COLLEGE PARK, Fla. –

Orlando officials on Tuesday discussed changing the city’s landscaping code to address front yard vegetable gardens after a College Park couple’s controversial garden sparked national outrage.

Orlando’s Municipal Planning Board presented its recommendations, which include:

• Limiting the area in front of a home where vegetables can be planted to 25 percent.
• Plants cannot be taller than four feet, (i.e. tomato plants in the front yard).
• Planter boxes would have to be three feet from the sidewalk.

[PICS: Patriot garden sparks controversy | READ: City Agenda | MPB recommendations]

Jason Helvenston, of College Park, says the proposed restrictions will make it impossible for his garden to grow.

“(The proposed rules are) basically made by a bunch of people who don’t grow vegetable gardens,” he said.

One by one, residents voiced their concerns during the public comment period of the meeting.

“The restrictions of 25 percent — when it’s my yard, I own it, I pay taxes on my yard — are ridiculous.  They are infringing on my constitutional rights as an American,” an Orlando resident said.

Some, however, support the staff’s recommendations.

Gretchen Rivera owns the home next  to the Helvenstons and filed the original complaint about the garden.

She’s concerned about property values and safety in the neighborhood.

“I passed by last night, and it looks like somebody who wants to have a crime, they can hide between the tomatoes or anything else and that’s not good,” she said.

In November, Local 6 broke the story about the controversial garden after the city told the Helvenstons their 25-by-25-foot front yard vegetable garden was not in compliance with the city’s code.

The city was originally going to fine the couple $500 per day if they didn’t comply with the old laws, but that’s been placed on hold.

Watch Local 6 News and stay with ClickOrlando.com for more on this story.

MANISTEE — The Spirit of the Woods Garden Club, MGC, announces their 2013 School Nature Grant for schools located within Manistee County. This annual grant helps fund horticultural, conservational, environmental, and nature study projects. Grants eligible for funding include school gardens and landscaping, community beautification, recycling projects, nature studies or other environmental programs. The project […]

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Posted by MNA Staff
on Jan 15 2013. Filed under Local News.

A group of civic and architectural partners in Little Rock has developed a great concept for improving a declining neighborhood, incrementally increasing density, and applying advanced measures for storm water control at the same time. All this in a single-family, affordable infill development with first-rate design. No wonder it has won a slew of awards, including a 2013 national honor award from the American Institute of Architects for regional and urban design. 

The project employs the “pocket neighborhood” concept championed by architect Ross Chapin – reducing the footprint of a group of smaller, single-family homes by sharing gardens and amenities that would occupy more land if duplicated for each individual house.  Chapin, who has worked mainly in the Pacific Northwest, gives his projects high-quality building materials and beautiful design features that respect their neighborhood settings. I’ve been a fan since before I knew the concept had a name, when I ran across his pioneering and lovely Third Street Cottages in Langley, Washington. I love incremental approaches to increasing density, in part because they seldom require major lifestyle changes and in part because their relatively harmonious design improvements can be somewhat easier to sell to suspicious neighbors inclined to distrust change.

Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood, courtesy of University of Arkansas Downtown Community Design Center and Downtown Little Rock LLC

The pocket neighborhood approach is not for everyone, though; in fact, as I learned while teaching a course in sustainable communities at George Washington University Law School, it may not always appeal even to audiences already disposed to favor environmentally progressive approaches.  When I showed the students Chapin’s designs for an in-town enclave some 10 miles north of downtown Seattle, they disdained them as too suburban and expensive.

The good news is that Little Rock’s Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood retains all the good aspects of Chapin’s concept while curing the aspects that troubled my students. Far from a suburban location, the site on the Arkansas capital’s Rock Street is a 10-minute walk (0.5 miles), according to Google Maps, from the governor’s mansion, and only about a mile to the heart of downtown.  The site enjoys a Walk Score of 77, being within a quarter mile of at least one restaurant, grocer, park, school, and health care clinic (I didn’t count how many of each). As you can see from the satellite image, the site is also proximate to an amazing number of places of worship.  There are three bus lines nearby, though Little Rock’s system is not known for frequency of service.

 

 

As I’ve stressed in previous articles, a central location generally means reduced rates of driving, not only because walking and transit are more viable but also because driving trips are shorter, releasing lower levels of carbon emissions. The wonderful Abogo calculator from the Congress for the Neighborhood Technology indicates that households in the Pettaway site’s neighborhood emit only half as much carbon for transportation, on average, as do households in metro Little Rock as a whole. The gridded pattern of well-connected streets further enhances walkability and reduces driving.

The site plan places nine homes around shared green space and amenities on a one-acre assembly of five parcels. This essentially doubles the density previously contemplated for the site. According to a press release, the homes average 1,200 square feet – not large by American standards, but in line with trends favoring smaller home sizes that appeal to a growing market share – and have two to three bedrooms each. Affordable pricing – about $100,000 – comes from standardized dimensions and materials. Designers chose structured insulated panels and a few types of windows in various configurations.

Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood, courtesy of University of Arkansas Downtown Community Design Center and Downtown Little Rock LLC

The size of the homes is important because it represents the so-called “missing middle” between the larger homes that captured the U.S. market in recent decades and the much smaller ones typically found in multifamily dwellings or the trendy but still miniscule (pun unintended but acknowledged) portion of the market claimed by cottages and the so-called “tiny house” movement. For many decades, bungalows of a thousand or so square feet were quite typical for American households, but very little such housing has been built since the 1940s.

Once a lively 20th-century streetcar neighborhood, Little Rock’s Pettaway has since taken a turn for the worse. The Pettaway Neighborhood Manual reports that 26.3 percent of the district’s residents live in poverty, approaching double the 14.3 percent rate for the city as a whole. The satellite view shows many vacant lots, and over 30 percent of the neighborhood is said to be vacant and abandoned. 

 

 

The Pettaway pocket housing project was a collaboration between fifth-year architecture students in the University of Arkansas School of Architecture and the University’s Community Design Center, an outreach program of the school. It was commissioned by the Downtown Little Rock Community Development Corporation, in partial fulfillment of a planning grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, with additional funding from the city of Little Rock.

For the pocket neighborhood, designers took resources typically found in individual private lots and pooled them to create a true public realm, something notoriously lacking in modern American residential subdivisions. Shared features include a community lawn and playground, community gardens, a shared street, and a sophisticated but low-impact stormwater management system based on the use of green infrastructure – landscaping and fixtures designed to take advantage of natural rainfall filtration and avoid polluted runoff into the sewer system.  Water management is especially important to this site, which has been prone to flooding in past storms.

 

It is hard to read the small font in the image presenting the green infrastructure features, but it depicts an array of elements working together:

• Bioswales to covey waterflow into the soil rather than out to the street
• Lamination trenches underneath bioswales for better absorption
• Filter strips adjacent to paved surfaces to catch water that would otherwise run off
• Rain gardens that enhance the site with attractive vegetation as the water filters through
• Permeable weirs at selected locations to slow the rate of flow

The idea of clustering homes around a common courtyard or garden didn’t originate with Chapin’s pocket neighborhoods, of course. It’s been around for centuries and has been a staple of multifamily housing and townhomes, in particular. But the concept has been much less common in single-family, detached neighborhoods, particularly those built in the latter half of the 20th century before a few smart growth and new urbanist architects began to bring them back. They make a lot of sense now, helpful to conserving land and encouraging walkability for the growing part of the market that is not seeking a large amount of space.

 

In Pettaway, the students worked with a citizen advisory committee who, among other preferences, wished to avoid flat roofs or metal siding – nothing “aggressively modern,” according to Stephen Luoni, director of the Community Design Center. The designers looked for ways to blend traditional architectural elements – porches, balconies, terraces, pitched roofs – with modern principles – open floor plans, abundant light, natural airflow, refined choice of materials. I like what I can see of the results – a fresh look, but one in harmony with the scale and character of period housing in the neighborhood. At least one awards jury referred to the design as a “community within a neighborhood,” and that looks exactly right to me.

Even better, the pocket neighborhood could be just the beginning. There is a larger revitalization plan in the works for Pettaway. The Neighborhood Revitalization Manual mentioned above was commissioned by the same set of partners and elaborates a set of excellent principles for restoring the surrounding district. The goal is to bring completeness and ambition again to this once-thriving area whose proximity to downtown positions it well for a revival, and to do so without displacing current residents. Among the concepts discussed in the Manual are a master plan, a form-based code, improvements to walkability, and high-quality infill development.

 

In my professional world of environmental advocacy, we are encouraged to set our sights on grand, comprehensive schemes that, so the theory goes, will result in major payoffs.  Strategic planning exercises and funding guidelines demand that we do so. But there’s a problem with this:  grand schemes – particularly those that require significant changes in public policy – can take decades to realize, if they come about at all. Meanwhile, actual opportunities for real change in real neighborhoods, where things get built every single day, lie right under our noses.  If we ignore them, the grander schemes become moot.

Plenty of advocates work on the big issues (climate change, fracking, disappearing wildlife, and so on), as well they should. These matters are hugely important to our survival. But, in my own writing, I also try to look for smaller measures of progress that can serve as models in the here and now, and bring them to light so others may emulate them. The Pettaway Pocket Neighborhood is a great example of exactly that.

This post originally appeared on the NRDC’s Switchboard blog.

This weird weather is torturous. It has brought winter days as warm as spring, thus making a gardener want to start preparing the soil for plants. Until you remember it’s January and suddenly it’s cold again. Then summer comes and it’s so darn dry you run up the water bill keeping your plants alive. Not to mention running up the AC bill because it’s so darn hot.

Ah well, can’t change what the weather was or will be. So put weather worries away and spend some of these winter days planning your best garden ever.

Here are some tips from University Extension of Illinois and Colorado State University:

• Choose a spot and size. If you already have a garden, do you want to expand it? For vegetables, you’re going to want the sunniest place you can find, although plants grown for roots or leaves like beets, cabbage, lettuce and chard will grow in partial shade. For flowers, how much sun you need depends on what you want to grow.
   
• If this is your first garden, lay it out on graph paper and sketch in your plants, based on how large they will be when fully grown. This is especially helpful with landscaping or flower beds. Don’t make the very common mistake of putting young plants so close they’ll be crowded in a year or two and you have to start over.
   
• Make a list of the plants you want to grow. If it’s long, you might divide it into “must haves,” “really want” and “only if I have room.” Keep the list handy as you browse seed catalogs and see what’s available in stores, adding or subtracting items as you get closer to summer.
   
• Now figure out where those plants will go and if you have enough room. If your plot is small, look for veggies with a high yield per plant (read seed packets for this and other valuable info). Climbing beans, for example, take less space than bush beans. Plants like watermelons and pumpkins are fun to grow, but they take lots and lots of space.
   
• What will you need besides seeds and plants? If this is your first garden, invest in good tools. You’ll save money in the long run and avoid the frustration of inferior tools. You don’t need a lot of tools. A good shovel, rake and hand spade will fill most of your needs.
   
• If you’re growing climbing beans or other plants that grow up, figure out what you will use to support them. You can buy trellises or put something together yourself. I would invest in some tomato cages, however. After years of thinking I could just tie them to stakes, I had  to admit the cages were far easier and more effective than anything I  rigged up.

Geri Nikolai: 815-871-6850; gmnikolai@gmail.com

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Posted

January 14, 2013 11:12:42

Photo:
Canberra’s fires produced a fresh sense of community for some. (Copyright: Jeff Cutting)

That Saturday was a frightening day but as we look back, I want to share with you some of the good things which came about as a result of that tragedy.

We built our house in Duffy way back in 1972 when Duffy was a brand new suburb.

Everyone in our street built their homes at the same time so especially in weekends we were busy planting gardens and doing landscaping.

We soon got to know each other and the children all played together.

There were literally hundreds of children in Duffy at that time; in 1973, 200 babies were born in the suburb – 18 of them in our street.

There was a wonderful feeling of community. But as the years went by, we all became busier and busier and we didn’t make time very often to talk to each other.

Then on 18 January 2003, in the middle of a drought and a very hot summer, suddenly several fires around Canberra joined together.

It was a very hot and very windy Saturday afternoon and this now huge fire swept on Weston Creek.

At 2pm the sky was black as night and the roar of the fire sounded like a Boeing 747. We were trying to fight the fire at our house but when no water would come out of the hoses, we had to leave and our house burnt down.

This is an experience for which you don’t get any practice and on that day there was a lot of confusion because we didn’t know what was happening or what was about to happen. I think people overseas had a better idea of what was going on than we did.

We heard of a man who had come to work in Canberra from New Zealand. He was on the roof of his house in Chapman clearing the gutters when his mobile phone rang and when he answered it was his mother in New Zealand who was watching Sky News and had seen him. She said, “Get down off that roof immediately!”.

That night we were given a bed at the home of our daughter-in-law’s mother. She kept apologising because she hadn’t cleared shelves for us in the bedroom. We had to keep telling her that we didn’t actually own anything to put on the shelves anyway. We didn’t even have night clothes to put on.

We heard of someone else who was preparing potato salad to take to a barbeque that night. She could see the fire getting closer and closer and decided she needed to leave the house.

She ran outside and then remembered she had forgotten to put Glad wrap on the salad. She rushed back into the house and put the gladwrap on the salad and then left again without even taking her purse.

It all burned down – even the covered potato salad.

Neighbours reconnected

One of the lovely things about the passing of time is that bad memories tend to fade and good memories get stronger. I want to share with you some good memories.

The day after the fire we were allowed back into the street to see what was left of our homes. As we all walked up and down the street in a state of shock we found ourselves meeting up and talking to neighbours we hadn’t seen in years.

We greeted each other as long lost friends and comforted each other.

Over the next few days as we were sifting through the ruins of our homes people would come up the street and give us bottles of water and pizzas and other food to eat; people whom we hadn’t ever met before would stop and chat.

Friends and relatives all over the world got in touch with us to see if we were alright, and we were invited to people’s homes for meals. People we had never even met made us quilts, and businesses around Canberra very generously gave us a bed and TV and discounts at stores because we had to replace absolutely everything.

We were quite overwhelmed with the generosity which surrounded us.

I well remember the day we went to register for the bed. We were all to be given a queen sized bed, and I asked them if it would be possible to have a double bed instead.

The man at the shop asked me why. I said it was because all my sheets were double sheets. He said to me “So you still have your sheets?”.

Of course, I didn’t have my sheets but somehow it took a long time for it to sink in what had really happened.

Lessons learned

I will let you into a secret. Your most important possessions are not your jewellery, nor your beautiful furniture. They are not even your photos. The first thing we went out to buy were undies and toothbrushes!

Something big like this gives you a chance to work out what is really important in life, and what isn’t as important as you thought.

We became very aware that people matter much more than material goods, and rather than working day and night to earn more money to buy possessions it is better to take time out to be with friends and help others and care for each other.

In some ways it was harder for the people whose houses didn’t burn down. They had no water or electricity for days and the suburbs were quite empty because so many homes had been burned.

They found too that they were able to get together for barbeques because they couldn’t use their stoves.

It was almost that instead of losing community they had found community.

The ACT Government did a wonderful job making a Recovery Centre in Lyons where we could go for all our needs – getting new birth certificates, building advice and helpful advice on just about anything.

What happened 10 years ago was terrible but lots of good things happened too.

We lost all our possessions in the fire but we still have our precious memories and we also have wonderful friends and communities in which to live.

These are the things which are really important and I thank God every day for his goodness.

Topics:
bushfire,
duffy-2611

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stories from Australian Capital Territory

By 

Denise Trowbridge

For The Columbus Dispatch

Sunday January 13, 2013 5:01 AM

If you still cultivate your lawn and garden the way your parents or grandparents did, it might
be time to re-evaluate the habitual use of pesticides, fertilizers and watering hoses. Or, if your
yard and garden look very similar to your neighbors’ — with the same types of trees, flowers and
shrubs — it might also be time to branch out.

As a society, “We need to change the way we maintain our landscapes,” said Peter Lowe, the
native landscape manager at the Dawes Arboretum in Newark. “We sometimes garden the way our parents
did, out of habit, instead of thinking about the impact of what we’re doing. The normal everyday
practices of gardening are becoming harmful, because many gardeners aren’t aware of the
relationship between plants, the environment and the ecosystem. And we’re overusing chemicals.”

Lowe and the arboretum are hoping to change that. The arboretum has launched a sustainable
landscaping certificate program for homeowners consisting of four classes introducing the basics of
sustainable gardening. The classes will take place one Saturday a month from February through May,
beginning Feb. 9. The series costs $80, or $65 for arboretum members.

The classes will cover the basics of sustainable landscaping, such as the benefits of
incorporating more sustainable practices into home-gardening routines, garden-bed maintenance and
preparation, and wiser use of plant material and chemicals. Participants will learn to manage water
more efficiently, via use of rain gardens and rain barrels, and how to find the best plant
materials for their growing conditions. Lowe will also address topics such as composting; managing
garden soil; and the benefits of providing for wildlife.

At the same time, the classes will address big-picture issues such as the importance of
biodiversity in home landscapes. “Home gardens are becoming too much alike,” Lowe said. “We have
cookie-cutter landscapes. “If you look at your street, almost everyone has burning bush, taxus,
boxwood. We’re evolving toward lack of biodiversity, which is bad for wildlife and increases garden
maintenance and populations of garden pests.”

Dawes developed the class at first “out of the increasing need for native plant populations
within home gardens” in Ohio, Lowe said.

The class series is also part of a new focus for the 84-year-old arboretum.“Dawes wants to
become the go-to institution in central and southeast Ohio for native plant and sustainable
gardening information,” Lowe said. “We want people look to us as a resource when they want to make
changes in their lifestyle and need practical advice, plant material and the direction to get them
started.”

During the course of the class, Lowe hopes people will learn that having an eco-friendly and
sustainable landscape doesn’t mean your garden is unkempt or wild-looking.“You can have a beautiful
garden, or even the same garden you have now, and just tweak a few things to make it more
sustainable,” he said.

Sustainability isn’t just for the eco-minded.“People think doing things sustainably will cost
more money or be too difficult to do, but the reality is, sustainable is cheaper,” Lowe said.
Gardens that work with nature instead of against it are “lower maintenance, and require less money,
time, water and chemicals to maintain.”

For those who want to learn to revamp their garden or build more permanent structures, the
arboretum has also launched a four-class landscape design certificate program. Brent Pickering, the
arboretum’s ground curator, will teach participants the basics of landscape design, with
information on plants and materials. Participants are encouraged to bring photos and plans of their
yard, so their work in the course can be personalized to their needs. The program will take place
on four Saturdays, starting Feb. 2 and ending March 16. The cost is $80, or $65 for arboretum
members. For more information on courses, call 740-323-2355.

Denise Trowbridge is a Columbus freelance writer who covers garden topics.

cdecker@dispatch.com

Everyone in Amy McBryde’s family has a green thumb.

“I always knew I wanted to work outside with plants,” she says.

Working part-time for a landscaper during her senior year of high school solidified her career goal of combining her creativity with her knowledge of plants and her desire to work outside.

McBryde, 34, majored in horticulture science and landscape design at N.C. State University, graduating in 2004. Her grandfather told her he always hoped to see her as a small business owner.

“He must have seen something in me I didn’t know I had.”

She and her husband, Brandon Crist, 36, now own and run Everything Under the Sun Landscaping. It is a melding of their skills and talents. McBryde is responsible for the design and maintaining the gardens and turf care, while Crist, a former plumber, does all of the hardscape (lighting, block work, drainage, pavers and patios).

McBryde and Crist live in Marshvillewith their 6-year-old daughter, Maisy, but their clients are located throughout Charlotte, Union County, and the Matthews/Mint Hill area. They oversee both residential and commercial properties, maintaining some properties year-round while other clients want help on a one-time basis with either the design or the installation of their landscaping.

They try to use organic and sustainable principle (soil, fertilizer and plants) as much as possible.

“If done correctly,” McBride says, “most landscaping can take care of itself over time.”

They try to educate their clients, both in how to create and maintain a microenvironment that can sustain a landscape, but also how to manage their expectations and be patient.

“Everyone wants instant gratification,” McBryde says, “but we tell them the first year sleeps, the second year creeps, and the third year leaps.”

McBride and Crist enjoy working together and learning from each other’s strengths and areas of expertise.

“It has made us stronger as a couple,” McBryde says.

They hire one or two additional employees when needed, but, says Crist, “we try to maintain a hand on everything we do.”

The hardest part of working together is learning when to turn it off.

“We have tried to learn how to enjoy our free time,” says Crist, “and not have every conversation be about the business.”

The best part is enjoying a long-term relationship not only with each other, but with their clients as well.

“We enjoy getting to know our clients’ kids and seeing them so excited about their gardens,” McBride says.

TWO attractive bird species, one unexpected, swept and fluttered into peripheral vision, then established their presence.

One, it seems, is flavour of the month. Long-tailed tits (Aegithalos caudatus) are here, there and everywhere, to be seen in gardens and parkland with good cover. Just how these beautiful but tiny creatures survived the deluges of last year when there was an almost total wipe-out of songbirds is one of nature’s miracles.

The unexpected were waxwings (Bombycilla garrulus), rare winter visitors from Scandinavia and Russia in hard weather, distinctive and unusual birds, starling-sized, small groups of which will clear red-berried bushes in jig time. There have been sightings for a month or so.

A few years back, a poet friend had a group of these visitors in his south Dublin garden. Last week, in nearby Monkstown, a keen birder spotted a bunch of them gorging on cottoneasters and pyracanthus.

They are non-stop feeders once they find a source and will swallow berries wholesale. In Scotland one observed bird ate 500 cottoneaster berries, three times its own weight, in six hours. But one bird in Wales broke the all-comers’ record by devouring between 600 and 1,000 berries in a similar period. Naturally, these went through its system – every four minutes!

Waxwings can appear in varied sized groups in eastern Ireland sometimes in four- and five-year cycles, or ‘invasion’ years, triggered by poor rowan berry crops in Scandinavia. Thousands of birds head west and south seeking food. Obviously many hit the eastern seaboard of Britain before Dublin gets a spill-over, but some birds have gone as far as Galway and Listowel.

These beautiful birds are a warm cinnamon grey colour, with striking reinforcements such as a conical ‘hoodie’ crest, yellow-edged tail, and an upward-curving, Zorro-like black mask.

Most distinctive, however, are the red waxy blobs at the tips of several secondary flight feathers which give the bird its name.

You may not be as fortunate as the Monkstown birder in spotting a small invading air force (there were sightings in Clontarf also), but keep an eye out in supermarket car parks where berry-bearing landscaping can attract these exotic visitors.

Long-tailed tits, which are resident, are tiny, beautiful birds – like whirring sticks attached to ping-pong balls – passing through communal places making soft, bubbling contact noises. They operate in groups and play follow-the-leader – when one takes off, the others follow. It’s a family thing. They are tiny and delicate like goldcrests and survive on a diet of minute insects, garden bird table fare not being much of an attraction for them.

Bad weather can be devastating. Like wrens, they huddle together for warmth in a roost with protruding tails from a clump of feathers like a spiked ball.

They are tribal for survival with various ‘aunts’ and ‘uncles’ helping to raise youngsters hatched out in an elaborate oval-shaped dome usually sited in a dense thorn bush. Such togetherness means that year after year, in spite of the weather, they reappear in spring to give all of us a heartfelt lift .

Originally published in

Click photo to enlarge

Marin

• Lenore Ruckman of Marin Master Gardeners speaks about “Rose Pruning and Bare Root Planting” from 9 to 10 a.m. Jan. 12 in the greenhouse at the Falkirk Cultural Center at 1408 Mission Ave. in San Rafael. A work party follows. $5. Call 473-4204.

• West Marin Commons offers a weekly harvest exchange at 1:30 p.m. Saturdays at the Livery Stable gardens on the commons in Point Reyes Station. Go to www.west marincommons.org.

• Volunteers are sought to help in Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy nurseries from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesdays at Tennessee Valley, 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Wednesdays at Muir Woods or 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays or 9 a.m. to noon Saturdays in the Marin Headlands. Call 561-3077 or go to www.parksconservancy.org/volunteer. $5.

• Growing Excellence in Marin (GEM), a program providing horticultural vocational training for Marin residents with disabilities, has a weekly plant sale from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Fridays at 2500 Fifth Ave. in San Rafael. Items offered include garden plants, potted plants, cut flowers and microgreens. Call 226-8693 or email michael@connectics.org.

• The SPAWN (Salmon Protection and Watershed Network) native plant nursery days are from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Fridays and weekends. Call 663-8590, ext. 114,

or email jonathan@tirn.net to register and for directions.

• Marin Open Garden Project (MOGP) volunteers are available to help Marin residents glean excess fruit from their trees for donations to local organizations serving people in need and to build raised beds to start vegetable gardens through the Micro Gardens program. MGOP also offers a garden tool lending library. Go to www.opengarden project.org or email contact@opengardenproject.org.

• Marin Master Gardeners and the Marin Municipal Water District offer free residential Bay-Friendly Garden Walks to MMWD customers. The year-round service helps homeowners identify water-saving opportunities and soil conservation techniques for their landscaping. Call 473-4204 to request a visit to your garden.

San Francisco

• The Conservatory of Flowers, at 100 John F. Kennedy Drive in Golden Gate Park, displays permanent galleries of tropical plant species as well as changing special exhibits from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. $2 to $7. Call 831-2090 or go to www.conservatoryofflowers.org.

• The San Francisco Botanical Garden Society, at Ninth Avenue and Lincoln Way in Golden Gate Park, offers several ongoing events. $7; free to San Francisco residents, members and school groups. Call 661-1316 or go to www. sfbotanicalgarden.org. Free docent tours leave from the Strybing Bookstore near the main gate at 1:30 p.m. weekdays, 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. weekends; and from the north entrance at 2 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Groups of 10 or more can call ahead for special-focus tours.

Around the Bay

• Cornerstone Gardens is a permanent, gallery-style garden featuring walk-through installations by international landscape designers on nine acres at 23570 Highway 121 in Sonoma. Free. Call 707-933-3010 or go to www.corner stonegardens.com.

• Garden Valley Ranch rose garden is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays at 498 Pepper Road in Petaluma. Self-guided and group tours are available. $2 to $10. Call 707-795-0919 or go to www.gardenvalley.com.

• The Luther Burbank Home at Santa Rosa and Sonoma avenues in Santa Rosa has docent-led tours of the greenhouse and a portion of the gardens every half hour from 10 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays. $7. Hands-on rose pruning demonstrations are from 9 a.m. to noon Jan. 12 and 19. Call 707-524-5445.

• McEvoy Ranch at 5935 Red Hill Road in Petaluma offers tips on planting olive trees and has olive trees for sale by appointment. Call 707-769-4123 or go to www.mcevoy ranch.com.

The Trowel Glove Calendar appears Saturdays. Send high-resolution jpg photo attachments and details about your event to calendar@marinij.com or mail to Home and Garden Calendar/Lifestyles, Marin Independent Journal, 4000 Civic Center Drive, Suite 301, San Rafael, CA 94903.

Items should be sent two weeks in advance. Photos should be a minimum of 1 megabyte and include caption information. Include a daytime phone number on your release.