A Touch of Blue

Following the lead of the excellent Path to Freedom blog, I've been saving blue bottles that sparkling water comes in to use in a border in the garden. Instead of just tossing the bottles in the recycling bin I've stashed them in bags in my carport for the last couple months until I had enough to work with. Today I realized I had enough bottles and enough time to put the border in.

tame. I love the look of the hostas and they bloomed aThe target spot was a little corner bed at the foot of a jasmine vine. It's got a few small hostas and a couple wild geraniums growing there now and in the spring blue dutch iris bloom there as well. When the iris are in bloom, it's a nice shot of color (as shown in this photo from mid-May), but when they're not, it's a little too lot this year, but it wasn't enough. This is also the first thing I see from my kitchen window and I thought it would be nice to have something colorful there even in the winter.

So after about an hour of work (including hacking madly at the jasmine, weeding, and spreading new mulch), I had a dug a trench and planted 15 blue bottles to border the bed. I'm really pleased with the result and I'm looking forward to when I have enough bottles to do another border around BH's garden outside my back steps. I have 9 bottles left and the next border will probably require about 30, so I better start drinking more water.

If you're not familiar with the Path to Freedom blog, you should check it out. They have an amazing family homestead and I'm getting lots of ideas from them for maximizing the planting space I have, creative recycling, and producing a garden that is both beautiful and efficient.

A Salvaged Garden

One person's trash is another person's ... garden.

I went to Urban Ore in Berkeley a couple days ago and went home with two great finds. One is a white-and-rust metal hanging planter. My plan is to let it get completely rusty and use it as a centerpiece in the area that is now my vegetable bed. In the fall I plan on re-doing that entire bed and I think that this planter mounted on a pole or post of some kind in the center of the bed will look great.

My other find was a blue metal store display rack of some kind. It caught my eye because it's such a terrific shade of blue, but I knew right away it would make a great trellis for the mystery berry plant I was going to pot and re-locate. Here it is happily soaking up the sun in a new redwood pot.