A little bit of work goes a long way

Santolina going for broke in yellow
and the dry grass Nasella winding down 

Both gardens are looking great, with some plants like the Santolina Annie just profiled going like crazy for Summer, while other plants like the Nassella tenuissima, a grass, going into the dormant part of its cycle. It's a beautiful mix, exactly how we like it!

Annie is away on vacation so I watered the trees, and overall had a lovely time talking with neighbors and doing chores around both gardens. Right as I was getting started with the trees, two of my neighbors came by that were using the route down along PRG to get a coffee from Front and walk their dog - one of my favorite activities (!) - and we chatted while I setup everything.

Nate powering the sound system by bike

On Thursday we were invited to the SF Parks Alliance Love Your Parks Party, where Ryan and I met up with Nate. Nate agreed to take a turn on the bicycle powering the speakers, and garden on Saturday (Ryan agreed to neither). So while waiting for Nate I updated our kiosk with new flyers and doggie bags, weeded the beds by the benches, cut back Centranthus by the arch and transplanted a Knautia macedonia out from under a Ceanothus to the middle back bed by the Plectranthus. I've had the Knautia in other gardens and it goes like crazy with flowers for most of the year, but we haven't quite found a place it enjoys at PSG yet. This new spot was still very wet from the brief run of automatic sprinklers on Friday night, so I know it will get more water in the new location and by not being buried under a Ceanothus more sunlight, so maybe third times the charm?

Hard to imagine this was full of weeds!

Meanwhile Debbie and Nels were taking a walk throughout the garden checking out plants that may work well in their garden and we chatted about a few lovely candidates, including the Agave attenuata, they are posing with in their photo. I made sure to point them to the great plant profiles that Annie writes for information, and they were glad to have the garden and our website as a resource. Yay!

Savvy gardeners Nels & Debbie

Once Nate arrived at the garden we started by cleaning up the cardoon, Cynara cardunculus, removing all the dead leaves still attached to the plant and the large dead ones that had already fallen. We did crinkle the leaves to make a 'mulch' of sorts, which looks more like 'mulch' then dead branches fortunately -  so we'll see how that works out in a few weeks! After some more weeding it was time to stop the water at PRG, so we went down to weed a bit more and pickup all the trash... there is always so much trash! I hand watered a few plants that are having a hard time making it (a few Stachys and Convulvus) which out of 700 plants is only a small handful, so I'm grateful, and we packed up the hose and headed out to a late lunch.