By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer

I'm always tempted to buy entire stalks of Brussels sprouts when I see them at my supermarket just because I like the way they look.  But that's a lot of sprouts for two people so I usually talk myself out of it.  Now I know what I could do with the extras.   I saw this fun, quick wreath idea on Cindy McNatt's blog.  Wish I'd seen it before Thanksgiving.  It would have made a fun hostess gift.

By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

My wife likes to start Christmas early—as in Thanksgiving weekend. That's when we head out to the Christmas tree farm with a saw and $40 in hand. She chooses, I cut, the farm bails the tree for an extra $2 so it fits into the car (see photo below), and we head home. It's ritual, and we love it.

I guess it would make sense to use an artificial tree, since you buy it only once, it's fireproof, it doesn't shed needles, and you never have to water it. But I'm a gardener, and I love fragrant things fresh from the land.

This year my wife picked a stately Noble fir (Abies procera). Its shape is full and perfect, its scent is fresh, and we know from experience that it will hold well for weeks indoors.

Once we get it home, we cut a half inch off the bottom of the trunk, position it in the stand, and add water. The fresh cut trunk takes up water better than one that was cut even 30 minutes earlier, so the tree remains fresher longer if I top off the stand's reservoir every day.

If the water ever falls below the trunk's base, the cut end seals and the tree stops taking up water and dries out unless I quickly recut another the base.

If you're a fan of fresh trees, I strongly recommend cutting them yourself. Ubiquitous U-cut farms make it practical, fun, and cheaper that most Christmas tree lots. And you'll get a better quality tree because it's fresher, and has probably been sheared at least once during the previous year to give it an even, full shape. The cutting process ends up being a great family ritual too, and I suspect that after a few years, you'll love it as much as we do.

By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

Last year I found the most innovative Christmas tree stand I’ve ever used. Called Swivel Straight (model XTS3), it has two features I like very much. The first is a receptacle that slips over the cut end of the tree’s trunk. After you clamp it on, you lift the tree and slip its receptacle-covered base into a hemispherical stand.

The stand’s second great feature is its adjustable top. It swivels and rotates freely, so you can make the tree perfectly vertical in about 5 seconds. Then you lock it in place by touching an ingenious foot pedal. After you've filled the stand’s reservoir with water, you’re done.

The Swivel-Straight XTS3 stand can hold up to a 10-foot tree. It's $75 at LL Bean, or as low as $53 at Amazon.com; or you can pay $99 for the XTS1, a larger model that holds a tree up to 12 feet tall.

In the interest of full disclosure, I have no relationship with the company that makes these, they don't advertise with Sunset, and I bought the stand outright at full price before I ever even considered writing about it.

By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer

Nassella tenuissima, commonly known as Mexican feather grass and often sold by its old botanical name Stipa tenuissima, is one of those plants you can't decide whether it's a hero or a thug.

I've never seen Mexican feather grass used in mass when it didn't look stunning.  (This example is from a garden in Tucson, Arizona designed by Elizabeth Przygoda of Boxhill Landscape Design.) There is just no other ornamental grass quite as blonde and billowy.  N. tenuissima is also drought-tolerant, pest-free, and easy to grow.

But, like a lot of tough survivors, Mexican feather grass is an aggressive reseeder.  Or at least it is in irrigated California gardens.  Przygoda hasn't found this to be the case in Arizona.

If the seedlings stay in the garden, then this would only be a maintenance issue. 

The problem occurs when seedlings escape.  When I ran a post showing Mexican feather grass in mass back in June, Barbara Kossy, a member of the San Mateo County Weed Management Advisory Committee advised me that the California Invasive Plant Council (Cal-IPC) was investigating whether they should ban this plant. Per Cal-IPC, "the plant has not yet established in the wild, but is a frequent escape in gardens."

That's where the problem lies.  You don't want to be contributing to the huge invasive plant problem.  But neither would I want every plant that reseeds in gardens to be outlawed.  That would mean  no more euphorbias or nasturiums or statice or cosmos or cerinthe.  "Volunteers" that pop up in spots where they look pefect are one of the joyful surprises of gardening.

The other issue is that like politics, all gardening is local. Growing conditions are never the same in two locations.  So should we ban Mexican feather grass throughout the State if it's only a regional problem?  Jeanne tells us Mexican feather grass has already escaped in the San Jose area.  But I haven't seen any evidence of escape in Southern California.  Maybe that's because San Jose gets 3 times as much rain as we get down here in an average year.  Or maybe I just haven't been looking in the right places.

So, bottom line, I'm worried about taking a useful, gorgeous ornamental grass off the market if it's not necessary, but if N. tenuissima really is a problem where you live, I'd like to know.

Comments, please.

***

Note.  I've had second thoughts since I wrote this post.  See this later one.

By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer

Purple heart (Tradescantia pallida 'Purpurea') loves the desert and always looks good there.  This example, though, may be the prettiest I've seen.  That generous sweep of purple is exciting.  Especially with the dashes of orange bird of paradise adding some contrast. Design by Tuscon, Arizona designer Elizabeth Przygoda of Boxhill Landscape Design.

By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

Asked by the local school district whether she’d be willing to put a special needs student to work for a couple of hours per day, two or three days per week, Deidre Finley said yes. She knew how much her own daughter Leah, pictured here, loved the chickens and plants that call Big Dipper Farm home, and suspected that any teen would respond well to it. “It has to be good to get any kid outdoors,” said Finley, “out of the artificial world so many are in all the time, and into the real world of plants, dirt, and animals.”

She was right. Her student had never seen a chicken before, and loves the plants. When working at Big Dipper, which is a retail and mail-order nursery, visible symptoms of the student’s autism are minimal or absent.

Finley says she wants to expand this program simply because it does so much obvious good, and Leah doesn’t mind sharing her chickens for a great cause.

By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer

Adriana Martinez has restored my faith.  For a number of years I was wondering if garden journalists were going to become an endangered species.  Nurseries kept telling me that young homeowners were just not interested in digging, weeding, deadheading, pruning, dreaming up new plant combinations, re-arranging plants like furniture, and all the other tweaking that goes into creating an ornamental garden that previous generations of gardeners thought was fun.  All they wanted was a landscape that looked respectable.  Something they could just put in and forget about.  The equivalent of plastic plants.  What would there be to write about?

But now the same people who didn't think ornamentals were worth ruining your manicure for have discovered edibles.  They're building raised beds, buying compost by the truck load, nurturing their own seedlings, researching organic pest control methods on the internet, and finding the whole process of harvesting things straight from their own garden enthralling.

Adriana, shown below with 'Green Zebra' tomatoes towering over her in her garden in Long Beach, California, is one of those new gardeners.

When Adriana responded to our July query asking to hear from gardeners who were finding ways to garden in small spaces, it was the fact she'd painted her raised beds black that first caught my attention.  How urban and edgy, I thought. 

And totally in keeping with Adriana and her husband Hector's personality as it turns out.  Both love punk rock music.  (Hector used to be in a punk rock band and now brokers punk rock music for a living.)  And the two have a wardrobe that is primarily black.  "I have 20 black t-shirts," says Hector.  Adriana even got married in black.

But Adriana's garden is not just about style.  This gal's the real deal.  She researches everything.  She found the plans for the "perfect raised bed" in Sunset's pages.  She checks in with Los Angeles Cooperative Extension regularly for monthly tips on vegetable gardening.  She loves the whole adventure of growing your own crops. Bringing home a truck load of compost and shoveling it into their new beds.  ("We always seem to pick the hottest days for the hardest chores.")  Ordering seeds.  ("I spent $52 on seeds when Renee's Garden seeds had their sale and could easily have spent twice as much.") Germinating seeds.  ("I got a huge bag of Vermont Compost Company potting soil and a seed block for my birthday, and I was thrilled.") 

I am thankful to have met Adriana.  She restores my faith in the future of gardening.  I just hope there are thousands more out there like her.

The Martinez's dog, Wrinkles, next to their fall crop.  Photo by Adriana.  For more photos of the garden, see Adriana's blog.

And here's how Adriana grew her towering tomatoes.

1.  She started with good soil.

2.  She watered deeply but not too often.  Adriana drilled one-gallon plastic containers full of half-inch holes and buried them around her tomato seedlings up to the lip.  She filled them with the hose when it was time to water.  "It slows down the water and makes it go deep into the root zone," she says.

3.  She feed her plants kelp.  "I think Kelp Sea Weed Magic' is well-named."

By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

In fall foliage and fruit, not many trees can compete with persimmons for drama. But left to themselves, they grow tall, and tend to be dirty when you climb them to pick fruit (as I’ve been doing since I was about 8 years old).

I’ve seen two great harvest methods.

Maybe the best is used by Franki Baccellieri in her Portland, Oregon garden. A remarkable cook and fruit grower, she trains two ‘Fuyu’ persimmon trees in a fan (shown above). A vertical wood frame gives her a flat surface to work against, and she doesn’t let the top of the fans grow higher than she can reach. When the harvest is ready, she just reaches into a wall of brilliant leaves and picks the fruit.

The other method, for which I no longer have photos, was used by a Los Angeles family growing ‘Hachiya’ persimmons on a large tree. The tallest member of the family reached into the tree with the hook on the end of a pole pruner and pulled the fruit off. The two boys were waiting below with a Hula Hoop that had fabric stretched across it. They caught the soft fruit in their home-made catcher and it suffered nary a blemish.

By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer

Just crossed my desk -- Tree of Life Nursery, the  native plant specialty nursery in San Juan Capistrano is offering a wreath-making class on December 13.  Here's your chance to create a holiday wreath using all native materials.  Follow this link for details.

By Jim McCausland, Sunset senior garden writer

Photographs by Barbara Temple Lombardi, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

American colonists of 300 years ago chose plants for fragrance, serious medicinal value, nourishment, dyes, and striking beauty. But what, exactly, were those plants? Lawrence Griffith, who is curator of plants at Colonial Williamsburg, did years of research to find out. Then he grew 180 varieties of flowers and herbs from seed, most of it sown directly into open garden soil, and studied the way they performed and multiplied (or disappeared) as photographer Barbara Lombardi documented them over a period of several years.

The result is a book of gallery quality photos and meticulous, readable researach about 47 flowers and 11 herbs commonly grown in the colonial era. The book is Flowers and Herbs of Early America by Lawrence Griffith and Barbara Lombardi (Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2008; $50). Read it and you’ll want to grow these: some for their names (who could resist elecampane, ragged robin, or cinnamon vine?), some for their medicinal properties, many for their history, and all for their striking good looks. (For more about Lombaradi's spectacular photography, see the following post.)

Along the way you’ll get a quick, fascinating survey of two millennia of written horticultural history, lots of great garden tips, and new motivation to go into your garden and try something that's new to you, but perhaps very old.