OK, so our garden in Livermore at the Martinelli Center is on the Bay Friendly Garden Tour on April 27th, and get this - we didn't have a formal compost pile.  Oh our weeds never ended up in a landfill or in a green bin somewhere, they were simply piled off to the side of the garden without pomp and circumstance or any biostack to speak of. 

When people ask about composting, they are quite sure that it requires a bit of luck, a product you need to buy at your local home improvement store, and years of experience, but we are here to tell you that compost just happens, if you wait long enough.

Thanks to our new trainee, Sue L., who was ashamed of our lack of a formal composting program, we now have a three pile system complete with finished product.  She started digging under the pile of weeds and...

Low and behold, under our three year old pile heap of weed refuse was the most beautiful compost!  No turning, no inoculants from a cardboard box, just Mother Nature strutting her stuff and returning formally living material back to the earth.

Not willing to wait three plus years to reap the benefits of compost? You can speed up the process with the Compost in a Hurry from ANR communications, or you can settle for some system in between our "pile and neglect" system and optimal composting.  Either way, compost happens!

The Master Gardener Program is really into Bay Friendly Gardening this year!  While we have always had a few Master Gardener homes of the tour and have provided docents at various sites, this year we are really getting our hands dirty in this environmentally friendly regional gardening tour. The tour itself takes place on Sunday, April 27, 2008 and will be held at various sites through out the Bay Area.

Our Livermore Drought Tolerant Demonstration Garden is on the garden tour. The 7,000 square foot garden features plants from our own “Outstanding Plants for Alameda County” List as well as other native and Mediterranean plant materials. We will feature plants from the Outstanding Plant List for sale that day and also have a talk on the plants at noon at the garden. We will also be inviting all our contributors to the garden that day to show off all our hard work and their generous contributions.

Thanks to some very industrious Master Gardeners we have an Outstanding Plant List for Alameda County.  As they say, the proof is in the pudding, or in the demo garden.  Check out these beauties at the demo garden in livermore.  This were taken on December 14th.

Volunteer or rogue weed? Just because you didn't plant it, doesn't mean it's a weed.  Master gardeners decided that volunteer poppies and lupin deserved a chance in the dry creek garden.

It may not be Spring but this lupin is already flashing us!