Tag Archives: maintenance

Crust is great on baguettes. Not so much on tile and stone

Sometimes you have the space for a splash zone, sometimes you don’t. Following some simple guidelines can keep your water features less crusty and lower maintenance requirements. Some design guidelines can help to alleviate this kind of thing – something to consider when designing a water feature. This is kind of like a situation fromContinue reading “Crust is great on baguettes. Not so much on tile and stone”

Prickly Pear Cactus Pruning: an update

It’s been two years since we visited this cactus and did some fairly major structural pruning. We removed trunks to simplify the plant’s shape to let its structure come through. This time, the goal was to keep the cactus’ size in check, removing peripheral pads to again show the branch structure. Prickly pear limbs tendContinue reading “Prickly Pear Cactus Pruning: an update”

Aster chilensis trimming results

Last year, our California asters grew. And grew. And grew. By flowering time, the plants were about six feet tall. Too hard to appreciate the flowers at that height without a ladder, but the plants had a solution: as the season progressed, they drooped. We couldn’t cut them because we wanted the seeds as aContinue reading “Aster chilensis trimming results”