Are Raised Beds a Good Idea?

...ld do a soil test, especially if you live in an urban area) and the results come back showing that you have heavy metals in your soil. You live in a very wet climate. A disability prevents you from kneeling or leaning over to garden. Your soil has no contaminants, but has some other problem, say bad texture or lots of buried rocks/chunks of concrete. You have dogs/rabbits/chupacabras, etc.  I’ve come to the conclusion that for Southern C...

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Droopy Leaves are Not a Good Thing

...30;that this was nothing to worry about. I’d also heard that was ineffectual, anyway, to water them midday. Well, I was wrong. Erik just sent me a link to a post from one of his favorite blogs, WSU Extension’s The Garden Professors titled Hot Weather and Not-So-Hot Advice, which scientifically refutes this myth, and gives us permission to water midday, if necessary, to save the plants. In a nutshell, droop is bad. Droop is stress. The...

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Make a Spore Print

...i Fests, the Los Angeles Mycological Society is putting on the 26th Annual Los Angeles Wild Mushroom Fair this Sunday, February 14, 2010 from 10 AM – 4 PM at Ayres Hall at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden. Mushroom celebrity Paul Stamets will be speaking at 2 p.m. More info on the website of the Los Angeles Mycological Society. Not in LA? Spend some time reading Mykoweb.com, and excellent and entertaining resource publ...

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End of Season Tomato Review

Homegrown Evolution had ambitious plans to review each and every tomato variety out of the garden this year, but alas, we fell behind in our bloggulating duties and planted way too many tomatoes. So here, as “winter” appears in Southern California (it’s raining, that’s how you tell), we’ll review what worked and what didn’t work. The tastiest tomato award goes to the Pineapple variety pictured above. Not only...

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Making Beer in Plain Language

...the grains. 4. The extracted sugars are boiled with some hops for an hour. 5. After boiling for an hour you cool down the liquid as rapidly as possible. Here comrade Ben uses ice and a coil of copper tubing with water from a garden hose flowing through it, to bring that temperature down. 6. The cooled liquid is poured into a glass carboy and yeast is added. After a week or so this will be transferred with a tube into a second carboy. After about...

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3D Greetings

Homegrown Evolution’s holiday gift to our readers is a headache. Well, to be precise, we offer you three dimensional images of two of our favorite garden plants. Above, the prickly pear cactus (Opuntia ficus-indica) and, below, spearmint (Mentha Spicata). To view these two images in three dimensions follow these instructions, specifically the bit about “parallel viewing”. Be persistent, like all good things it might take some p...

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Saturday Linkages: Soil Liming, Vegans Partying, Cats and Couches

Designer Seungji Mun’s cat couch. Please Stop Liming your Soil Based on the pH! | Garden Rant http:// gardenrant.com/2012/07/please -stop-liming-your-soil-based-on-the-ph.html  … Vegans party … at the butcher shop! http://www. latimes.com/features/food/ dailydish/la-dd-vegans-party-at-the-butcher-shop-20120801,0,7684645.story  … Small Homes in Working Class Neighborhoods http:// bit.ly/NMf0xX Purr-fect Playground: Human Sofa...

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Fading into the Soft White

Mrs. Homegrown here: Honeybees congregate on our floating row covers to die. Every day, two, three, four or five will choose to land one last time on this billowing white fabric that covers one of our garden beds. There they will cling while their strength wanes, until they fall off to be lost in the mulch. I know worker bees don’t live very long. They work so hard that by the end of their lives, their wings hang in shreds. Their little b...

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