In terms of what we sell, we have a strong commitment to San Jose. We participate in PG&E’s partner program for compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFL’s). Through our participation in this program we are able to offer CFL’s at a very deep discount off the regular price. If you haven’t started converting over from incandescent lightbulbs to CFL’s, we encourage you to do so. The energy savings is huge!
Following is a sampling of some of the earth friendly products that we have available:

• Low- and no-VOC paints
• Electric lawn mowers and “weed whackers”
• Degradable trash bags
• Less toxic garden supplies
• Natural cleaning products
• Compact fluorescent light bulbs
• Bosch® tankless water heaters (special order)
• Solar attic fans (special order)
• Battery charging stations and rechargeable batteries
• Reusable tote bags – for groceries, hardware, and other errands you run. Keep a few in your car.
• Organic flower and plant seeds as well as organic composting material.

We accept the following items for recycling DURING BUSINESS HOURS only :

• Fluorescent lighting:
  • A Willow Glen Ace Associate must be present to accept the lighting
• Batteries:
  • We accept household use batteries only, such as AA, C, D, 9 volt.
  • We accept  button batteries such as those used in cameras, eleactronics, and hearing aids.
  • Please DO NOT bring automotive batteries, we are unable to accept these.  Please check with the business where you bought the battery for recylcing of automotive batteries.
  • Please bring the batteries to a cashier or associate inside the store.

Thank you for dropping these items off during business hours only, so that we can keep our property clean and tidy, and contine to offer these services in our community.

Please take a look at our “Make Cents for Public Schools” program, which rewards public schools in Willow Glen every time you:

• bring your own bag when shopping in our store, or
• don’t need a bag to tote your purchases home.

7/24/09:  We are no longer able to accept clothing donations in our parking lot.  The bin that was available for donation has been removed due to continued dumping of other items.   We regret the inconvenience.

Marinade
1 cup fresh orange juice
2 teaspoons grated fresh ginger
1 teaspoon minced garlic
1 teaspoon toasted sesame oil
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

4 bone-in pork rib chops, each about 3/4 inch thick
Vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
1/4 teaspoons ground black pepper

1. In a medium bowl mix the marinade ingredients.

2. Place the pork chops in a large, resealable plastic bag and pour in the marinade. Press the air out of the bag and seal tightly. Turn the bag several times to distribute the marinade, place the bag flat in a rimmed pan, and refrigerate for 1 to 2 hours, turning occasionally.

3. Prepare the grill for direct and indirect cooking over high heat (450° to 550°F).

4. Remove the pork chops from the bag and reserve the marinade. Pat the chops dry on both sides with paper towels and brush off the bits of ginger and garlic. Lightly coat the chops on both sides with oil and season evenly with the salt and pepper. Let the chops stand at room temperature for 15 to 30 minutes before grilling. Meanwhile pour the marinade into a small saucepan, bring to a boil over high heat, and boil for at least 30 seconds. Remove the saucepan from the heat.

5. Brush the cooking grates clean. Grill the pork chops over direct high heat, with the lid closed as much as possible, until the surface is well marked but not burned, 3 to 5 minutes, turning once or twice and swapping their positions as needed for even cooking. Move the chops over indirect high heat and cook until firm to the touch but still slightly pink in the center, 3 to 5 minutes, turning once or twice, basting the chops occasionally with the boiled marinade. Remove from the grill. Serve warm.

For the pork:

• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1 pound pork tenderloin
• 1/4 cup sweet and sour sauce

For the rice:

• 4 tablespoons canola oil
• 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger
• 1/2 cup diced red bell pepper
• 1/2 cup diced yellow bell pepper
• 1 cup diced red onion
• 1/2 cup thinly sliced green cabbage
• 1/2 cup thinly sliced snap peas
• 1/2 cup peeled, diced carrot
• 1/2 cup diced celery
• 1 tablespoon minced garlic
• 6 cups short-grain white rice, cooked and cooled
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 1/4 cup soy sauce
• 1/4 cup oyster sauce
• 1 tablespoon sesame oil
• 1/2 cup chopped green onion
• 2 tablespoons toasted sesame seeds

Directions

Pork: In medium bowl, add soy and oyster sauce, ginger and garlic, and sesame oil. Add pork and let marinate for 1 hour in the refrigerator.

Heat grill to medium-high, and grill pork on both sides until done. Heat remaining marinade to 165 degrees F and use to baste meat as it cooks. When meat is almost cooked through, glaze both sides with sweet and sour sauce and let finish cooking while sauce caramelizes on meat. Remove from grill, allow to stand for 10 minutes, and cut into 1/2-inch pieces.

Rice: While pork is standing, heat oil in wok or large skillet on high heat until oil almost begins to smoke. Add ginger, as well as all vegetables except garlic. Cook for 3 minutes, or until vegetables are cooked, then add garlic. Before garlic browns, add rice and mix rapidly so rice does not stick to sides of wok or pan.

Once entire mixture is thoroughly combined, pour beaten eggs over rice and vegetables, and toss again rapidly until all egg is cooked. Add the soy sauce, oyster sauce, and sesame oil. Mix thoroughly and then add pork.

Garnish with green onions and sesame seeds. Serve immediately.

We are open 7am – 9pm on Saturday, and 9am- 6 pm on Sunday.

This is a great opportunity to save on all kinds of things you need for your home, lawn and garden!

*Does not include grills or items already on sale

What do you do when you have large new borders to fill and would rather not A,  spend much money or B,  wait forever for them to look good? Steal like crazy from other parts of the garden – if you’re lucky to have an old garden that has plenty of divisions and too-big castaways to spare.

So as I wrote about on GardenRant, landscape architect Billy Goodnick drew me this cool plan for my ex-lawn – greatly enlarging my existing borders and reducing the lawn-like area to not much more than a path.   So, where to start? First I used

stakes and then orange marking paint to create the new border – that’s easy enough.  But now it’s mid-March and time to fill ‘em up.

The first photo is of the right-hand border (seen from the house and also on Billy’s sketch). You see the orange lines and the junipers I planted there yesterday. They spent the winter potted-up on my front porch, and seem to tolerate being moved every spring to the back yard to make room for Fun with Annuals on my front porch.

Also on the right are two large, severely cut-back grasses of some sort (varieties of Miscanthus, now forgotten), which were too big for their spots somewhere else, and I envision them draping gracefully over this large pot that will be trying to fulfill Billy’s vision of a focal point.  Then behind all that are 3 year-old Itea ‘Little Henry’ which don’t look like much yet and I’ve decided I need 3 more of same to fill the area and mimic the kind of massing Billy suggests.  What’ll go along the front of the border is anybody’s guess at this point.

Then in the lower photo here you see where I’ve moved the full-grown spirea to another focal point, and the enlarged border now jumps over the dry streambed (something I’d never have thought to do). To fill up the new space I planted some large carexes (including some that are blizzard-battered but presumaby capable of recovering), lots of smaller ‘Ice Dance’ carexes, and a flowing mass of lamb’s ears along the new edge of the border. The stepping stones WILL be moved and relaid to follow the center of the new lawn-like path through the garden.

Key to any garden plot is the soil, if you do nothing else, providing good soil will give you a good garden. Improving existing soil to be good enough for a garden though is rough. If you have a section of your yard you would like to be a garden, to turn that turf into garden would require significant labor, and even some machinery. All in all, it just isn’t the best way to do things.

Most home gardeners with relatively small lots instead build raised beds. Raised beds offer a variety of benefits, they’re easy because you don’t improve the existing soil, you merely add soil on top. They warm up faster in the spring, they offer excellent drainage, and the quality of the soil you can add to them far exceeds any result you would get by trying to till up your existing soil.

You can build a raised bed out of almost anything, an old tire, stone, brick, plastic, but the cheapest option tends to be wood (unless you have a free supply of old tractor tires). Since cost of food is a large motivator for someone to build their own vegetable garden, wood ends up typically being the material for choice for non-ornamental (ie, edible) raised bed gardening.

Types of Wood

You basically have two choices when choosing the type of wood you wish to use. Cedar, or treated lumber. Cedar is beautiful but is very very expensive and comes in smaller weaker cuts.

Pressure treated lumber is perfectly safe, for more on why it is safe see this post on the safety of pressure treated lumber. It is also stronger, bigger, and significantly cheaper.

You could also use synthetic woods, such as those used for decking, but those are also very expensive.

This post will use pressure treated lumber, and I recommend you do the same. This post will allow you to build two beds. 10×4. It is not recommended you exceed 4 feet for the width of any raised bed as it will become difficult to reach the interior to weed.

Tools & Materials

• 1 4×4 8 foot pressure treated post
• 4 2×12 10 foot pressure treated boards (you could also get 2×10s or 2×8s, depending on the depth you want.)
• 2 2×12 8 foot pressure treated boards
• Decking/Pressure treated lumber screws, 4 inch length
• A tape measure
• A drill
• A shovel

Directions

Layout your boards Fill with cardboard Add fresh organic matter Top off with compost

Step 1: Cut the wood

Pressure treated lumber is perfectly safe to use in the garden, but that doesn’t mean you want to inhale it, so work outside and wear a dust mask.

Cut your 8 foot long 2×12s in half (do not cut your 10 foot long 2×12s).

Cut your 8 foot long 4×4 into 8 1 foot lengths.

Step 2: Do your layout

Layout the boards in rough fashion where you want them to lay. You do not need to dig up any sod, but if you like you can dig up the sod directly under where the boards will be, just to a depth of a couple inches.

Assemble the boards by first screwing a 4×4 piece to the ends of your 2×12 10 foot pieces. The 4×4 pieces are your corner blocks. Then stand up the boards, using an assistant if needed, and screw the 2×12 4 foot pieces (you made when cutting your 8 foot lengths in half) to the 4×4s thus forming the ends of your box.

Your box is now done, it’ll be heavy but you can with effort slide it around if you need to reposition it, if your ground isn’t flat and there are gaps use a shovel to dig down the high spots to better sit the box. You do not need to anchor it, it is heavy enough to sit still (especially after adding the dirt), but if you like you may drive short bits of rebar into the ground next to the inside corners.

Once you have it situated where you absolutely want it, move on to the next step.

Step 3: Cardboard

You now have a box filled with grass, this will not do. Lay down a thick layer of brown corrugated cardboard (the plain stuff), or newspaper. Either is perfectly safe to use in the garden and will fully decompose, but not before killing any grass below it. They’ll also provide compost and food for worms.

Step 4: Yard Debris

You have a perfect opportunity now to kill two birds with one stone. If there is any yard debris you want to get rid of, anything you’d normally compost, spent flowers, perennial or shrub clippings, kitchen scraps, grass clippings, you can dump it all into your boxes. The only caveat is if you add a lot of woody material also add a bag of blood meal to balance out the nitrogen. This material will slowly decompose once buried, feeding worms and providing the soil with nutrients way deep in the root zone.

Step 5: Fill with Dirt/Compost

I recommend directly using compost. Fill the boxes up with any compost you have, then at most garden centers you can buy bagged composted cow manure, do so and fill it up to the top. You could use regular top soil or garden soil, but compost is only slightly more expensive (pennies) and much more nutritious. It will not burn or harm or infect your plants, so go for it. You can also often get compost delivered by dump trucks from landscape companies. You will need around 100 cubic feet of dirt total, so you’re looking at a pallet of bags, or a single dump truck run.

Why it works

Your raised bed provides some protection to your crops from critters (You can also easily run a small wire fence around it, stapled to the wood). It will heat up quicker in the spring, it has excellent drainage. 12 inches of really good soil is enough for most plants, whose roots only exist in the top 12 inches of soil. The soil will also be loose, allowing crops such as carrots or sweet potatoes to grow well. You also have one less foot to stoop down when working the soil, thus saving your back.

You can put raised beds in your backyard, side yard, even your front yard. Sometimes people build many beds and then instead of fencing them all individually (assuming they have critter problems) then build one big fence around the whole group.

Your overall startup cost, (mostly wood and dirt) will be expensive, a couple hundred dollars. And it may not seem like a money saving proposition to do this. However these start-up costs are only at the beginning, you will not need to buy more dirt or wood on a yearly basis, and you’ll be able to use these beds for many years. As such the free food you’ll get from your garden will eventually more than cover the cost of creating

Ingredients

• 2 pieces leftover barbeque chicken, from Barbeque Chicken recipe, meat removed from bone
• 2 celery stalks, small dice
• 1/2 medium red onion, small dice
• 2 tablespoons mayonnaise
• 2 tablespoons leftover barbeque sauce, from Barbeque Chicken recipe
• Salt and freshly ground black pepper
• 4 hot dogs rolls
• 4 leaves romaine lettuce

Directions

In a medium bowl mix together the chicken, celery, onion, mayonnaise and barbeque sauce. Season with salt and pepper, to taste.

Divide the chicken salad evenly between the 4 hot dog rolls, top each with a lettuce leaf and serve.

If you bring your own bag SATURDAY, you get 20% off everything in the store! (*Some exclusions apply).

Sunday there will be instant 10 to 25% discounts throughout the store!

Hope to see you there!!!!!!

The early years were lean, as the brothers struggled to provide for their families. On occasion one of the brothers would take an outside job, while the other ran the store; the two incomes would then be split down the middle.

In 1961 they moved the store to Redwood City’s Marsh Manor Shopping Center. Bob became the sole owner in 1961, when Bill – realizing that the store couldn’t support more than one family – left the business to become a high school shop teacher. Bob’s son Larry grew up helping around the store after school and on weekends. After graduating from San Jose State in 1973 he joined his father full time.

The supplier for Marsh Manor Hardware was Baker Hamilton, a small, San Francisco-based wholesaler. In 1965 the store incorporated, and joined Ace Hardware, which offered greater selection and pricing, better inventory management, training, and guidance in the intricacies of developing the business. The connection with Ace Hardware proved to be a solid cornerstone in the growth and success of the business.

When Bob retired in 1988 Larry looked for a new location with greater potential. In 1992 he found, bought, and restored a long-abandoned former automobile agency on the corner of Alma and Channing in Palo Alto – a building that shortly before had been called “Palo Alto’s biggest eyesore.”

Palo Alto Ace Hardware opened in 1993, and flourished. In 1995 the Ace Corporation awarded it the Crystal Pyramid Award for Excellence in Retailing, an award that honors the best Ace hardware store west of the Mississippi, and one of the top three Ace Hardware stores in the nation.

In keeping with family tradition, Larry’s sons Eric and Richard grew up working in the hardware stores, and after receiving their bachelors degrees they both came back to the bay area and joined their father in the family business.

The Hassetts purchased Ocean Shore Hardware in Half Moon Bay in 2003, and, as they had in Palo Alto, orchestrated a complete renovation of the store, including a change from True Value to Ace. Just as in Palo Alto, the new Willow Glen Ace Hardware, under the direction of Larry, Eric and Richard, flourished.

In 2008, the Hassetts expanded once again, opening a third store, Willow Glen Ace Hardware, in San Jose. The new store is located very near where the Hassett brothers opened their original store in 1956, more than 50 years before, bringing the business full circle back to its geographical roots.

Today the three Hassett hardware stores are thriving businesses, employing close to 100 people, and successfully competing against the big-box stores. The business is very different from what is was in the beginning, and yet much is the same. The stores are still family owned and operated, as they have been from the start, and the same dedication and integrity that Bob and Bill Hassett brought to their first store continue to be the heart and guiding spirit in Palo Alto, Ocean Shore, and Willow Glen

Sunday, February 21, 2010

The dream of owning a successful small business is still alive in America and remains an essential part of our national self-image. But along the main streets and rural byways of the country today, in place of countless small businesses supporting millions of families in tens of thousands of communities, the banners of a few giant corporations now fly.

President Obama is proposing various initiatives to strengthen small businesses, including a $30 billion fund for community banks that agree to lend to local entrepreneurs, in an effort to spur job creation and help the still-fragile economy. But the problems besetting small business in America far predate the Great Recession, and undoing the de facto exclusion of small entrepreneurs from so many of the country’s business activities will require more than fresh cash.

Ask an economist why so many small businesses have given way to giant chains, and you’ll hear a lecture on the dynamics of capitalism and free markets, and how the creative destruction of small, independent businesses is a natural and benign process. Yet specific political moves and decisions in Washington over the past several decades have made it much easier for the people who control large-scale corporations to displace small proprietors.

One of the most important was a radical change in 1981 in the enforcement of U.S. antitrust laws. Until then, small entrepreneurs were protected by a legal framework created during the Second New Deal, which began in 1935. Many histories of the era focus on the FDR administration’s initial decision to all but suspend antitrust laws. But after the Supreme Court declared the National Industrial Recovery Act unconstitutional, the administration (along with numerous populist allies in Congress) reversed course and adopted a very aggressive competition policy designed to protect citizens against excessive corporate concentration.

In practice, this was achieved through more strategic enforcement of antitrust laws, including cases against the chain stores that emerged during the Progressive Era. For instance, the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations all took action against the A&P grocery chain, the Wal-Mart of midcentury America. The populists also promoted competition through such all-but-forgotten market laws as the Robinson-Patman and Miller-Tydings acts, which limited the ability of large trading companies to use pricing power to exert control over producers and thereby gain an advantage over smaller retailers.

Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas expressed the profoundly political goal of such legislation in a 1949 case that focused on efforts by big oil companies to control independent gas stations. “When independents are swallowed up by the trusts and entrepreneurs become employees of absentee owners,” Douglas wrote, the result “is a serious loss in citizenship. Local leadership is diluted. He who was a leader in the village becomes dependent on outsiders for his action and policy.”

The populists in the Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower administrations and in Congress were comfortable with concentrated economic power: They accepted outright monopoly, for instance, in the case of many utilities, as long as the public had a say in their management, and they accepted heavy industry in the hands of a few large companies, as long as they were forced to compete. But in retail and farming, the populists opted to protect the market system that allowed individual owners to deliver their products and services to their neighbors free from predation by distant powers. The result was a restoration of the republic of small proprietors established by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the early 19th century.

Although Americans began to hear the term “deregulation” when President Jimmy Carter dismantled the Civil Aeronautics Board, what Carter-era reformers envisioned was a shift of regulatory power from micromanaging agencies to more-hands-off antitrust officials. Soon after President Ronald Reagan took office, however, officials in his administration made clear that, to them, “deregulation” meant shifting that power from public to private hands.

Instead of protecting competitive markets, Reagan officials said they would use anti-monopoly laws to promote “consumer welfare,” which they defined largely as lower prices. It no longer mattered how much power was consolidated, as long as the consolidation appeared to result in the delivery of less-expensive goods.