Page 8 - 2018 Sonoma County Gardener's Resource Guide

Need Help with Your Yard?
By Kellen Watson, Daiy Acts, Gazette Garden Delights columnist
Daily Acts is excited to pilot a new fee-for-service arm of the non-profit, called Sustainability Services! This is a great option if the DIY part of your
landscape transformation is a bit daunting, or if you’d like help planning your personal garden paradise. We love to work with homeowners (and renters!) who want to do some of the work themselves so they can learn and keep costs down, but who need help with clarifying their vision, choosing plants, and with technical questions and hands-on support during installation. Plus, you can feel good knowing that your fees are helping a great, local non-profit grow their impact and fund community-enriching projects.
We provide garden consultations, design services, and DIY installation support. Our goal is to help clients create verdant, abundant landscape oases that are water-wise, multi-functional, and gorgeous! We focus on drought- tolerant plants that are edible, medicinal, and habitat-providing. Rainwater harvesting and graywater reuse systems can also be incorporated into designs to reduce long-term costs and make your landscape even more eco-groovy.
Here are a few of the multi-functional, water-wise plants that are staples
in our design palette. They are beautiful, good for pollinators, and useful to people! This is a list for sunnier locations, but keep an eye on this column for a great list of water-wise shade plants.
Persimmon: Diospyros kaki Persimmons are an edible winter delight and a beautiful landscape plant. Its big leathery leaves are chartreuse in spring and brilliant orange in fall, before they shed to expose shiny fruit hanging like Christmas ornaments. There are two types: Fuyus have apple shaped fruit (seen here), which can be eaten when still crunchy, while Hachiya varieties have acorn shaped fruit, which should be eaten when very soft and ripe.
You can slice and dry either variety when less than ripe to remove their astringency. A hardy tree, not prone to disease, that requires minimal pruning.
Plant Size: 20’-30’ tall Exposure: full sun preferred Soils: tolerant of many soils Water Use: low to moderate
Pineapple Guava: Feijoa
sellowianna
This is such a fun one because it’s a fruit bearing evergreen. It’s a very low-maintenance shrub with showy edible flower petals that taste like cotton candy, gray-green foliage, and unusually tropical fruit. Feijoa is a nice multi-functional replacement for box hedges, or it can be trained as a tree or for screening.
Plant Size: 6’-12’ tall & wide. Exposure: full sun
Soils: tolerant of many soils Water Use: low to moderate
8 - www.sonomacountynurseries.com - 3/18
HELP cont’d on page 9
CA Lilac: Ceanothus spp.
Oh Ceanothus! This native shrub is available in every shape and size, and just brings so much multifunctional joy. Its small, dark evergreen leaves are adorned with dense puffs of white to lilac to blue flowers in early spring, providing essential pollinator