Tag Archives: sustainability

gardening

earth day 2010

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Our sign at Earth Day

Happy Earth Day everyone!

Last weekend I helped out with the local native plant society’s information table at San Diego’s Earth Day celebrations, advertised as “the largest free annual environmental fair in the world.” Imagine that, in sleepy little conservative San Diego.

Our booth

Some of the plants we had for sale at the table. We ended up not pushing them too hard since a heavy gallon pot seemed to be more than most people wanted to carry around with them on a warm day with thousands of people crowded around. Seeds were and easier sell.

Some of the crowd at Earth Day

This exhibit was encouraging people to grow more of their own food. The cutouts for kids to poke their head through assured some attention from the younger crowd. Not all the kids looked at the exhibit, but a lot did.
There are always displays of electric car conversions...
...but with electric cars starting to come on line, they're less of a draw than before. But people seemed really interested in the electric scooters next door.

It’s always a wide mix of things that you’ll find in a large environmental-themed gathering, from conservation organizations to green-technology vendors to the ubiquitous booth selling kettle corn. What kettle corn has to do with sustainable living I have no idea, but it did keep some of the people fed and happy.

And it’s always a broad sampling of people who attend these fairs. Of the people who stopped by our table, there was the European family that was stranded due to Iceland’s Eyjafjallajoekull volcano, plenty of people interested in to work of the plant society, and even more people who were in the process of replacing their landscaping with less water-intensive plants.

I enjoy talking plants–any surprise since I do a garden blog? Helping to get the word out about the value of native plants, in the wilds or around the home, was extra-cool.

Some of the plantings at Balboa Park's Alcazar Garden

But it was nice to escape the crowds for a few minutes and just look at some plants. Our booth was adjacent to Balboa Park’s Alcazar Garden. The groundspeople are constantly changing the look of the garden. Today it featured flowering blocks of red snapdragons and lavender. It’s not a combination I’d have come up with, but I think I like it. Of course I’m way too curious about plants–and probably way too ADD–to limit myself to two garden plants.

A detail of the pairing of snapdragons and lavender.


Even with grand displays like this near the native plant society’s table, we had a nearly constant flow of people–a sure sign that people are thinking about different kinds of pleasures for their gardens. The times they are a-changin’.

landscape design, my garden

our front porch project

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We began this project to redo our front porch surround last year. It’s not totally finished, but it’s at a point I thought I’d share it with you.

The house originally came with an enclosure around the little front porch/patio area that made it feel like you were behind bars, doing time for a crime you didn’t commit. We took a saw to the original porch cover and provided some breathing space in it, but it always felt like an uncomfortable retrofit. As the termites dealt a terminal blow to the first enclosure, I developed this completely reworked design, sort of a deconstructed patio cover, with openings through the front screening panel, as well as an open, incomplete canopy overhead.

porch-cover-front

This shows the shelter from the front of the house. The big window cut into the screen lets you see out into the neighborhood, while not making you feel caged.

porch-cover-front-angled

Another front view, approaching from the side of the house…

porch-cover-from-above

And a last shot from the roof, showing the partial covering overhead. Many of days are overcast, and we really would prefer sun over shade most days. This reduced cover shelters the big main window and front door, but lets more light in than an edge-to-edge cover.

The new wood needs to season just a little bit before the final finishing, and the old wood will need to be scrubbed to clean it a bit. But once the finish is on, it should really look great. I’m pleased!

Main materials: pressure-treated lumber for the support structure (painted black, to fade into the background); ipe hardwood lumber for the slats; exposed stainless steel screws for fastening the slats. The ipe hardwood is potentially the least green component of this project. Although my local lumber supplier is assuring its users that their ipe “is harvested from professionally managed sustainable forests,” some of my research is now saying that the claim just may be a crock of greenwashing. Ugh.

Choosing sustainable materials for an outdoor project is challenging. There are interesting discussions you can wade into, including an introductory Sustainable Decking Solutions post that’s worth a look. If you must use ipe, a supplier like AltruWoods can supply FSC certified lumber for a project, and might have been the better choice for getting materials for this project.

Whatever you do, reducing the amount of materials you use is a beginning. The post above recommends that “[o]ne green building idea with a lot of merit is treating wood as a luxury. Trees help the planet the most when they’re alive and globally, the acreage per forest is dwindling rapidly. Using wood as a common structural and outdoor finish material is not a long-term sustainable practice.” Good advice.

How do you all approach trying to be greener in your outdoor projects? I suppose one excellent alternative to a patio cover would have been to plant a tree. It’s a concept our grandparents would have signed on to…