Holiday for Gardeners

My brother gave me a terrific Christmas gift – an ACE gift card! Of course, now I have to decide how to spend it! Do I need new cedar chips for a walkway? Do I want new tools, more cinder, mulch, or soil? Maybe lumber for more shelves in my shed?

Gift cards are great for the giver, but when you have a problem with making decisions like I do, the burden of shopping now shifts to the receiver. Gift cards might not always a good idea in this economy, since so many stores are going out of business, but ACE should be around forever.

Thanks, Bro! I think I’m able to handle the challenge! Besides, this gives me a segue into the topic for this post.

Most of you have probably completed your holiday shopping. On the off chance that you are still wondering what to get for that gardener on your list (or even for yourself), here are a few suggestions.

Gift cards of any kind are generally a good idea. We don’t know what the other person really needs or wants, so it gives them the opportunity to make their own choices. Save yourself the gas and the mailing costs. For your gardener, you might look at ACE, or check with Home Depot or Lowe’s, or any store where the gardener shops regularly.

Start with an Amazon Gift Card. Just click on this and shop! I was amazed at the variety of garden and patio products you can purchase through Amazon, and mostly at a discount.



And of course Amazon has books for the gardener. Check out the list of just a few of my favorites on the right-hand side of this page under "Useful Books." There are garden books on everything you could ever imagine, from beginner to expert.



You might browse through one of the local garden shops or hardware stores. Pick up a sturdy basket or 4-wheeled cart like the one above, then begin to pile in various small garden tools, seed packets, books, and more. Tie a big red bow on the top for a flourish. A friend gave me one of these carts for my birthday and I absolutely love it!

If you live near a college or university that offers horticulture courses, you might even pay for a special friend to take a class. That happened for me in the early 70s at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. I took a course in landscaping designed for the home owner who was an amateur. It was such an exciting thing that I ended up taking horticulture courses for the next three years!

One of my favorite gifts from friends who live locally is a cutting (or a dozen cuttings) that I can put out in my own yard. It’s a constant reminder of that person every time I water or weed. Recently I had one of those friends stop by and he was amazed at how certain plants had grown that he and his wife had given me in exchange for eggs.

I’m not at a point of being able to give cuttings out of my yard yet, but some day I hope to do that. I can, however, pick up potted plants at the nursery to take. These plants can look nice in the home for a while, later to be planted outside in a more permanent home. Our local garden club meets the Saturday after Christmas. We’re bringing pupus and a plant for the gift exchange.

Finally, there is nothing like a personal gift of time. Coerce your favorite gardener into sitting down for a chat with you over a cup of tea and your homemade cookies. Walk around the place with your gardener and let her/him show you around. As bleak as we may think our garden is, we are always still proud to show our accomplishments.

You’ll think of other gifts, and who knows? You might even get the gardening bug yourself, if you haven’t already been bitten.

This is Lava Lily, with a wish for all of my readers to have a super bloomin’ holiday!

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The Magic of Seven

There is a fairly long and involved treatise written in 1956 on the magic of the number “seven” by George A. Miller, Princeton University Professor of Psychology, Emeritus. If you are of a mind, you can read it here. At the end, he refers to the seven deadly sins, the seven wonders of the world, the seven days of the week, the seven seas, and so much more.

I would not presume to improve on that, even with my own degrees in psychology! But I do know there is something magical about the number seven. So I give you my own take on it.

It is a super busy time of year for many of us, with the beginning of the school year, fall garden work (yes, even here in Hawai`i), and a balmy breeze that seduces us into staying outside and working longer.

With school lectures to prepare, blogs to write, a house to keep clean, food to cook, laundry to be done, books to read, and papers to read, I find I don’t have time to do the things I love doing, or that constantly call out my name to remind me of a task I haven’t completed.

I’ve taken the “Magical Seven” to heart and it is changing my life.

In my personal library are two books that I’ve put off reading, saying I didn’t have time. The first is The Seven Minute Difference: Small Steps to Big Changes by Allyson Lewis. The fly leaf states “You’re just seven minutes away from unlocking your purpose, knowledge and passion!” At some point, I must have been enamored with the title and the thought behind the book because I discovered that I own two copies – neither one had been opened!


The other book is 7 Minutes of Magic: The Ultimate Energy Workout by Lee Holden. The fly leaf here says that Holden “shows you how you can dramatically change your energy and fitness levels by performing two simple 7-minute routines…” Wow!


Somewhere on a blog or in a forum I occasionally read, I heard about the Fly Lady so I checked it out. She talks about setting up 15 minute time slots to clear up the mess in your house (or wherever your mess is located). I tried some of her techniques and they are great. I wanted to shorten it up even more and do it in seven minute bits.

Are you beginning to understand what I’ve been seeking and why??

So now rather than try to get the entire acre weeded in one back-breaking, time-consuming whack, I pull seven clumps of weeds at a time and dump them in the chicken run for my “girls” to nibble and scratch around.

You can pinch back seven shoots on a plant. You can spend seven minutes sitting in your patio to relax. You can toss out seven pieces of clutter. You can jot down seven people you need to call. I just now refilled my recycled seven bottles of good water to keep in the fridge.

When I feel overwhelmed with magazines, I either go through seven at a time to discard or give away, or I take seven minutes and do however many I can in that time. The list goes on and on.

My time at the computer is long by necessity, but if I take seven minutes to get up and do something more physical every half hour, I seem to accomplish a lot more when I sit back down. There is a little free software program specifically designed to remind you to get up and move. It’s called “Workrave” it can be set for whatever amount of time you want.

I have always been a musician, but lately I don’t take time to sit down and play the piano or pick up the guitar. By limiting myself to seven minutes, I can get back into something that lifts my spirits, and if there’s time, I can spend another seven minutes.

If there is a book that I need to read but I’m resisting, if I tell myself to only read seven pages, it doesn’t feel so boring.

I’m sure you can think of many more ways the number seven can work its magic in your life.

By taking all these activities in seven minute intervals or biting off only seven pieces of work, we are left with more time to enjoy those things we don’t want to do in only seven minutes – like eating a delicious meal, watching a good movie, having sex with your lover. . . . . . .

Sorry, my mind drifted off there for a few minutes!

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Living On the Earth

I can’t remember a time when I was not in love with books. Even before I could read well, my parents made regular trips to the little libraries in whichever town we lived in at the time. I spent many hours looking through the books in my grandfather’s library. They were on a huge revolving stand, and although they were much too deep for me at the time, I would take them out and thumb through the pages.

Kaimana thinks he can read some of my books, too, but I think he just likes the smell of paper.



The first books I actually remember being able to read myself were the Raggedy Ann and Andy books. Then came the Bobbsey Twins, Elsie Dinsmore, Heidi, Nancy Drew - and I was hooked. Whether for personal pleasure or academic reading, my library grew from there. I still have books for math, French, Spanish and literature from my high school years!

But books travel to places unknown, and over the years I’ve lost books because of floods, being stomped on by horses, through two divorces, loaning them to people I’ve forgotten, and numerous moves from state to state.

When I moved from Ali`i Drive o Ocean View, I gave over a thousand books to the Friends Of The Libraries, Kona, plus four grocery bags full of books on gardening to Kona Outdoor Circle. I still have over a thousand books here in my home, plus at least that many in a storage unit in California. This next shot shows part of my attempt to sort out which ones to keep and which to give away.



It was in the early 70s when I read a book that changed the way I lived my life. I was re-structuring my life as a single woman, and although I didn’t embrace everything in the book, it did start me moving toward a more “natural” way of living. It’s one book I’ve kept over the years, and my copy is a bit tattered. I was surprised to find it can still be purchased.



I had three years of Ornamental Horticulture classes at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo under my belt, and I’d always had an interest in gardening. From that point on, I couldn’t get my fill of reading about ways to garden and provide sustenance for myself. If you’ve been reading these posts on a regular basis, you know that I also lived on a 37’ sailboat for 5 years. My gardening slowed considerably during that time, but my interest in gardening never waned.

When I lived in Tucson on the edge of the Sonoran Desert, I found a wonderful book that provided me with ways to use the “Fruits of the Desert.” Many of the author’s recipes and information on those fruits can be extended to some of our own produce. The cover is beautiful, and I’m sorry that Amazon doesn’t have an image of it to show you.



One book I forgot I had until just recently, is Designing and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally, by Robert Kourik. It’s a large and rather detailed book, but full of good information for the gardener who is serious about planning an edible garden.



If you are interested in an adult version of a picture book and dream book, pick up a copy of In a Mexican Garden. I drool over the photos in that book! I would label this book and others like it as “garden porn.”



This should keep you busy for a while, and I will be telling you about more off-the-beaten-track garden books in the future.

In the sidebar of this blog, I have listed books I use on a regular basis for my gardening ideas. If you are interested in buying one of them, please order through this site. It will help support my purchase of more gardening books.

Is this an addiction that I want to cure? I think it’s too late!

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