This is my first post on this blog and it is about gardening in its most PRACTICAL and useful sense.  So often I see articles about gardening that are really beautiful and lyrical but geez...how real are they?  The thing they don't tell you is that that container that was so lush and full of flowers in the picture only lasted for about 3 months or that just before the photo every piece of leaf litter was meticulously picked up and the lawn photo was airbrushed.  My goal with this weekly blog is to create a space where real world gardening (and by that I mean in California not the UK) meets