Just saw this in the local paper and thought you might find it useful. SF Chronicle Home & Garden Q&A column, 7/19/06: Q: I have a 'Meyer' lemon tree that produced one lemon. The white blossoms are starting to brown and the other tiny, tiny lemons don't seem to be growing. I have it in a huge wine bucket. I was using citrus fertilizer every 10 days or so but haven't for a couple of weeks. I will buy a water meter to ensure that I do not overwater. If you have any other ideas, please tell me. Also, what flowers would you recommend I plant for color at the beginning of September in San Francisco? My garden club will come to my house then. Some of the flowers will be in a southern exposure that gets warm sun and some in four hours of sun a day. What do you think? A: Citrus trees often don't mature fruit until they are 3 years old, needing the energy to grow bigger first. Fruit drop can also be caused by watering swings. Citrus wants a nice, steady water supply, never soggy and never dry. In a container, underwatering is more common than overwatering, and a water meter is a good tool to help get it right. Assuming your container drains well, water till some drips out the bottom, and then again when it is on the dry side a few inches down (but not bone dry), maybe once or twice a week, depending on weather. The most common symptom of too much fertilizer is brown edges on the leaves, which you didn't mention. For citrus in containers, fertilizing once a month is a good guide, though formulations vary, so it is best to follow package directions. As to having flowers in bloom in September, that should be easy to do. Because you are starting not far in advance, you will be planting mainly annuals. Look in the nursery for long-blooming annuals that are starting to flower now, such as violas, pansies, cosmos, paludosum daisies, callibrachoa, edging lobelia, 'Dwarf Marguerite' varieties and diascias, and choose a few kinds that you like. All of them will bloom well in sun. For shade, you can't beat impatiens, unless it is with 'New Guinea' impatiens, which is taller and often has variegated leaves. Inland, four hours of sun might harm impatiens, but not in cooler San Francisco. In either sun or part shade, consider working some small to medium tall grasses or sedges and some fancy-leaf heucheras into the planting to vary the forms of your plants.

I have 4 Sargent's in my garden and they are beautiful. But the one that gets the most sun ( 4 hours) look the best. The one that got the least (1 hour) was just OK and so I cut down a couple of poplars to provide more sun and it has responded. The photos above suggest that the plants get quite a bit of sun and so you need to factor in how much shade you have in your garden. Gary

Hi! I live in Hickory Hills (SW suburb of Chicago). Been lurking (and occasionally posting) here for about six years now. It's great! I love all the pictures, plus the forum is so informative and friendly. My hosta collection is rather small (just under 40 varieties) but I'm planning my first trip ever to Hornbaker's soon, so that should help! Lisa

Mike, thank you! I do indeed have a picture or 5 or 6 from my back deck. But you must promise not to laugh. I have gardened for a long time -- but in the back of a big brick colonial in full sun. After 10 years I had a really lovely Southern garden built around a pretty carefully curated collection of ~150 roses, from Old Blush on up through the ages. The old teas and noisettes were my favorites. THAT was maintenance, LOL. But just as you note, that was also about (ever expanding) beds,... Life changes and now I am single again, caring for a very sick mother who lives with me, communing to work in Philadelphia, trying to rehab a house and learning to garden in a new way. I mention all this to beg a little bit of a pass on my unimpressive results to date -- its hard to find time to study and learn! That said, what time I do have is devoted not to trips to the tile store, but to this -- there's an image "just below the surface" -- its compulsion. And given how precious that time is, it feels awful to be floundering! I am so grateful for your note. The site is not easy to photograph because when the sun is out, the camera really exaggerates the shadows; therefor I'm uploading shots taken on overcast days. The setting is a suburban woodland of ginormous red, white and chestnut oaks and tulip poplars that slowly are giving way to runs of American beech. It is hillside watershed into a Potomac river tributary. Soil is two or three decades of leaf litter sitting on top of marine clay, and that clay is important to keep stable. The backyard is on the south side of the house -- the sun travels right over my roof line, is blotted by 2:00 p.m. by a big old white oak on my west wall. It is a pie shaped lot, the narrow end deep in the woods. The first picture is from last fall, looking at the back of the house from about half-way to the back property line. That's metasequoia "Miss Grace" planted high on some big rocks (that can be repurposed eventually). On the far left, a very old, not terribly lovely Fosters holly (I think) -- the end of a screen of now 18 footers that I've been trying to rehab with pruning but... The second photo is from early this spring-- my little Lilliputian garden secreted among those great big trunks. [All the cryptomeria here took a bad hit with the freeze/thaw cycle this spring]. I was okay with the idea of a "grotto" as the best I would be able to do in the shadows. But when the big oak off my deck that so intimately connected the house to the woods finally gave up and came down, everything changed. In the photo below, the rocks along the property line on the right (which extends another 20 feet beyond the rocks) I put there with the idea of filling in the grade a bit, but want someone trained in water/erosion control to keep me from making a mistake I might regret. I imagined, and still do, a small pondless falls next to the big stump on the far right -- not for splash, just for some sense of movement. Now that I am thinking bolder, I also imagine that the "source" for that falls is a very shallow "destination" pond roughly behind the azaleas (in the photo below it would be mostly screened by the top of the variegated dogwood). The dogwood is Samaritan -- just one of many poor choices/placements I've made -- it will get too big to between the sun and everything that is behind it. The river stones I was just playing with. Those will go away. You can just make out the deck coffee table in the photo below, where I imagine a bench would be. The Nootka (oddly my favorite thing in the whole yard-- I love weeping forms and this one just makes me smile) also is poorly placed, probably should be snug up against the big stump to backdrop the vignette of a the falls, with a red dissectum in there somewhere (I have 1 gallon Shaina, Temukayama, Red Dragon, and Orangeola waiting for homes), and a bigger boulder than I have. I also went with Alice hydrangeas on the left for scale, but honestly I do not like them, at least not now -- they are coarse -- another variety would be lovelier. Or something else fronting that stand of oaks. The Atlas Cedar was another inexpensive chance taken -- I'm fond of him but tall as he is, he'll get no respect inn that spot. Apricot carpet roses in front of the hydrangea were meant to help call him out. Not shown here are a recently purchased an "at your own risk" 6 foot Seiryu that needs a home and an Omurayama that I imagine on the property line next to the "pondless" pond, this side the stump. And Red Sentinel, back there just to the left of the wood pile, is not his best self in that shade, neither red nor sentinel-like. Seems like his columnar shape should be next to a trunk. LOL, Where do I start from here? Lay in the hardscaping, re-position the existing trees...purchase many more... but this time with something like a plan. I sure could use a steady hand to guide me..