March 26, 2015 by Born To Organize

Three’s A Charm: San Francisco Flower & Garden Show

On the first day of Spring this year I joined my friend Candace for the annual San Francisco Flower & Garden Show. We’ve decided that after attending for three years running, it’s officially a tradition. This year’s theme: Mother Nature Going Wild

Tumble Leaf No 4 Sculpture

The display gardens are the heart and soul of this show and they are really something to behold. Although they aren’t all necessarily my style, I appreciate the thought that goes into each one. It takes tremendous time and energy to install the garden displays in the middle of an indoor event center. They haul in plants, trees, soil and structures and in many cases paving stones, gravel and tile.

As you walk through each one, it’s fun to imagine what it might be like in the ‘real’ world.

There were fewer gardens then in past years with many of them focused on succulents or low-water use gardens. I also spoke with a gentlemen who designs a lot of water features and learned that a properly installed water feature uses less water than drought tolerant plants. Of course flowing water attracts all sorts of birds and beneficial insects and is a key component of a healthy garden. Who doesn’t want a garden filled with butterflies, birds and bees? I’ve already designed one…in my head anyway.

Here are three of my favorites:

2015 garden show where the wild things are

Transformation: Hugelkultur Technique Garden Designer: Nathan Beeck and Juan Chavez Garden Creators: Clearwater Design

Transformation is based on the landscape elements of Hugelkultur

“using landscape waste into new organically rich soil and an underground sponge that holds moisture and encourages the development of a mycorrhizal web of life. – Program Statement

2015 garden show growing an artful garden

Growing an Artful Garden, Garden Designer: Max & Joanne Nagaele Garden Creator: Foothill Design

Growing an Artful Garden was full of whimsy and charm. We’re sitting at a table with a garden cake made of greenery. If you look closely you’ll see a slice. The program statements says:

The vibe is serendipity. The ornamental garden, vegetable garden and the vintage potting shed provides the viewer with a vibrant tableau.

Don’t you want to stay awhile?

Beauty Gone Wild Garden Designer: Benjamin Goulart Garden Creators: Goulart Designs

Beauty Gone Wild’s design features

Gaia, the great mother of all: the primal Greek Mother Goddess, creator and giver of birth to the Earth and the Universe. She is the personification of nature itself, and we are creating her with nature itself in our garden.

I fell in love with this gorgeous fountain, and haven’t stopped thinking about it for a week. The soothing flow of water held me captive.

In addition to the garden displays, there are two other pavilion halls housing plants, trees and seeds for sale. A couple of hobbyist groups showed off Bonsai plants that were upwards of fifty years old. If those plants could talk!

There were plenty of gadgets for sale too, but nothing I couldn’t live without. We did leave with several bags of freshly made kettle and caramel corn, and put a serious dent in one of the bags during the 45 minute ride home. Yum!

Have you ever been to a garden show? If not, I highly recommend it.

March 23, 2015 by Born To Organize

A Little of This and That

I’ve been puttering in the garden here and there over the past week, but I still haven’t put together a plan for the summer. I pruned a hedge and pulled a few weeds but my busy schedule hasn’t allowed for much more.

The purple hyacinths have now taken the place of the pink ones. The dark pink freesia is still in bloom

As we enter year four of our drought, water restrictions are increasing. According to the state water agency, 44% of residential water use is outdoors. We’re now restricted to watering once every three days, using the odd/even method based on home address, and we can only water before 6 am or after 6 pm.

I’ve left both vegetable beds empty for now. My original plan was to leave one box empty and plant some tomatoes and basil in the other. I love fresh tomatoes and basil and know that we’ll eat them all summer long. The tomatoes, however, have sprouted all over the garden, self-planting like they did last year. Instead of moving the plants, we’re going to add drip irrigation to the viable plants and see how it goes.

Self-planting tomatoes

Last fall I sheet-mulched one half of the lawn, but the process is still ongoing. The grass died off as planned and much of the material is decomposing, but with so little rain, it’s taking longer than planned for it all to decompose. It’s not very pretty, is it?

Sheet mulch in process

Comically, I have a pair of potato plants growing in the midst of the sheet mulch. It will be interesting to see if the plant flowers since it’s in the shade most of the day.

Potatoes volunteered in the mulch

As the bright yellow daffodils begin to fade, a second group of plantings are taking their place. They’re two-toned and a bit shorter, but just as lovely. I’ve had great success with bulbs once I figured out what the squirrels don’t like, namely narcissus (daffodils), and hyacinth.

Daffodils transition in the curb garden

Narcissus in the curb garden

We had a bit of rain overnight, and woke to a refreshed garden. That was a wonderful surprise. I only wish I hadn’t slept through it.

I hope your week is off to a good start.

March 20, 2015 by Born To Organize

Blogging 101: Feature This

First day of spring in the garden (photos at dusk)

It’s late in the day on the first day of spring, but I’m determined to finish out week three of Blogging 101. Day fifteen’s assignment: Create a New Posting Feature.

Why do this? The idea is:

to inspire loyalty is to publish regularly. And the best ways to make sure you publish regularly is with a recurring feature — it’s like making a pact with yourself and your audience.
Creating a regular feature means your readers have something specific to wait for at regular intervals — it gives your blog a hook.

We’re all creatures of habit, bloggers and readers. Adding a recurring feature — or simply planning posts at regular intervals — helps your writing stay sustainable. Even a purely personal blog of random musings benefits from a hint of structure.

I read the assignment last night and thought about it throughout the day. In my early blogging days I ran a feature called Blooming Thursday. It did give me some focus for one day of the week, but I don’t think it captured the minds and hearts of…anyone.

I dug a little deeper if you’ll pardon the pun. I thought about the things that I know and love and eventually settled on organizing. Organizing people, places and things has been a passion my whole life. My mom said she found me in her room organizing a sock drawer at the age of two. I’m sure there’s been some embellishing to that story over the years, but it illustrates my interest from an early age.

I’m casting about for a proper name and this is where you come in. Will you please vote for one of these options, or simply let me know what you think in the comments below?

For those of you living in the northern hemisphere, happy vernal equinox. To my friends in the south, I’m sure you’re welcoming the approach of cooler weather. I love the turn of a season and all the promise it brings. How about you?

March 19, 2015 by Born To Organize

Blogging 101: Branding Your Image?

Today’s blogging 101 task asks us to extend our brand with one of the following: a custom Blavatar, a custom image widget, or a fan page.

Since I already have a Gravatar and lacked the energy to create another Facebook page, I opted for the image widget.

It was fun playing round with my photo using a (mostly) free app called PicMonkey, but the idea of creating a brand is a bit lost on me.

You can see the image widget on the right side of my blog. Of all the lessons over the past few weeks, this was the most challenging, mostly because I just couldn’t see the point.

Have you used the image widget on your blog? How about PicMonkey?

March 18, 2015 by Born To Organize

Blogging 101: Weird Image Wednesday

Today’s Blogging 101 task is to pick a blogging community event and take part.

I couldn’t help myself.

I chose Weird Image Wednesday hosted by Karl Thibodeaux.

baby spiders on fern 4-18-2013 12-47-012

Hatching baby spiders

I blogged and shared this photo two years ago, but thought it was worth sharing again.

While cleaning debris under the orange tree I discovered recently hatched spiders leaving home. Within two days they were gone without a trace, so I’m glad I took this photo when I did.

You can read about my discovery at Itsy Bitsy Spider

Karl has several beautiful photographs on his site at Weird Image Wednesday. I think the frozen thorns are my current favorite. You might want to check it out.

If you want to join in the fun on future Wednesdays, be sure to include the tag in your post.

March 17, 2015 by Born To Organize

And In This Corner, A Garden Sampler

According to Aristotle, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” This small corner of my garden agrees.

There are all sorts of gardening rules to insure your success:

Do not over plant or crowd your seedlings
Make sure your plant gets the proper amount of sunlight
Water appropriately to support healthy roots
and so on.

Then the usual suspects blow into town and make a mockery of it all. With some assist from the wind, a few birds and other garden foragers, this perfect little gem of a corner came together without any help from the gardener (that’s me).

None of these plants are garden strangers. They enjoyed their stay last season and decided to make a come back. Below my window, and along the patio’s edge, a sampler garden is born.

Garden Sampler

Four o’clock Mirabilis jalapa

This prolific annual grows quickly with a low, sprawling habit. The original plant grew at the front of the house in the Children’s Garden, producing lovely yellow blooms around four o’clock each day, hence the name. I saved lots of seeds, but honestly, I needn’t have bothered. Two months ago, several seedlings started to grow.

Cyclamen

Cyclamen grow from tubers. They die back each year, returning in the winter and early spring, preferring cooler temps. This lovely pink variety is flowering like mirrored twins.

Polka dot plant Hypoestes phyllostachya

This spotted pink darling self-seeded from a pot nearby. Late in the summer, tiny purple flowers appeared. It’s nice to have that splash of pink joining the others.

New Zealand Hair Sedge

Every garden needs some breezy grasses, right? It’s the perfect backdrop for the pinks in the foreground.

Tomato Plant nightshade Solanum lycopersicum

Rounding out this densely populated corner is a tomato plant. Just like last year, tomatoes are popping up all over the garden. The plant is doing fine now, but once the Acer fills out for the summer, the tomato won’t receive much light. I don’t have the heart to try to move it so it stays. There are no rules that say tomatoes have to bear fruit. It can enjoy the quiet solitude of the corner and do whatever it wants.

Blogging 100: Day Twelve

Our Blogging University assignment for today is to “Increase Your Commenting Confidence.” I’m pretty chatty around here. I drop comments all over the blogosphere and receive thoughtful and thought-provoking comments on my blog in turn. I followed the instructions, though to

“read six posts written in response to the same prompt, and leave comments on at least two of them.”

Fun!

Save

March 16, 2015 by Born To Organize

Oh, The Places You’ll Blog*

*with humble apologies to Dr. Seuss.

It’s day eleven of Blogging University: Blogging 101. With two weeks down and one to go, I’ve learned a lot.

Today’s assignment is to

publish a post based on your own, personalized take on a blogging prompt.

The prompt is

Places: beach, mountain, forest, or somewhere else entirely?

Where Am I?

When daisies pied and violets blue
And lady-smocks all silver-white
And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue
Do paint the meadows with delight,
Love’s Labours Lost (5.2.900-4)

In 1989, single and unencumbered, I flew to Europe with a backpack and stayed for two months. I traveled mostly by train, but also by bus and boat. The best days were those spent on foot, exploring small towns, large cities and everything in between. I covered ten countries in all, including most of the British Aisles as well as France, Belgium, Germany, Spain and Switzerland.

I traveled on a shoe string, working from a copy of Let’s Go Europe. Staying in youth hostels made the trip affordable and fun. I met travelers from around the world and in addition to their good company, I learned about other places to stop along the way.

It seems a life time ago, and of course in many ways it is. I’ve since married and had two boys, started a small organizing business and moved to San Jose. When I look at this photo, though, all the memories come back. Photographs, much like music or a certain smell, have a way of transporting you back in time. I remember buying the dress I’m wearing and the sweater to go with it. Those comfortable, ubiquitous sandals carried me everywhere. It was a thrill to step foot in this aging town and to learn more about its history.

A woman I met at one of the youth hostels snapped this photo on a warm, July day. Then we explored the sites together. We were still buying rolls of film in those days and developing them at a nearby drug store. It was here that I bought the first of many travel patches that I would later sew on my backpack.

Of course lots of the memories are lost with the years. Sometimes I want to peer outside of the photos edge, to see what might be there. I remember arriving but not departing and I don’t remember any of the meals. I wonder if I’m really that close to the river’s edge or is it simply an artifact of the camera’s lens?

What I do know is this: Traveling alone on another continent was one of the most enriching experiences of my life. There were times when I was lonely, cranky and scared, but they were far outweighed by the interesting people I met along the way and the tremendous sense of independence that comes from finding your way in a distant land. I wouldn’t change it for the world.

Can you guess where I am from these clues?

March 13, 2015 by Born To Organize

Garden Curiosities

My garden is full of curiosities. Come have a look.

This is the only snapdragon to survive the winter. I don’t know why this survived, but it sure is pretty.

Overwintered snapdragon

If you take a closer look though, the plant below the flowers looks terrible. Dots of black, sooty material coat the leaves, an as-yet to be determined garden pest. Curious.

Snapdragon infestation

Our aging orange tree produces an impressive amount of fruit, but they’re not very sweet. The rats, however love them and lay waste to a half a dozen oranges a day. Somehow they overlooked the larger orange. It grew like the heart of the Grinch on Christmas day.

The orange that ate New York

Since we live in California, we keep an up to date earthquake emergency kit, stored under my potting bench in the backyard. The lower bin holds water, blankets and a first aid kit, and the top bin stores canned goods and assorted items. The bins remain disguised but at the ready if we ever need them.

I use the top of the potting bench to stage some of my photos and in the summer it doubles as a buffet for outdoor meals.

Well.

Apparently some unknown critter had the same idea. Just under the top of the bench I found a mass of hollow snail shells. Do you think the snails hide there by day, providing a tasty buffet for a night dweller, or do you think the night dweller brings them there for his meal?

Potting bench, earthquake storage and a place where snails go to die

Outdoor earthquake kit

Snail evisceration

I was home alone one morning this week when I heard scratching on the living room window. Yikes. I screwed up the courage to investigate and saw a goldfinch repeatedly fluttering into the window. This went on for most of the afternoon and on into the second day.

We have ultraviolet decals on the windows to discourage flying accidents. Some birds will fly straight into the window thinking the reflection is more blue sky. The decal alerts the bird and prevents injury. But this was different. Over and over again, he would fly up to the window from his resting branch, and without injuring himself, flutter his wings on the glass.

I did a bit of reading and learned that the birds small brain thinks the reflection is a competitor. This exhausted little bird has been defending his territory for two days…against himself. I taped a large piece of red plastic to the glass and it broke the spell. Curious indeed.

Ultraviolet window decal, barely visible from indoors but highly visible to the birds

Here’s the view from the tree.

Goldfinch nemesis: His own reflection

While cleaning up oranges from under the tree, I made the mistake of drawing back the branches of a fern. I wonder who’s living in that hole? I released the branches of the fern and backed away. I’m curious but, not that curious.

Anybody home?

Finally, what’s more curious than a cat named Mouse licking dew drops from the edge of a daffodil while a little snail travels down the center of the bloom?

Mouse sips water from the flower, snail inside

Mouse, always curious

Blogging 101, Day Ten: Build and display your blog roll.

Please have a look at my sidebar and see if you find something of interest. Then click away. If you’ve been blogging for a while you know that comments and blogrolls are the spice of the blogging community. Belly up to the table and enjoy.

March 12, 2015 by Born To Organize

Color Me Green with Envy

Green is the prime color of the world and that from which its loveliness arises.
– Pedro Calderon de la Barca

No argument from me here. I’ve always loved green, which comes in handy when you’re a gardener. It’s pretty hard to grow a garden without it.

I see no reason to stop with the garden though. I liberally sprinkle green throughout my home. Just last week I replaced the broken clock in the bathroom with a retro-inspired vintage green clock. It goes beautifully with the green tile. One of the walls in my home office is a muted green and I’m pretty sure half of my wardrobe is green too. It’s handy when you’re getting dressed, because everything goes together. I still tease my husband that when he came to pick me up on our first date in a green car he pretty much sealed the deal.

According to Color Matters:

Green is no longer just a color, but the symbol of ecology and a verb.

Since the beginning of time, green has signified growth, rebirth, and fertility. In pagan times, there was the “Green Man” – a symbol of fertility. In Muslim countries, it is a holy color and in Ireland, a lucky color. It was the color of the heavens in the Ming Dynasty.

Have you ever thought about your favorite color and why it appeals to you? My sister’s favorite color is purple and my husband’s, blue. My dearest friend loves aqua so much that it feels like part of her personality.

When I was pregnant with my second son, my then-3-year old decided that his brother’s favorite color would be yellow. My oldest son loves orange, and the people around him loved blue, green and red, so he figured his brother would ‘inherit’ the color yellow. With his limited world experience, he figured only one favorite color per person. That still makes me smile.

My Sweet Tangled Bird curated a beautiful post this week entitled, Color Inspiration – Lucite Green. She’s pulled together exquisite examples of Pantone’s Lucite Green, a trending color this spring. She included a gorgeous owl piece from artist Michelle Morin that had me returning to her post again and again. The art left me breathless.

Our blogging 101 assignment for today: write a post that builds on one of the comments we left the day before on a blog we’ve never followed. The idea behind this is to:

Your blog is shaped by your own thinking and by your interactions with others, and building on someone else’s post expands your own ideas.

If you thought the original post was worth commenting on, that means it struck a nerve — it’s a topic people are interested in reading about.

Responding and linking to other blogs adds to the fabric of the blogosphere, and actually helps other bloggers find you. – Source: Blogging 101

What’s your favorite color? Please tell us why.

March 11, 2015 by Born To Organize

Postage Stamp Table Top and Day 8 of Blogging 101

Once I got past my fear of messing things up, making this postage stamp table top was great fun. Here’s how I did it:

I started with a pre-made plywood circle. While I like the idea of using power tools, I find them intimidating. When I took scenery design as one of my required theater courses, the horror stories of lost digits and visits to the ER put me off of them for good. I have ten perfectly good fingers and plan to keep it that way. I headed to our local Home Depot instead and bought a round plywood table top for about $20. I wanted a round surface to suggest stamps from around the world.

I sanded the edges to smooth out the roughness, then added a coat of paint. Taking a page from Keeping Up with Mrs. Smith, I used left over touch up paint from our living room walls. It’s great using what you have on hand, and since the finished table goes in that room, it will coordinate beautifully.

Plywood table top with a coat of green paint

The following day I sanded the painted surface a second time, then froze with indecision for another few weeks. Once I started applying my dad’s postage stamps with Mod Podge® there would be no turning back. Originally I planned to use sections of the pages, but I didn’t like how it looked.

My dad’s postage album

When I realized the album had four triangular-shaped stamps I knew I had a plan. It was December by now, so I put the unique stamps in a small wax envelope for safe keeping. The stamps ‘disappeared’ and I was sure I had inadvertently sent them off in the mail. It took a thorough tidying up of my crafting boxes to locate them once again.

postage stamp table top with triangle center

I had exactly four triangle stamps for the center.

Then one Saturday afternoon I just went for it. Using the surface of the kitchen counter, the only working space high enough to accommodate my Amazonian height, I got to work sorting Dad’s stamps. Page by page and stamp by stamp, I removed the postage, sorting them in piles by color.

Now I was in the zone. My back was aching from standing so long, but I didn’t want to stop.

I placed a pencil dot in the center of the circle, brushed on a layer of Mod Podge, and placed the first four stamps. From there I moved out in rainbow order.

Stamps from around the world

Once I reached the outer edges, I changed the stamp’s orientation. Brown, black and multicolored stamps circle the border, completing the table top surface.

I saved the multicolored stamps for the table border

With the drama of the table top finally behind me, I went in search of a base. I really like the way it looks on the little outdoor table we have, so searched high and low for something similar. Several visits to vintage and thrift stores turned up nothing. Then I learned that I could order the same table through Pier One Imports. It should arrive this week.

Plywood table top

Day Eight: Be a Good Neighbor via Blogging 101

Today’s assignment: leave comments on at least four blogs that you’ve never commented on before. It’s all about engagement. So once I press the publish key, I’m off in search of a few (more) good blogs. Should be fun.

In the meantime, check out these DIY blogs. They make it look easy and fun. And guess what? None of these women are afraid of power tools.