Scientific name: Cytisus scoparius. Common names: Scotch broom, broomtops, common broom, European broom, Irish broom, English. Native Origin: British Isles, central and southern Europe Ecological Impacts: This aggressive, rapid spreading plant can grow 3 feet in the first year. It can form dense impenetrable stands that degrade rangeland, prevent forest regeneration, and create fire hazards. It invades rapidly following logging, land clearing, and burning. It can form pure dense stands for miles along highway and country roads to crowd out native species and destroy wildlife habitat. Toxicity: Mild poisoning can occur from this shrub. Large amounts are required to cause symptoms in animals such as horses. Alkaloids have been identified as being the toxic principle. Cytisin, sparteine and isosparteine are found in the twigs, leaves and seeds in small amounts. The seeds of the plant can stay dormate for 160 years.

So funny...I am the one who started this thread back in 2004 (and we shortly thereafter moved to Colorado). We moved back to So Cal last September, and just now moved into a home on a huge horse ranch in San Timoteo Canyon. Our yard is a blank slate (except for having mature pepper and birch trees)...no grass, so I am on the lookout for anything drought tolerant and rabbit proof. I don't have a lot to trade at this point, as I am starting all over, but I do have some seeds and can get my hands on some great succulents (as my mom and dad's succulent garden is always in need of trimming). And if anyone is in Redlands or thereabouts, let's see about having some get togethers to do some trading!

Oz, Whether or not you leave them in the peat pellets is up to you. I'd base my decision on a couple of facts: 1) How soon they are going to go into the ground. If you are going to plant them out in March (and with our variable weather, that might be iffy), they should be able to survive that long in peat pellets. Once the plants are 3" tall or so, though, you may need to feed them with a water-soluable fertilizer because peat pellets are essentially "dead" and have no nutrition in them for the plants. You could use the fert. of your choice--I like using liquid seaweed or fish emulsion. 2) How warm the seed-starting room is/how quickly they dry out. One of the problems with peat pellets is that they hold too much water initally when you first add water to them to get them to "expand" and "fluff up", and then once they dry out, it can be very hard to get them wet again. So, water regularly so they don't get dry and hard, but don't keep them sopping wet. If you keep peat pellets too wet, then damping off, which is a disease that kills the seedlings, becomes a huge issue. 3) Potting them up into cups gives them a huge advantage root wise, so I always pot up into cups using a good, sterile soil-less potting mix. Look at the size of your pellets and the size of the roots you can have in those pellets. Then look at a 12 or 16-oz. cup and imagine what size the roots could attain in those. If your plants are going to be inside another 3-4 weeks, your plants could gain a lot of root growth in paper cups during that time. 4) Potting them up into paper cups makes hardening off a lot easier. With larger plants in paper or plastic cups, you'll find the hardening off process will be easier to achieve. Plants in very small peat pellets often dry out very quickly as you are hardening them off outside in the sun and wind. If it is especially windy, they can be blown out of the flat. Plants in cups have a little more weight and hold moisture better, so they are a little easier to manage during the hardening-off process. And, I've grown most of what you've started from seed and they've done well for me here. I haven't grown pilotus, though, and Texas Bluebonnets usually flower in April-May from a fall planting. I am not sure if you'll get flowers this year from seed if it was planted only recently. On the other hand, I have planted "Alamo Fire" (red-flowered) bluebonnet seed in the spring, and those bloomed in June-July. Dawn

Hi Emily, Before I tell you how large our place is, I want you to promise me that you will stay calm and NOT hyperventilate. OK? It is going to sound like a 'gardener's dream' but most of the time it is a 'gardener's nightmare'! We are in a very, very rural area on a piece of land that was part of a farm until about the mid-70s. After that, the land was left fallow although it was leased out for cattle grazing. During that time, no one was keeping the land cleared out, so most of it reverted to cedar trees and obnoxious brush like greenbrier and poison ivy and 'trash trees' like hackberry, ash, elms, etc. I love all trees but the trash trees are weak and short-lived and are continually sick, sickly looking, rotting, dying and crashing down. Since purchasing this property we have spent thousands of hours and lots of $$$ on relatively inexpensive hand-held equipment like chain saws and multipurpose weedeaters that have steel cutting blades, trying to clear away the trash trees and brush. The greenbrier and poison ivy are still with us and always will be, although we work hard to keep it away from our cultivated areas and the pathways cut through the wild areas. If I had it to do over again, I would have bought a smaller piece of property. Actually, we were looking for a 3- to 5-acre plot of land, figuring that would give me more than enough room to play in the dirt. What we ended up with was 14.4 acres, which is enough to keep me constantly exhausted, and I don't even venture onto the 10 wooded acres that much. The land is beautiful. Our woods are gorgeous and remind my husband of Pennsylvania, where he grew up. We have ponds, springs, creeks and a swamp. The wildlife is amazingly abundant, which is good and bad. Our land is creek bottom land, so parts of it are lower lying than the land on two sides of us, which causes water to drain UNDERGROUND for weeks after a heavy rain and keeps us pretty wet and soggy for quite some time. Our house is on the highest part of the land, and we are not in an area prone to flooding, but my raised bed veggie garden some distance away from the house and on lower-lying land does have drainage issues. With this year's rain, those drainage issues have been quite apparent. Don't get me wrong. I love this place. I love every inch of the woods and all the beautiful native understory plants. I love the open pastures which, since they aren't used for cattle any more, aren't really pastures anymore. I guess I should call them meadows. I love the wildflowers and the wildlife. It is a maintenance nightmare though. Just mowing and weeedeating the approximate 4.4 acres that aren't wooded takes me a couple of days if the weather is dry and on my side. If it is continually wet, I often have to mow waist high grass with a wheeled weedeater (similar to a DR Field and Brush Mower) and then come back and redo it with the lawn tractor or a push mower. Weedeating takes forever. The bermuda grass we have was probably planted for haying many years before we bought the place. I know that I NEVER would have planted it. I spend untold hours trying to get rid of that bermuda grass because it is invasive and creeps into every cultivated bed we have. It is my dream to one day get rid of all the bermuda. Little by little, I am succeeding, but it will take me another decade at the rate I am going. We try to be good stewards of the land, removing overgrown invasive species and encouraging the good native ones. So far we have removed ALL the cedar from the 4.4 acres of open land, and now must start removing it from the wooded areas. We only work in the wooded areas in the winter when the copperheads, water moccasins and rattlesnakes are hibernating. I have learned so much about the soil, the plants and the wildlife since we moved here. I don't regret that we bought this place and I do, in fact, want for us to spend the rest of our lives here. However, I have had to accept that most of it will NEVER look the way I want it to, and instead focus on the land closest to the house and just try to keep it under control. Because it takes so long and is so hard to improve the soil on ever a very small piece of land, I have had to accept that most of what I grow will be plants that have to grow in red clay soil that is low in organic matter, holds tons of water when it does rain, and dries concrete-hard and cracks wide open when it doesn't rain. THAT is the reason I have had to learn so much about what does, does not, will or will not grow in clay soil. So, when looking for land, it is important to think about your life many years down the road. Do you still want to be mowing and maintaining several acres when you are 50, 60, 70 or 80 years old? Do you have to have everything look 'just so' or can you live with the overgrown woodland and wildflower-filled meadows that don't get mowed very often? Are you OK with tons of wildlife, including poisonous snakes and lots of predators like bobcats, foxes, raccoons, skunks, coyotes, panthers and cougars? If not, rural to semi-rural acreage might not be your best choice. I know I have sounded pretty negative, but I just want to give a realistic picture of what it is like to try to tame wild, relatively untamed land WITHOUT hiring someone with a bulldozer to come in and knock everything down, detroying decades-old trees and all the lovely wildlife habitat in the process. And, if hiring a bulldozer guy sounds easy and relatively cheap, think again. We have neighbors who hired a guy to clear and regrade their land and he spent most of TWO YEARS working on that, especially with regard to drainage issues. I know that I have made this whole thing much harder on myself than I had to because I have insisted on doing everything as organically as possible, so we don't use herbicides like Round-up or broadleaved weedkillers containing chemicals like atrazine or 2, 4 D. I simply refuse to poison the land. I work hard to save native plants, and work even harder to remove invasive ones, especially invasive grasses like Johnson Grass. It is worth it all to live here though. We have a beautiful place filled with all kinds of desirable wildlife like birds, butterflies, dragonflies, turtles, toads, frogs, skinks, lizards, salamanders, bunnies, etc., etc., etc. We have gorgeous sunrises and sunsets. We have a nice little 2-story Victorian house with wrap-around porches and a huge barn-style garage complete with a weather vane and cupola. We have the absolute best neighbors in the world on all sides of us and the people in our part of Love County are the nicest, kindest, most loving and giving people you will ever meet. I love it here. I suspect I would love it a lot more if we had only 4 acres, though, instead of 14. The moral of this story....be careful what you wish for! I truly love living here, but it ain't easy!!! Happy Growing!! Dawn