God! I love Memorial Day Weekend & always have. When we were kids, at this time of year, you could almost smell the end of school along with the fresh cut grass! Mmmm!
I’m not going to talk about Rosie leaving or that bird pooping on the President etc. I’ll just say: God Bless Our Troops & God Bless America!

A great Holiday weekend tradition that we Americans have is to get out & do something in the yard! I mean look at my neighbors beautiful geraniums in window boxes…it’s like living in Europe!
A very cool thing about L.A. is that, come these long weekends, everyone & I mean everyone, LEAVES TOWN. It’s Friday night & my street, which normally sounds like a NASCAR Rally, is so quiet it’s almost eerie. But I am not complaining.

Another wonderful aspect about Los Angeles is the jacaranda! First of all it’s such a fun word to say! It sounds like some Outback Super Hero, which is appropriate, because these trees flourish in Australia. And once a year they show-off their nearly obscene beauty in Los Angeles too. There are several streets in Beverly Hills that are lined on both sides with jacaranda & driving down them under a huge, high, canopy of purple flowers, feels like arriving in Heaven.

Do you see this vine in the above photo? It scares me just a little. Last year I bought some succulents in Chinatown. I was surprised to find this little vine as a bonus growing among them. Well it’s growing so fast & furiously & wrapping itself around everything it can I literally take a breath before I go out in the garden to see where its traveled to overnight. I’ve heard of kudzu, a Japanese vine that can take over a whole city in less than a decade if left to its own devices, but this doesn’t look like that. I feel like Jack in Jack & The Bean Stalk, but I’m too heavy to climb now! The funny thing is you cannot train it. Its like a defiant child. If you take an end & wrap it around something, that end dies, but new growth sprouts up somewhere else. There’s a lesson here I am sure of it!


One thing I loathe about this time of year are the SLUGS! No! Not the Male Hollywood Dating Pool, those hateful little snail-like creatures that eat through all of my plants! They are disgusting. Don’t know what I’m talking about? Pick up one of your pots & look at the bottom. Look for a slimey, gross, rubbery head inching out from a shell. There it is! Garden Enemy Number 1! They leave a shiney, silvery, lace-like web over your plants. By the time you see that…its too late…they’ve arrived. Now they’ll make “lace” out of your plant leaves. There are a number of remedies available at your local nursery but they are very expensive & you have to keep applying them. Here’s a trick: You know what thing they love but will prove fatal to them, as it did to many of my relatives??? BEER!!!!! Yep, beer!
Here’s what you do: find out where they are. Ideally you’ll see them in a flowerbed, but you can do this in a container as well. Fill a container(s) with beer. Go out the next day & look in the container. You will see many dead, floating slugs! I recommend doing this AFTER breakfast. You have to keep replacing the beer & tossing the slugs, after their burial at sea, but its cheap, easy & guaranteed to work…which is more than I can say for my last boyfriend!

Have a Fabulous Weekend!