This Sunday, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom and Alice Waters, along with lots of gardeners will plant the first edible garden in the city by the Bay's Civic Center since 1943.

Here are details from the
Slow Food Nation Blog .

Beginning July 1, the lawn of San Francisco's City Hall will undergo a transformation from grass carpet to edible garden. The installation of the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden marks the first time that City Hall has hosted an edible garden since 1943. We will begin by pulling up turf (which will be replanted in other parts of the City's green areas) and planting beets, lettuce, kale and many other heritage varieties of vegetables. The food grown in the garden--most of which will be ready for harvest during Slow Food Nation's Labor Day event--will be donated to those with limited access to healthy, organic produce through a partnership with local food banks and meal programs.

The Surfrider Foundation dedicated to cleaner oceans has a website with lots of great tips for landscaping to keep storm water run-off from washing into the oceans, alternatives to lawns, great household fertilizers (human hair can be used!), as well as plants that naturally repel insects so that pesticides aren't needed.

From their website, .

CPR stands for Conservation, Permeability, and Retention, and when fully employed, it has one of two outcomes: Water run-off is either eliminated or cleaned.

This client in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn didn't like the cavernous, dark space under the porch. She wanted to transform it so that it would look nice from the yard, and when in the downstairs playroom, whose doors opened to this area, it would have pleasant sights and scents. So we installed a simple fountain made from an antique Guatemalan sink and stone found at Keystone in Hudson, New York. On either side of the door zinc pots hold deep shade plants--the elephant ears are doing great, surprisingly, the ghost ferns, not so much. The trellis with a dragonfly made of butterknives is from Mohawk Industries, often displaying his creative metalware at the Brooklyn Flea. There's a hanging basket, where the caladium are very happily regenerating themselves, and under the stairs is a mix of heuchera (coral bells), ferns, and creeping jenny. The client added the small bench for her daughter, and it has become a lovely little area increases the size of the usable garden.

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Trellis with Semi-Shade Clematis

Under the Stairs

Close-Up Shade Pot (A nice thing about shade gardens is that the dearth of blooming plants makes you work more with leaf color and texture.)

Here's another fountain we installed in the yard. It's also made of Guatemalan stone sinks.

The new food and gardening blog, Diggin Food has recently featured the vegetable loft by Prospect & Refuge. They also have a recipe for grilled cheese with figs that looks pretty amazing up right now...

This client had a new penthouse terrace with amazing views that stretched from downtown Brooklyn across the waterways and included the Statue of Liberty and Lower Manhattan. The main problem was that the developers had put no irrigation on the roof and there was no access to a system from any terraces. At first we thought about using a rain barrel, as there is a drainpipe. However this was so low to the ground and close to the door, it couldn't be used. (The Co-op rules mandate that it can't be adjusted in any way.)

So we had to find self-irrigation planters. The taller cylindrical ones we got from Sprout Home in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. These have 1-2 gallon reservoirs and after the roots establish in about 3 months, the tanks only need to be filled every three weeks. We chose charcoal gray, and were really pleased with how simple they were to put together and how nice they look.

The rectangular planters are custom made by Rollner Architectural Metals.

I saw their planters last year at the Brooklyn Design show, and was really impressed. These are powder-coated aluminum and weigh only about 38 pounds empty, so they were great for a weight limit. There are lots of colors to choose from, but we decided to stay in the gray/silver range. The tricky part with these was irrigation. We ended up ordering Tournesol sub-irrigation systems. They took a long time to assemble, came missing parts, etc. but hopefully were worth the hassle.

We chose hearty, wind tolerant plants. To the south, the clients wanted privay, so we planted ornamental grasses with a few lavander and sedum. These give the area a breezy, beach feel. The side with the amazing views, we went lower, so to not obstruct the skyline. Here we planted rugosa roses, lavender and sedum. The corners are anchored with trios of hearty boxwood, euonymus and berberis.

(The Rollner Architectural Metals planters are from their Tides Home line.

This client's favorite color was gray--even when it came to plants. She also liked blue, but hated pink--so the existing cherry tree went to a neighbor who has a totally found plant/repurposed garden. It's funky, but I liked it. He had fastened a stage out of old railroad ties, and performed at his parties every once in a while. But back to the gray garden.

Outside the subterranean master bedroom, the clients had a Asian influenced installation. The bluestone cut and set in sleek symmetry, the raised planter held bamboo, ferns, liriope and ginger. The client wanted to echo this somehow, and we also wanted to find a way to use the back part of the yard. So often in brownstones, with the rectangular shaped yards, the back part is often unused. So we decided to do two small bluestone patios, and repeat the bamboo and gray stone as a sort of privacy wall.

A bluestone path leads between the two seating areas--one with a table, the other more lounge-like. The borders we repeated patterns of sea holly, lavender, catmint, and blue fescue. The one of the right was larger, so this has the same planting, but also yucca, a fig tree, hydrangea, and zebra grass.

She also wanted a silver shed and had an old teak door laying around, so we made a storage shed, covered it with aluminum and repurposed the old teak door.

She also had some white pots, so we planted them with annuals for a little drama.

Trevor Paque at work in San Francisco in a garden his company planted in a client's backyard.

Both the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about the Grow Your Own trend for the higher end. This is great--hopefully city gardeners can switch from selling clients annual flowers to annual vegetables. Then just do a little perennial planting around the beds to attract pollinators and it's so easy being green.

In the article A Locally Grown Diet With Fuss but No Muss , people in the San Francisco Bay area hire local gardeners to tend their backyard beds, as well as owning shares of cows in their region. They wrote: "Call them the lazy locavores -- city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty."

A blueprint that inspired Rick Norling's garden in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif., was based in part on the gardens at the palace of Versailles in France.

In an article in The Wall Street Journal Real Estate blog, Ellen Gamerman wrote in her article,
The Vegetable Patch Goes Luxe

"Some people are paying tens of thousands of dollars to have landscape architects design and install elaborate vegetable gardens. These homeowners regard their plots as edible showplaces, where they take guests on tours of manicured beds of baby bok choy and Japonica maize the way others show off their koi ponds and rose bushes."

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We ripped out the existing buckled cement and replaced it with staggered Pennsylvania Bluestone. Then we installed a custom fence out of white cedar that was milled in Maine. Instead of a lawn, we planted plugs of the ground cover rupturewort (herniaria glabra) that creates a carpet like matting. It's green in the summer, bronze in the winter, can handle heavy traffic, and grows in sun and semi-shade.

The client is very allergic to bees, so we chose non-flowering plants--except for the Nikko Blue Hydrangea, which doesn't attract pollinators. This border is mix of ornamental grasses, bonsai junipers, boxwoods, berberis, and euonymus with a few hostas, spreading junipers, and cypress.

The client purchased this great bench at
Home Infatuation

Rupturewort never needs to be mowed, doesn't like fertilizer, and its root system makes it very efficient on water use. The only problem is weeding between plugs while it grows in, so we recommend mulching between plants until they spread into a mat.