Annie's Annuals & Perennials

I finally decided to physically visit Annie's Annuals (http://www.anniesannuals.com/). After drooling over their catalog and website for years, I made the hour and a half drive from Sacramento to Annie's last month. My friend Chuck (http://www.back40feet.blogspot.com/) was nice enough to join my daughter and I, and I'm so glad he did! I'm pretty sure Chuck knows their catalog by heart, every time I would google a plant from there that I wanted, his Flickr page ALWAYS came up on an image search- so I'm pretty sure he's grown or taken pictures of every plant they've offered. That being said, I'm pretty sure I bought twice the amount of plants BECAUSE Chuck was with me. All he had to do was say "Oh, I love this plant", and somehow it made its way into my wagon.
Most plants are available for purchase in 4" pots, and each plant has a color coordinated plant label that indicates what the price is. The plants here are VERY reasonably priced. Each plant has a sign above it that is well labeled with its plant zone, water & light requirements, and height & width of the plant. It also includes special characteristics about the plant; such as where it came from, the story behind how they found it, or why they like this particular plant. The information on these signs is all available via their website, so there’s no need to take notes while you’re there! I admit, I put some plants in my cart just because of the story that they wrote about it- is that bad or what? I'm a sucker for a good story.....
I was happy to see one of my favorite plants here- Ceanothus ‘Tuxedo’(pictured above). This is a plant that I was lucky enough to get my hands on from Pat Fitzgerald from Ireland (and Pacific Plug & Liner) earlier this year. If you look closely at the description it even mentions the infamous Pat Fitzgerald! I can’t wait for mine to start blooming, but I'll admit it’s the color of the foliage that I love most (oh- and it does not need a lot of water! It took our summer heat like a champ!). Pat has worked on this plant for YEARS, it has got to feel pretty awesome to see this plant in one of the finest nurseries in California! But do you guys find it odd that the foliage on Tuxedo resembles the color of Guinness? Hmmm....
I had my little helper Alex along to help me pull around my cart. Chuck also got to experience first hand why it’s pretty handy to have a well behaved kid (she’s pulling his cart too). I swear, this is not child labor, she wanted to do it.
To thank(bribe) Alex for her hard work, I let her pick out any plant she wanted. I do this often when we go shopping for plants. It’s fun to see from her perspective what kind of plants she prefers. Today she picked Eucomis autumnalis ‘Pineapple Lily’ which most would say looked like a pineapple, but noooo, my kid says “It looks like corn, but it’s not ready yet”. I admit, this is probably a plant I would have walked right past, but once she pointed it out I started to appreciate its child-like features. I blame her for me adding Echium wildpretii "Tower of Jewels" to the wagon for the same reason. And I blame Chuck for telling me to grab two more of them (something about them looking better when they have "friends").
Did I mention they also have a kid’s area? Yeah- how awesome is that?! I think Alex was pretty entertained pulling the wagons around, but around the time she started getting bored with that is when we found the play area for kids. If any of you have toddlers, you know how awesome it is to find a place that can accommodate a child. Between the play area and their chickens (yeah- chickens!), Alex thought this was as cool as going to the zoo (which is good- because I guess the whole way there she thought we were going to a place called “Annie’s Animals”, thank goodness they had some!).

Next time you're stuck in traffic either heading into San Francisco, or leaving it- I totally recommend you stop in Richmond at Annie's for a bit. This place is like Disneyland for plant lovers. They have gorgeous demonstration gardens which I was too overwhelmed to take pictures of (sorry- I'll take pics next time!). I left this day with 24 plants for my new front yard project, and I'm going back this weekend with some fellow bloggers to check out their Fall Planting Party (and they're having a HUGE sale). By the looks on their website of their previous parties, it looks like TONS of fun- and I am SOOOO hoping to win the shopping spree (I even had a dream that I won it the other night- kinda weird, eh?). I'll be sure to post about some of my new plants from Annie's as they get a bit more established!

"It's gone daddy gone, the lawn is gone"

Ahhh....much better! Even if I don't do a thing to this space for months, it looks a heck of a lot better than the dead grass and weeds that were here just days ago! The fence and lawn removal project that I was told was going to take two days has actually taken four. I’m not complaining though- there’s no way I’d be outside in 100+ degree weather pulling out sod (oh wait, I’ve actually done that before! Lessons learned!). Yesterday when I got home from work I finally got to see the lawn removed- and what a difference it makes! The size of the space is MASSIVE, as you might be able to tell with my pint-sized daughter standing in some of the pictures.

The dirt area you see in the pictures will be amended and covered with shredded bark this Sunday. I’m lucky to have some pretty awesome people in my life to help me with the manual labor, even on a day that’s supposed to be a scorching 100 degree’s. My hope is to gather enough friends to help me knock out the work in record time, before the sun hits us too hard! Needless to say, the freezer will be STOCKED with iced mugs for all of us to enjoy a nice frosty beer afterward.

Once the area is amended and mulched I’ll have the difficult task of actually designing the space. I’m not a landscape designer by any means, but since this is such a huge space that takes up over half of my front yard, I want it to be a little more planned out. I have about a hundred plants arriving the second week in October, in addition to the twenty or so plants I currently have in the backyard in pots (they’re waiting patiently for their moment to shine). I guess I better invest in some graph paper and start planning!

"Take the Good With the Bad"

I often get the question "How did you start gardening?". Working in the technology field, it probably seems like the last thing someone like me would do. My simple response has always been "I've been doing it my whole life" because basically I have, whether I wanted to or not. I'm often envious of people who say their passion for gardening started with helping their grandmother trim her roses, or city dwellers who always yearned for a greener way of living. My story isn't as romantic.

I come from a family of dairy farmers- both sides of my family owned dairy farms. I even had some family members that ran a pig farm in Woodland for many years, but they had stopped that before I was born. My parents bought a house on some land in a small farm town, and my dad immediately turned it into quite a hobby farm. We had sheep, chickens, goats, ducks, rabbits, turkey, geese, and one cow named Bossy (who has her own interesting story, which I'll save for another time) . My dad had also created a huge garden (larger than my entire plot of land now) where we grew pomegranates, oranges, strawberries, grapes, pumpkins, corn, artichokes, tomatoes, basically everything you could possibly want. We always grew WAY too much zucchini (who doesn't?), so much so that my mom had to buy an entire cookbook just on zucchini so we could find ways to get rid of it all (this cookbook now belongs to me!). Fried zucchini, zucchini pancakes, and chocolate zucchini bread were and still are my favorites. It was a lot of work to maintain the farm, and I had a long list of chores to tend to daily. I hated every minute of it.

Reading the previous paragraph I think most would say "Oh, she learned how to garden from her dad". That would be an easy answer! The truth of the matter is, I don't want to give him credit for it. You see, my dad was abusive and to put it mildly, he was kind of a prick. It's hard for me to give credit for something I love so much to someone I dislike. I think he was trying to make me the son he always wanted, so he was pretty critical of me. I admit I wasn't an easy kid, but I know now I didn't deserve most of the punishments I got. He left us my 6th grade year, and most of the farm chores fell on to me. I hated all of the work, especially since that farm was his dream, not mine. I'd get up early to feed all of the animals before catching the hour long bus ride to school. My evenings were spent tending to the garden while it was still light outside, and once the mosquitoes came out I'd go inside and do my homework. Eventually my mom could no longer afford the upkeep of the farm and we sold it. I haven't spoken to my dad in about 18 years. I saw him a couple years ago at a wedding, but he wouldn't come and talk to me (probably wise of him- I had several large glasses of wine that night). I used to be okay with him being gone because my life was a whole lot easier without him around, but once I had my own child it was harder on me. I guess it's hard for me understand how someone can walk away from their own child, and even harder for me to understand how a parent could be abusive to their child. That being said, some of my best qualities are because of him, and my love of gardening is one of them.

After he left I continued with my love of plants. In high school I was active in the FFA (Future Farmers of America) where I would show plants every year at the state fair. At the age of thirteen I helped my mom design and install her front and backyard at our new house, which is where I also learned to never plant mint in the ground (unless you really, really like mojitos). She will be battling that mint for the rest of her life thanks to me! When I bought my first house I didn't have much of a yard so I became really good at container gardening, and started collecting strong scented herbs to try and mask the disgusting cigarette smells from my next door neighbor. Eventually I got married, and we bought a nice house with a decent sized lot that was covered in mature fruit tree's. I secretly started building and installing raised beds in the backyard, which upset my city-loving husband....until he took a bite of a REAL vine-ripened tomato. Three years ago we had a baby girl, and now that she's finally moved past her must-eat-the-dirt phase, I can't seem to spend enough time outside with her working in our vegetable garden. Gardening is no longer a chore, but a nice stress reliever for me.

When someone asks me now "How did you start gardening?" I think I will start to respond with WHY I garden. I garden for my daughter, so she can grow up knowing where her food comes from. I grow a lot of my own fruits and vegetables so that I know what goes into them, so that I may protect her from the many chemicals that are used in commercial farming today. I garden WITH my daughter so that she spends time outdoors learning about things that really matter- like attracting beneficial insects, saving water, how to compost, and how to build a worm bin! And more importantly, I garden with my daughter so that someday when she's my age and someone asks her where she learned to garden, she can PROUDLY say that she learned it from her mother, and that it wasn't a chore because we had way too much fun gardening together.