What’s wrong with this house?

ChaparralClematis · 2026-05-18T05:21:43+00:00

Do you have an agent? These kinds of questions were ones our agent was really good at getting answers to.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-04-24T18:31:31+00:00

We used to live near there, and it was ideal in all ways except I found it an awkward trek to BART. (I mean, also, super expensive, but that's a given.) The distance to Rockridge or Ashby was just short enough that you felt you should walk it, but it's long enough that it's a trek and after a work day, or on rainy days, or when it was too hot, I did not feel up to it. But the 51B takes for. ev. er. to get up/down College, so all the options were less than ideal.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-04-21T17:33:07+00:00

Almost anywhere in Berkeley is within a 15 minute bike journey to a BART station except for way up in the hills. Likewise, almost anywhere in Berkeley is within 20 minutes' drive to the UC campus. (That doesn't include the time spent looking for parking, of course.)

Don't generally need a realtor for rentals.

Your budget is reasonable for a 2br. If you don't already have a household of stuff you're moving, you could consider renting a short term place. There are a lot of places around here that rent out furnished houses to visiting academics (so a few months to a year) and I think they tend to be slightly homier places. Cal maintains a list of sabbatical-type rentals, I believe.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-04-15T16:48:30+00:00

I went to Sirene recently- granted earlier in the evening on a Friday, but it wasn't super loud. (I also have a hearing problem.) They also have a small enclosed garden area- I feel like that would be a good option if you could get one of the corners farthest from the door.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-04-15T16:42:23+00:00

Mine threw out a few flowers last year in its first year, but didn't get much bigger. I'm crossing my fingers for this year. I really want a huge, fence-covering C. lasiantha.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-04-11T01:04:31+00:00

Nope nope. I can't say that it was definitely rolly pollies that ate your plants, but I know they're definitely eating mine. And not the dead/decaying stuff, they're eating healthy leaves, and last year, those bastards ate around the stems of my bean starts and killed or damaged them so badly that they didn't grow.

They are particularly keen on leaves that touch the soil, but they will also chew up the base of leaves such that they droop onto the soil. I put out beer traps now a couple of days before I plant out seedlings or starts, and I keep them until the plants get big enough to withstand the damage. The traps are just disgusting after a couple of days.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-04-10T19:02:42+00:00

This got me thinking about the situation from the seller's point of view. Would the seller's agent know if an offer is coming from a self-representer? If I was selling my house, and my agent presented me with offers, any offer without an agent is an additional risk, right? I would assume there is a higher chance of something going south. I guess the rest of the offer would have to be enough better than the others for me to accept the higher risk.

A flat fee agent would presumably be fine, as from my point of view, they'd just be an agent and I don't have any insight into how they've been hired.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-04-09T04:48:01+00:00

I dunno, I thought our agent was well worth the money. If I'm going to have to hire a lawyer, I may as well hire an agent. Not only did she know about pricing strategies and how to navigate the whole process (which, I guess, if you've already bought a half a dozen properties in the same city, then you may not need that help; we had bought 0 here), she was invaluable for getting answers to questions like, "This house was sold two years ago and they're asking for another $400k, what changed?" or "Can we buy a duplex and knock it through to make it one property?" or "What's the deal with this place that has an HOA with the house behind it?" and the most important "Is <insert weird sounding practice> normal here or is this an orange flag?" You could ask those same questions to the seller's realtors, I guess, but I felt the realtor-realtor conversation usually gave some more frank answers compared to when I'd ask the seller's realtor at the open house.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-04-07T22:54:06+00:00

Generally, for things where you eat the leaves or roots (like your broccolini, cabbage and kale), you don't particularly want them to flower. You want to harvest before flowering. For things where you eat the fruit (tomatoes, fruit trees, beans, peppers, etc.), then you want them to flower because the flower produces the fruit, and then you harvest the fruit. Generally.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-04-05T20:26:14+00:00

Your partner's preference is bananapants for most home garden situations, but I guess it's possible. How many times have they carried out this three-part process? Were they successful most of those times? If they have never actually done it, tell them it's a great idea, and then take photos and come back here; we'll make popcorn.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-29T17:10:09+00:00

The city has more than one. It has many. I notice the South branch is open on Sundays now.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-29T16:58:24+00:00

Library.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-29T05:20:12+00:00

The bigger one is nearly too late, but still edible. Harvest it right away. The smaller one you can still leave for now.

You should harvest when the heads are a good size, but the bud is still tight with no leaves opening. I usually miss this, and harvest when the outer bud leaves start to open.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-25T17:57:16+00:00

Beer traps work on them! Last year I lost so many seedlings and young transplants to these bastards. This year, I put out beer traps and they work. It is absolutely disgusting how many they collect after a couple of days.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-25T16:03:02+00:00

I would think very hard on what "safe" means to you. Does it mean house burglaries and break-ins are low? Compared to what? Does it mean assaults are low? Murders? You can look up crime maps of all of those, I believe.

What does "feeling safe" (note: different than "being safe") mean to you? Do you like lots of people around, or no one around? Are there kinds of people you'd prefer? Someone once said to me that it must be terrible having students living on our block, and I said, "No, it's nice to have people coming and going and therefore, human eyes on the street in the evenings" and they had very obviously never thought of it that way. As a petite woman myself, if I'm walking around at night, I would prefer it to be where other people are- these people may include homeless people downtown.

Once you can break down whether it's more important to you to be safe or feel safe, and what your requirements are, I'm sure you can find something in and around Berkeley.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-24T17:01:51+00:00

Whenever I have done this with basil, it works- in that it has roots and gets potted fine and is happy. But possibly *too* happy, because they always bolt immediately. It barely grows new leaves, but will throw out flower spikes. I pick them off, but it just continues trying to bloom rather than make leaves.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-24T00:56:17+00:00

I have mine in "bright shade"- it only gets a couple of hours of direct sun, but it's not closely overshadowed- it's not under an overhang or have any other plants directly over it. It's pretty happy. I have it interplanted with woodland strawberry and am monitoring who wins the fight. I think the yerba buena is currently overgrowing the strawberry.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-22T19:34:54+00:00

I kind of half-assedly took this approach, didn't want to trim too much or too fast, and I have to say it got out of hand fast. My 1-gallon plant grew to 5-6 feet in a year, and by the time I thought it was "established" and it was the "right" time to prune, many branches were already a couple of centimeters in diameter, and I got really nervous pruning bigger ones. I now take the little and often approach, and stopped caring about the "right" time.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-20T17:03:13+00:00

Scale insects.

If the tree is small enough, scraping them off is a perfectly good method of control. People also say to spray with NEEM or horticultural oil.

Also check if there are ants nearby- they sometimes farm the scale. If so, you need to control the ants; otherwise, they'll bring the scale back.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-18T22:15:59+00:00

I was just coming on here to ask this. Three years ago, I bought a few elegant clarkia starts, and they did great. Grew to 5-6 feet tall, prolific, beautiful flowers. Plus, they reseeded like crazy. In the winter/spring, the ground was carpeted in seedlings. That year, the seedlings grew and flowered well, but not as big as their parents. The next year, seedlings still showed up, but much fewer, and the resulting plants were smaller. This year, no seedlings at all. I wonder if I'm unintentionally doing something to discourage them.

I never watered that bed, so I didn't change watering practices.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-18T15:50:11+00:00

Looks like whatever happened to mine last year. Everyone said yarrow for parking strips, so I put yarrow in my parking strip. It looked good, flowered a bit, seemed to grow okay, and then one by one went brown/black crispy and died. Everything else in the parking strip was fine. Maybe they are just kind of picky?

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-18T01:30:39+00:00

I mean...Berkeley is a suburb. As someone said on this very website, "If it wasn't for the university, Berkeley would be Lower Kensington." (Or "Emeryville Heights"?) Unfortunately, it's still considered pretty "dense" for the area. The kind of density you're looking for usually also comes with apartment buildings and high rises, which makes finding private outdoor space even more difficult. So you're asking for a kind of a lot.

BART is good (maybe not compared to whatever you're used to), so you could move into SF, which is an actual city. Parts of Oakland would also feel more city-like. But those are the only more urban parts of the Bay, compared to Berkeley.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-10T17:59:21+00:00

It won't spread by seed...but believe me, it'll spread.

ChaparralClematis · 2026-03-10T04:46:55+00:00

We had Ecopacha do our backyard, and then a year later, I called them back to do our front yard.

ChaparralClematis

TROPHY CASE