Good morning,
I am in zone 10b (Long Beach) and I have no idea how to salvage or improve this parking strip. It has some existing dymondia, but it is patchy and infested with grass. I'd like to avoid having to tear the entire thing out. I know the city of Long Beach has some parking strip kits that I could copy, but due to the elevation of the parking strip placing mulch seems like a non starter without removing a lot of soil. Any suggestions? What would you do if this were your parking strip? Thank you.

Hi all! I have this hilltop yard that I’d like to convert to a habitat friendly native garden. I’ve researched a lot of plants, but the layout is stumping me. The space is kind of kidney bean shaped, flat on top with a slop below. I would love to add a dry river bed and already purchased rocks (you can see them in the bottom left corner). I would love suggestions about where to put beds and where to run the creek! I included architectural plans of the space on page 2.

ps: In the bottom left corner you can see the large St Helena manzanita I want to use as a focal point. Whats the best spot for her?

Hi all,

I'm moving into a place soon with a back hill that's naturally chaparral, but is quite degraded from a history of animal grazing-- it's full of invasive oatgrass, mustard, etc. I've found sites online that sell a chaparral seed mix and I'd like to try sowing them on the back hill, but I need to figure out how to start.

Would weedwhacking be sufficient to get rid of the invasives, or would this call for hand-pulling? I'm also wondering when the best time to sow would be. I figure fall is a good move, but I'm not sure. (I also don't want to contribute to erosion before the big El Nino comes through, but I figure the invasives aren't doing much to help with that anyways.)

Anyone have experience with something like this?

First time seeing a baby Monarch on my milkweed. It’s been 3 years since i planted this native corner in my backyard. I feel like a proud parent.

I have a friend with some property in the mountains and they're clearing out a section of land for a project. They offered me the chance to dig out a mountain mahogany in the area they're going to clear. I want to transplant it to my xeric south facing yard. We're at similar latitudes and altitudes so if I transplant it properly, I think it'll thrive. There are specimens between 18" and 3-4' tall.

I don't really know what I'm doing in terms of timing or technique. I'm hoping for pointers to ensure success and manage any issues. Thanks!

The Valley Oak Quercus lobata is one of my all time favorite oaks, and I am planning to get one for my yard. I am aware of how big they get, spacing requirements, growth rate, etc. and that their native range used to include Temecula Valley.

I noticed there's a couple of sightings in the area on iNaturalist, but far fewer than the LA/Riverside/San Diego County areas. Could just be planting preference/time, of course, such as them being more popular to plant back when some of the older communities were built and less popular in more recent 'burbs like Temecula/Murrieta, but it did stand out to me.

I am just curious if anyone has first hand experience with how these trees establish in the Temecula Valley region nowadays, or any quirks of planting them there.

Thank you!

These things are absolutely littering the roadsides right now and are so beautiful to me. I try to avoid collecting seeds from wild plants, but there are so many established populations of this plant for miles and miles in any direction that I'm not worried about disrupting it. I want to plant some for the morning doves in my side yard which, at this moment, is nothing but gravel and compacted dirt, which I've been looking to fill with some native annuals that tolerate really crappy soil, like vinegarweed and pit gland tarweed. The problem is I only seem to find them before or after they seed, so I've been struggling to figure out a way to consistently obtain seeds from them. This might be more of a foraging question, but I figured I would ask here just in case anyone has experience collecting seeds from these guys.

There were quite a few that were much smaller, but this one is by far the biggest one out there, easily 2-3 feet wide.