where I happened to live from age 11 to 15. Picture, if you will-- college students, real cowboys, snow, Main Street, steep, treesy hills lined with charming homes, rolling wheat hills, the best ice cream, rock concerts, and cute boys who are now middle-aged like me so just shoot me.

What Flower Are You?

I am a Snapdragon What Flower Are You?

Snapdragon: "Mischief is your middle name, but your first is friend. You are quite the prankster that loves to make other people laugh."

Yep.

Now it's easy to go biodegradable in the home and garden!

Biobag makes biodegradable trash, composting, dog poop and lawn bags.

You can also dispose of your garbage guilt with biodegradable paper plates, and cups. Remember, plastic trash really is forever. Compostable cutlery isn't!


Whole Foods carries some of these products as well. Ask your neighborhood grocer to too.

Romantic Chair Planter

July 15 update: My chair planter is doing well despite some pretty intense summer heat. The geraniums haven't filled out yet. It's probably time for a feeding and a haircut.

Ta da!




June 7 update (8:43 p.m.)

Ok, I found the "CocoPeat", in the garage, in a bag from Home Depot. Guess it wasn't hard to find after all...or, rather, it's only hard to find after you buy it and bring it home. And if you're me. I just finished planting the chair and will photograph it tomorrow. I'm pleased with the way it turned out. The only change I might have made, in retrospect, is to use one geranium with some white in the flower color. No biggie, though. I'm sure I'll replant the whole thing a few more times before retiring the chair.

Plant material:

-- 'Abunda Giant White' Bacopa
-- 'Galleria Bright Violet' trailing geranium
-- 'Picasso' ivy geranium
-- 'Lemon Licorice' Helichrysum petiolare
-- Celosia (unk. cultivar)
-- 'Devon Cottage Rosie Cheeks' Dianthus (on the ground)

Chair basket:

-- green chicken wire
-- weed fabric (as a liner)
-- potting soil
-- coconut fiber or "cocopeat"
-- vinyl-covered wire ties for attaching the chicken wire basket to the chair

Tools:

-- wire cutters
-- scissors

I'm eager to plant... just having trouble finding coir liner. I thought I had some in the garage, but where is it? Did I use it all? Where did I buy the stuff? Argh.

I may have to go buy more, but it's a bit of a pain to find nurseries and hardware stores selling bagged loose coir. Easier to find are those pre-formed liners, but they're kind of cumbersome to work with and look a bit stiff.

The mini carnations will probably be planted at the base of the chair, but I hope to be able to include celosia in the chair seat. Without it, the seat plants look sweet and romantic, but celosia adds that necessary hint of passion.

New green pot from Bushnell's

This gorgeous warm green pot was on sale at Bushnell's. The plants are from Bushnell's and Capital (Sunrise). As is my way, I bought a little bit of this and a little bit of that and didn't even decide what was going in the pot until I got home.

The problem was, everything I held up to the pot at the nursery looked good. That's the blessing... and curse... of a green pot.

-- Ornamental millet (Pennisetum glaucum)
-- purple Angelonia
-- Heuchera 'Key Lime Pie'
-- red celosia

I like the way the red celosia plays off the crimson blotch on the volunteer orange nasturtium.

First zucchini of the season

I'm thinking... sliced and sauteed in a little olive oil with salt and cracked pepper.

The variety is a bush type called 'Gold Rush', by the way. These zukes are in a half-barrel, which might account for their earliness. I've also had a major veggie garden epiphany recently-- if you want bees in your vegetable garden, plant lavender! My lavender plants are like one giant beehive right now and yes, I do happen to have blooming lavender right next to my squash plants.

Capital Nursery (Sunrise) now carries Annie's!

I was at Capital Nursery on Sunrise Blvd. this Sunday and was thrilled to see they now carry Annie's! The display is just northwest of the cash registers, next to the annuals. Check it out next time you're there!

'Tiffany' and 'Munstead'

'Tiffany'



'Munstead' lavender