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Windmill Nursery Open House Pics & Video

by | Oct 16, 2007 | Uncategorized

I blogged about the upcoming Windmill Nursery Fall & Christmas Open House & Charity Event back in August and attended the event Saturday evening. The nursery looked great, with lushly planted demo beds (and more to come), container plantings, new signage on plants, Christmas displays and outdoor lighting.

Before night fell, I snapped a few pics of the nursery, inside and out.


Andrew talking to nursery reps.


Cheryl snapping me snapping them


Citrus


Wide selection of plants from Blooms, Annie’s, Monterey Bay and more.


New cold-hardy tropical demo bed


Cool-season color


Halloween planters


Cool-season planter


Seasonal and succulent planters


Open house attendees listening to raffle results


Christmas tree display. Yes, folks, it’s time to start thinking about the holidaze…

Windmill put on quite a gourmet spread, with beer, wine and catering by Carmichael restaurant La Perla Bistro . We were treated to live music by local band Fair Trade. The lead singer has a great voice and according to Windmill family member Andrew, this talented musician is also a landscaper!

CLICK TO START VIDEO

http://www.myspace.com/fairtrade

Since 10% of the night’s plant sales were going to Wind Youth Services, I felt I should do my part. Shopping at a nursery at night has always been a fantasy of mine… seriously… and now I know how super fun it can be.


(night shots by Cheryl Hawes, AKA Weeder)


Like the new do? Let me just say, “How could I resist?” and let it be known that I was very gentle with this hanging plant. Perhaps I should just say “No comment.”

Annie’s Annuals Fabulous Fall Planting Party

by | Oct 9, 2007 | Uncategorized

We arrived around 11am, just in time for luscious strawberries, banana-chocolate chip muffins, grapes and drinks. Hot mess Amy Winehouse was rockin’ in the background… my kinda nursery.

At noon, we were treated to a great demo by garden artist Keeyla Meadows. Keeyla showed us an easy and inexpensive way to paint and draw on clay pots. She talked a lot about color, which happens to be the theme of her next book, which I hope is published soon, soon, soon.

During our visit, two lucky ticket holders each won a 15-minute shopping spree. Of course, they had to don bright and shiny capes and crowns while dashing around the nursery filling their wagons. What price, dignity? Pretty low from what I witnessed. Hah.

After Keeyla’s demo and the shopping spree announcement, I filled a flat (all the little red wagons were taken) with some cool-season color to take home. All 4″ plants were 25% off.

After the festivities, demo and plant shopping at Annie’s, we swung by Oakland for lunch at Genova Deli, picked up coffee beans at Cole Coffee, did a little shopping at Heartfelt, bought a cupcake at Teacake Bake Shop in Emeryville, then headed home. A great day!

We sorta spaced and ran out of time for visiting Cohn-Stone Studios, but it’s still on my to-do list for someday.

Oh, to be able to clone yourself…

by | Oct 4, 2007 | Uncategorized

There’s a lot going on this weekend in and around Sacramento, especially for the garden-minded:

  • Apple Hill: Ongoing Events through March
  • Saturday, October 6: 33rd Annual UC Davis Arboretum Plant Sale
  • Saturday, October 6: Bob Hamm’s AIDS benefit plant sale at the Gifted Gardener (18th and J streets, 10 a.m.-3 p.m, 916-923-3745).
  • Saturday, October 6: Loomis Eggplant Festival
  • Oct. 6-7: Hoes Down Harvest, Full Belly Farm
  • Oct. 6-7: Amador Flower Farm’s annual Fall Festival; 9 a.m.-4 p.m. both days; 22001, Shenandoah School Road, Plymouth. Free. (209) 245-6660. (from SacBee.com)
  • Oct. 6-7: Giant Pumpkin and Harvest Festival, with a psychedelic salute to the ’60s combining pumpkin pop art, ’60s music and a retro scarecrow contest; 10 a.m.-5 p.m. both days; Elk Grove Regional Park, 9950 Elk Grove-Florin Road, Elk Grove. Free; park admission $5. (916) 405-5600. (from SacBee.com)
  • Oct. 6-7: Fall Plant Sale; 10 a.m.-4 p.m. both days; Garden and Arts Center, 3330 McKinley Blvd. (916) 722-7442. (from SacBee.com)
  • Oct. 7: Rio Americano High School’s annual Fall Garden Tour, featuring six gardens, 11 a.m.- 4 p.m., in the Sierra Oaks and Sierra Oaks Vista areas. $25 in advance, $30 at the door. (916) 508-9806, (916) 283-4057. (from SacBee.com)

  • Oct. 6 & 7: Annie’s Annuals Fabulous Fall Planting Party, 10am-5pm, Richmond, CA
  • Oct. 6 & 7: Cohn-Stone Studios Glass Pumpkin Garden & Sale, Richmond, CA

Take your pick! I’m heading for Annie’s and Cohn-Stone on Sunday, followed by eats and shopping in Berkeley before heading home. God, I need a Berkeley fix.

By the way, all plants are 25% off at Annie’s this weekend and there will be refreshments, live music and scheduled events.

Where did all the nursery jobs go?

by | Oct 3, 2007 | Uncategorized

I’m looking for a

I’ve been working on a resume of sorts. Thank goodness Word has templates kindly emphasizing education over employment because I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for the last decade or so. Before that, I was a housewife. Before that, I was a student. Before that, I was a baby.

Oh, sure, I had a few part-time jobs here and there, but I’ve never had what you could call a career. I didn’t need one. I’ve never kicked off a pair of high heels after a particularly tough day at the office, which is a good thing because I walk like a man in drag in heels. Worse, actually. I’ve never occupied a cubicle. I’ve never been asked to fax anything.

The very moment my son turned thirteen, it became abundantly clear to me that he no longer needed me in the way he did for the previous thirteen years.

Wanna try out the new UC IPM Kiosk?

by | Oct 2, 2007 | Uncategorized

Here are two… and for now it seems these are the only two… Sacramento county locations:

Sacramento County

Elsewhere in CA…

Fresno County

  • Sunnyside Branch Library—Ongoing
    5566 East Kings Canyon Road, Fresno

Lake County

  • Piedmont Lumber, Lakeport, Sept. 5 to Oct. 17, 2007

Los Angeles County

  • Los Angeles County Arboretum—Ongoing
    301 N. Baldwin Ave., Arcadia
    (626) 821-3222
    http://www.arboretum.org

Orange County

  • UC Cooperative Extension office, Costa Mesa
    By appointment only, call (949) 733-3970
  • UC Master Gardener Fall Seminar, Costa Mesa, Oct. 20, 2007

San Diego County

  • Grangetto’s Farm and Garden Supply, May 1 to Oct. 31, 2007
    Rotating through all 4 retail stores: Escondido, Encinitas, Fallbrook, and Valley Center
  • San Diego Zoo—Ongoing
    http://www.sandiegozoo.org/
  • Plant World, Escondido, Sept. 16 to Oct. 31, 2007
  • Lowe’s, Oceanside, Nov. 1 to Dec. 15, 2007
  • Home Depot, Sports Arena, Dec. 16, 2007 to Jan 31, 2008
  • Home Depot, Balboa Ave., Dec. 16, 2007 to Jan 31, 2008
  • Mission Hills Nursery, Feb. 1 to Mar. 15, 2008

Santa Clara County

  • Yamagami’s Nursery, Cupertino, Sept. 4 to Oct. 15, 2007

Solano County

  • Fairfield-Cordelia Library, Oct. 1 to Dec. 31, 2007.
    5050 Business Center Drive, Fairfield
    707-784-2680

UC Davis Arboretum 33rd Annual Plant Sale

by | Sep 30, 2007 | Uncategorized

I’m listening to Farmer Fred streaming live (I hope that doesn’t hurt) on my laptop while enjoying a slice of bacon, an egg, a piece of toast… dry… and a large mug of Peet’s French Roast coffee. Ah, Sundays…

Anyway, he’s reminding folks about the 33rd Annual Plant Sale at the UC Davis Orchard Park Nursery. Fall is a great time for planting and this sale is sure to have something for everybody, from plant geek to newbie. Check it out if you can. Apparently, they’ll have a new variety of Santa Barbara daisy called ‘Spindrift’ (Erigeron karvinskianus ‘Spindrift’), which has a compact habit and doesn’t spread like E. karvinskianus. Me want!

If you are coming from out of town, you might as well make a day of it and stop for lunch in relaxing downtown Davis. If you’re feeling sandwichy and it’s just you and a friend or two, try Zia’s. See where else the locals… Davisians?… Davisidians?… eat on Yelp.com.

Hey, did you know you can ride your bike from downtown Sacramento to Davis? That’s about 14 miles. To get home, you can either ride back to your car, which will be parked in a parking garage near the Tower Bridge, or take Amtrak back to your car, presumably parked in the Amtrak parking lot. Won’t you feel like such a stud getting on the train with your bike? Won’t you feel like a total rock star if you ride both ways?

Ok, so maybe you should do the bike ride on a different day from the plant sale, unless your bike has a nursery cart attached to the back. You also have until 1pm on Saturday to swing by the year-round Davis Farmers’ Market.

PLANT SALE
When: Saturday, October 6
Hours:

  • 9 am to 3 pm Public Sale
  • 7 am to 9 am Members Only Sale

“If you join or renew your membership on October 6th, you will receive a $5.00 discount on your annual membership, and a buy one get one free plant coupon good for one plant valued up to $8.00. All members receive a 10% discount at the sale”

What: Download Plant List

More info: http://arboretum.ucdavis.edu/

Why my gardening website is stuck in August

by | Sep 22, 2007 | Uncategorized


Alternate title: “Why I hate Dell“
Alternate title #2: “Why I Heart Apple“

I’ve been a PC person for years. PCs were inexpensive, you got a lot of bang for your buck (so I thought), and I found Macs to be prohibitively expensive… ok, and a bit elitist in a lower-case “i” sort of way… and software for them was limited. Two years ago, I invested in a screamin’ Dell 9100 PC with a terabyte hard drive. That’s a whopping 1,024 Gibabytes! Oh, and it had this special RAID configuration that was supposed to be lightning fast… and it was… until the whole thing crapped out on me after about a month.

You know the PC guy in those mac commercials? Not the cute nerdy Mac guy who’s dating Drew Barrymore… the cute nerdy PC guy from The Daily Show who is lying on the bottom of the cart in a fetal position because he’s suffering from the “blue screen of death”? Well, that’s me. That’s my computer. The dreaded blue screen of death.

When I called Dell customer service, I patiently endured the very polite but very I-am-going-to-take-up-hours-of-your-life (that you will never get back)-without-really-understanding-or-fixing-your-problem customer service representative in India. His conclusion, despite the fact that all signs pointed to a hardware problem that Dell should fix, was that my new computer suffered from a software problem… a Windows problem… and they were unable to help me. In other words, the buck was passed and I was stuck with a brand new, expensive, broken box. I was SOL.

I was computerless for a couple months and only by the sheer coincidence of being married to a software engineer was I able to get back on that box without taking it to a computer repair place. I lost a lot of data, drives were shuffled, the amazing RAID configuration had to be UNCONFIGURED, and I was left with a slow, grindingly loud, crippled computer. I took all this as a sign from the gods that I should take another look at Apple. There were more signs– Apple prices were dropping (probably thanks to our insatiable appetite for iPods), I learned that Apple is a blue company and Dell is red (and I am oh, so blue), and I do a lot of photo editing and Macs are great for that.

So I ambled over to our friendly neighborhood Apple Store and fondled the MacBook laptops. The display on the little Macbook was amazing, and the price wasn’t bad! I figured I’d have to spec the thing and wait a few weeks for it to show up on my doorstep. No. What? You mean you have them in stock… right now… and I can walk out of the store with my new laptop, thereby experiencing one of my favorite things of all time, immediate gratification? Woo hoo!

Flash forward six months or so to late August. My Dell 9100 desktop’s remaining hard drive… you know, the one with all my photos and website files and stuff.. disappeared. Died. The computer is out of warranty, of course, and the futility of another tortured customer service call weighs heavily on me.

At the same time, I started experiencing an intermittent strange clicking noise on my Apple laptop’s left-click button. I asked the computer gods, “Does this mean all computers are crap and I just have to deal with it?” They replied, “Go to Apple.com and make a Genius Bar appointment.” When I arrived at my next-day appointment, the Apple store was crazy busy! My name was called and a nice young Genius listened to my complaint. Expecting to have to defend myself against accusations of eating at the keyboard (guilty as charged) or of left-click abuse, instead I am told that he, too, hears the intermittent clicking and that it shouldn’t do that.

Can I wait thirty minutes while you replace the whole top of my laptop with a part that is (queue singing angels) in stock? Well, heck yeah, I can! Not only that, I think I will go try on pants while you fix my computer. Two pairs of jeans later, which you girls know makes thirty minutes go by in a flash, I get a call on my cell phone that my laptop is ready. With a “thank you very much” I am on my way. Free of charge. Now that’s customer service. If I knew a little Apple dance, I would have done one, right there, in Arden Fair Mall. My next desktop is soooooooo going to be an iMac. Until then, I can only dream of a PC-free life.

I apologize for not updating my gardening website and for not answering my gardening-related e-mails, which can only be read in Outlook, which is on my dead D: drive. Hopefully, I’ll be back online soon to help ring in the Fall planting season. In the meantime, I’ll continue blogging on my ultra-fabulous, inexpensive MacBook.