Home & Garden Columns

Garden Variety: Another indoor garden shop — Are we ready for spaceflight yet?

By Ron Sullivan
Friday February 09, 2007

A couple of months ago, I wrote about Berkeley Indoor Gardens, an indoor gardening (surprise!) store down at the tidal end of University Avenue. I got to feeling bad because I hadn’t written about the other indoor gardening store across the street. This one even advertises on KPIG, my favorite radio station. (So does Memphis Minnie’s, home of the best Sunday brunch in San Francisco. Don’t take my word for it—go eat!)  

So here’s the other side of the street, Berkeley’s Secret Garden, just to be fair. Also because I enjoyed visiting both. 

Both places have the requisite cute dog. At Secret Garden, we were greeted by a youngish smooth-coated somebreed-or-other with decent manners and a short attention span. Both places have prominent wall décor alluding to perfectly legal™ applications for their technology: here, more orchids; across the street at Indoor Gardens there were a few more references to the likes of home-grown salads.  

Both have the (also requisite) space-station arrays of silvery foil, fat PVC piping, moving water, whirring fans, and psychedelically whirling light arrays nurturing lush green tropicals and houseplants. Both sell sacks of soil replacements and amendments, and a great many supplements.  

Both are conveniently located in the neighborhood of Templebar and a number of Indian clothing and jewelry stores for a certain flavor of one-stop shopping. (I used the occasion of the scouting visit to discover that not only do those little bangle bracelets, the ones made to wear in multiples, come in designated sizes, but I need the largest one. No surprise, I guess. My glove size went up measurably after I’d spent a few years with my Number Eight Felco shears practically imbedded in my right hand, pruning for a living.)  

Secret Garden might have the edge on sheer numbers of arcane secret recipes. You could theoretically assemble everything a sane plant would need, from minerals and micronutrients to the best approximations of a number of mycorrhizal fungi, and add a few ecogroovy pesticides besides: several predatory bugs, including pirate bugs (Yo ho ho!) and a bacillus I hadn’t heard of: B. subtilis, used pretty much the way B. thuringiensis is and apparently as a disease control for lawns, of all things.  

Places like this seem to be cutting-edge for low-toxin gardening in general, maybe because people are touchy about introducing nasty stuff into their own homes. No doubt the Green Triangle granola culture has an influence too; there are handmade glass jars and “potpourri grinders” in the window, and a Seeds of Change rack.  

There’s also a bewildering variety of plant “nutritional” supplements—the scare quotes here are because plants do photosynthesize their own food. It’s evidence of a hundred lines of inquiry and theorizing about what plants and soils do together. One interesting product was a tank array of Humtea, a version of manure tea that has never seen the inside of a herbivore.  

Might be fun to use, but I’m still not drinking it, thanks.  

 

Berkeley’s Secret Garden 

921 University Ave. 

486-2117 

Monday-Friday: 10 a.m.-8 p.m. 

Saturday: 10 a.m.-7 p.m. 

Sunday: Noon-5 p.m. 

www.berkeleyssecretgarden.com/ 

 

 

 

Ron Sullivan is a former professional gardener and arborist. Her “Garden Variety” column appears every Friday in the Daily Planet’s East Bay Home & Real Estate section. Her column on East Bay trees appears every other Tuesday in the Daily Planet.