Homegrown Evolution in the LA Times

...Today’s Los Angeles Times Home and Garden section has a story on Guerrilla gardening, “Guerrilla gardener movement takes root in L.A. area”. The article mentions our parkway vegetable garden, which consists of two 6-foot square raised beds with two wire obelisks to support beans and tomatoes. We constructed it in October of 2005 and have grown a few season’s worth of crops. Here’s our parkway garden just after putting it in. We installed raised be...

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Native Plant Workshop

...ey save species. Learn about crucial native plant-animal relationships and gardening to attract birds, butterflies and hummingbirds. With only 4% of our wild lands left, urban and suburban native plant gardens will be the “make or break” difference to the support and preservation of bio-diversity. Lisa will show and tell you about several varieties of native plants as well as provide samples for sale. Immediately after the lecture in the garden we...

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Cutting a Beehive Out of a Wall

...d the other for honey comb to feed back to the bees once they got to Sue’s garden. The next time I do this I’m going to get some buckets for this purpose as the trash bags tend get stuck together with honey. Another lesson I learned is to bring a tarp. Taking a hive out of a wall leaves a huge mess of spilled honey, construction debris and dead bees. Once we had the brood comb in the nuc box we noticed worker bees returning from field massing wher...

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Homesteading Disasters: The Skunk Menace

...And each year I wake up the morning after planting to a kind of vegetable garden apocalypse–dozens of V shaped holes, overturned seedlings and scattered seeds. And each year I swear off vegetable gardening entirely. Actual photo of absent-minded conquistadors. So what’s the science behind this? Why do skunks dig? Skunks dig for doubloons dropped by absent-minded conquistadors many generations ago here in California. Our gardens in Los Angeles are...

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Warning: This Blog is Based in a Mediterranean Climate

...that most of the readers of this blog are either taking some time off from gardening or gardening under a hoop house. But for us here in Southern California it’s the prime agricultural season, when rain falls and the hills are green. It’s my favorite time of year. But I imagine most of you are puzzled by discussions of picking veggies in the middle of January. As puzzled as I would be about topics like bursting pipes and hoop houses. It’s my hope...

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