Succulent. The name says a lot. But it doesn’t reveal everything about these wildly compelling botanicals that surrender to even the least-green thumb. Thick-skinned and juicy, these intriguing plants sit somewhere on the sliding botanical scale between dry, spiky cacti and delicate leaf-bearing flora. Succulents love to preserve moisture deep inside their curious, pliant bodies.…
Posts Tagged: Gardening
Garden-Inspired Home Fermentation
One Saturday, when the chill had not quite worn off the morning and it was still likely that rain might ruin the weekend, my boyfriend Mike and I started planning what to plant in our garden. He’s the one with all of the know-how and experience, so I just put in requests. We knew he…
How Dig Gardens became Santa Cruz County’s hip gardening hub
Come for the ferns, stay for the cheese boards. Dig Gardens is a little slice of paradise that will have gardening geeks leaving their worries and wallet at the door. Whether they get lost in the outdoor succulent paradise, or don’t even make it past the Paddywax scented candles and bath salts, Dig has something…
Home & Garden Events 2018 Calendar
A round-up of home and gardening events happening in Santa Cruz County this year… Saturday, 4/14 UCSC Arboretum Spring Plant Sale The Arboretum’s spring plant sale offers hundreds of varieties of water-wise plants, succulents and small trees from California, Australia and South Africa that are ideal for the Central Coast climate. Get there early for…
Renee Shepherd Explains How To Grow Vegetables and Herbs From Seed
The seed packets from Renee’s Garden—marked with their characteristic watercolor illustrations and descriptive, owner-tested growing instructions—can be found in independent nurseries and garden centers across the country. But it all began here, in the mid-’80s, on Renee Shepherd’s sandy-soiled Felton property. “A thousand years ago, in the mid-’80s, this used to be just a big…
Plant Lovers are Going Wild for Jungalow Decor
It’s sort of ironic, I know, that my smartphone serves as a portal into nature, but my Instagram feed is full of green foliage and cactus flowers. On Instagram, this is not hard to do. The social media platform is teeming with design enthusiasts and plant lovers, who, more and more, seem to be becoming…
UCSC Farm Celebrates 50 Years
In the late 1960s, Orin Martin was “allegedly in college,” as he puts it, on the East Coast, but he rarely went to classes. He was in Washington, D.C. for the anti-Vietnam War march on the Pentagon in 1967, and was actively resisting the draft. A year later, unsure of what to do with his…
Upscale Foraging at Santa Cruz Edible Gardens Tour
Get inspired to grow your own food at the 4th Annual Santa Cruz Edible Gardens Tour on Saturday, August 8 at locations throughout the greater Santa Cruz area. Organized by Slow Food Santa Cruz, which advocates for healthy food policy in the community and organizes events that celebrate Santa Cruz’s unique, regional food culture, the…
Growing Up, Not Out
Relatively unknown in Santa Cruz, aeroponics could revolutionize farming.
