Saturday Linkages: Garden Hoses, Planners and IKEA Hacks . . .

Ikea meets aquaponics. Gardening Finding the Garden Hose of my Dreams Garden Rant http://gardenrant.com/2013/01/garden-hose-of-my-d1reams.html … Home Ec On Planners, Productivity, and Idle Pleasures http://thetanglednest.com/2013/01/on-planners-productivity-and-idle-pleasures/ … DIY Barn Door Track Tutorail http://shar.es/47h3M  How Google Earth Revealed Chicago’s Hidden Farms: http://ow.ly/gJRrS Bad News Department Florida couple may h...

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Polyculture

Here at SurviveLA we are experimenting with something called polyculture in the the garden. We read about it first in the worthy permaculture guide, Gaia’s Garden, by Toby Hemenway. Polyculture is the practice of planting a community of interrelated, interdependent plants, mimicking in your garden (in our case a raised vegetable bed) the complex relationships that are found between plants in nature. In the case of food crops, a polycultu...

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Yet More Tasteless Garden Statuary

 Photo by Anne Magnér Photos of shocking garden statuary continue to pour into the Homegrown Evolution in-box. Anne Magnér sent these amazing photos all the way from Denmark. The crass garden gnome, apparently, cuts across all European cultures from north to south.  Photo by Anne Magnér Photo by Anne Magnér I wonder what’s up with the confident and smiling Danish woman statues to the right of the kids. Wouldn’t mind one of thes...

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Garden Like a Pirate

...for growing food crops. The first bit of land we hijacked was our own parkway, that bit of dirt between the sidewalk and the street that technically belongs to the city, but is the responsibility of the homeowner to maintain. It’s yet another space, like the vast asphalt hell of parking lots, garages, freeways, car lots, auto repair shops, and junkyards in our car-obsessed city dedicated to the needs of the personal automobile. We decided t...

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Book Review: The New Sunset Western Garden Book

The Sunset Western Garden Book was one of the first gardening books we picked up when we bought our house back in 1998. A new version is out this month, now dubbed The New Sunset Western Garden Book, and it’s a significant improvement over our old copy. Lavish photos have replaced the drawings of my 1998 copy. The new edition has significantly more coverage of edibles, including a vegetable planting schedule as well as nice photographs of...

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Making Salves, Lip Balms & etc.: Close of the Calendula Series

...an also use essential oils to bring herbal essences into a plain salve.  Once you know how to make salve, you can not only make skin salves, you can make lip balm and headache balm and stick deodorant and homemade cosmetics. It’s a simple technique, but it opens a lot of possibilities. My favorite herbal salve is made out of a mix of equal parts Calendula (pot marigold), chickweed (Stellaria media) and plantain (Plantago major) oils. These...

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The Whip: A Homemade Moisturizer How-To from Making It

A quick little project: lavender infused moisturizer, two Calendula/plantain salves and a chamomile infused lip balm. Enough unguents to see me through Christmas. Note 3/16/13: When I posted this I never expected this to become one of our most popular posts.  Since so many people are looking at this recipe, I feel like I should let you know a couple of things about it before you try it. 1) The first is that it is not perfect. I love it...

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Making Beer in Plain Language

...r.” -Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature Judith Butler via the Bad Writing Contest Huh? At least the terminology surrounding beer making ain’t that obtuse, but it certainly could use some simplification. For novice home brewers, such as us here at Homegrown Evolution, the terminology creates an unnecessary barrier as impenetrable as a graduate school seminar in the humanities. Let...

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A Bustle In Your Hedgerow: California Natives for your Vegetable Garden

or randomly throughout) may increase the dispersal of small-bodied insect natural enemies through the fields. Scott Kleinrock, who is in charge of the new Ranch project at the Huntington, tipped me off to this research and is making use of a lot of California natives to create the urban residential equivalent of a hedgerow. In short, a hedgerow in our yards and urban spaces means making sure to include lots of natives and flowering plants that ca...

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