Reclaimed Teak Flooring

Just one more in the plethora of great new products we found at this years show!

Indo Teak Custom Flooring is a locally owned company that offers recyled teak flooring from Indonesia. All of their wood is reclaimed from structures so there is no deforestation!

This beautiful tropical hardwood is great for custom designed interior and exterior living areas but too often is harvested unsustainably. This company provides a beautiful product without the environmental impact of unsustainable harvesting.

Check out their site for more examples: http://www.indoteakcustomflooring.com/index.html

Surfrider Ocean Friendly Garden Workshops

Surfrider Foundation has recently set up a new Ocean Friendly Gardens program to encourage homeowners and businesses to install or retrofit their landscapes to become more ocean friendly. Ocean Friendly Gardens (or OFG's) reduce runoff pollution, are drought tolerant, and need little or no fertilizers or chemicals to look beautiful!

Exactly what makes an OFG and how do you design and install one?

Sign up for their new series of workshops starting this April to find out!

Check it out! http://www.surfridersd.org/ofg.php

Old Surfboard + Outdoor Shower = Awesome Idea!!

This year's Best of Show garden featured some great ideas! It was there that we found the bee houses featured in the previous post which went along perfectly with the veggie garden, which was the perfect compliment for the pizza oven, which was decorated with gorgeous mosaic...(kind of like that nursery rhyme about swallowing a fly)... which was designed by the same artists that designed this fantastic outdoor shower!

Made with a recycled surfboard (#8 reason not to throw away those old boards!!), mosaic, and some fittings these great outdoor showers are an awesome addition to any coastal garden! Each board/shower is custom designed by artists Will and Jane Fowler so each board is a unique work of art.

Check out their great website for more photos of their beautiful boards and other mosaic designs!
http://willandjane.com/home.html

Bee Houses!! wait....Bee Houses?!?

Yep, you heard right! But not for the kind of bee you're thinking of, these nests are for the little known but quite industrious native bee. These little bees are very different from the imported honeybee that most of us are familiar with and while the honeybee has a reputation for being a bit, well, sting-y, native bees are quite docile, so much so that most people hardly know they exist!

So if we hardly knew they existed why do we want to encourage them into our gardens? Well, with the current crisis with the honeybee population (number are dwindling because of pesticide use and disease) we stand to lose more than just honey. Bees are one of the major pollinators and without pollination most plants are not able to produce fruit, vegetables, seeds, and new plants. Basically, no pollinators=no new plants.

Thankfully, native bees are great pollinators and encouraging them into the garden is a safe (and now fashionable!) way to maintain a healthy and diverse population of native pollinators!

Check out sculptor Greg Corman's blog to see more examples of his beautiful Native Bee Nests (all hand-made from Recycled Wood and Steel) and to learn more about why native bees are so important: http://www.zenindustrial.blogspot.com/

You can also check out this great article on California's native bees for more info: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/2869/

Morgan's Best of Show Pic's

The garden show may be over but we walked away with tons of gorgeous photos, fun ideas, and great sources for the garden! We'll have plenty to share with you over the next couple of weeks!

So, without further ado, we'd like to share our pic's from what we thought were this year's greatest gardens :

Morgan's Best of Show

Check out http://www.springhomegardenshow.com/ for more info about this year's gardens.

Farewell Spring Home and Garden Show....

Today we said 'adieu' to this year's Spring Home and Garden Show at the Del Mar Fairgrounds. All of the gardens that were so lovingly assembled over the course of last week have disappeared surprisingly fast, leaving little more than piles of dirt and building block but also leaving us with lots of wonderful design ideas and, most importantly, photos!!

So on that note, here are some photos of our contribution to this year's show. Thank you to everyone who contributed to our garden and much thanks to everyone who stopped by to enjoy it!

The Artful Native Garden:

Winner: Best San Diego Adapted Landscape

Peak Bloom Season has begun in Anza Borrego!!!

((Thanks to Tom Chester of the CNPS for sharing!))

Peak bloom began on the desert floor ~23 February 2010, at elevations of ~1000 feet and below. About half of the desert annuals have begun blooming, with the rest to follow in the next month. This is the exciting phase of peak bloom, where every trip reveals additional species blooming, and finds fields of bloom from species that only had a few individuals blooming just a week earlier.

Peak bloom at elevations of ~1000 feet on the desert floor should continue for at least several weeks, through ~7 March. Its end will come whenever the temperatures hit 80° or above for a week or two. Peak bloom in the canyons to the west of Borrego Springs should begin in a few weeks, sometime in early March.

Peak bloom is defined here as the time period when you can see the maximum number of species in bloom on a given one or two day trip, as well as the maximum number of individual plants in bloom. The bloom is best from the city of Borrego Springs westward; it has not been observed to be very good at all east of there. The best places to go now are along Coyote Canyon Road, and the main canyons west of Borrego Springs: Hellhole, Borrego Palm Canyon, and Henderson Canyon.The desert sunflowers on Henderson Canyon have not yet begun to bloom; they are coming.

Check out the latest reports and photos at Desert USA http://www.desertusa.com/wildflo/ca_abdsp.html