Search Results for: label/garden design

542 results

Garden Swap

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening
3 Comments
Growing your own vegetables is a great way to add flavor, nutrition and, if done carefully, save money in our uncertain economic times. But what if you live in an apartment and don’t have any land to call your own? Homegrown Evolution’s in-box contained an answer to that problem for folks in the Los Angeles area. We love this idea: “Cultivating Sustainable Communities (CSC) is launching its newest project. GardenSwap is an op...

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Vertical Garden Success!

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening, Vertical Farming
14 Comments
Regular readers of the blog know that we’re dubious about vertical gardening, but this is a vertical garden we can really get behind. Here, a cherry tomato is growing out of a crack in a retaining wall in our neighbor’s yard. (It’s just off our front stairs, and is almost certainly an offspring of one of our tomatoes) It is thriving with no water whatsoever. You can’t see them in this picture, but there’s tons of f...

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Garden Edibles

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
3 Comments
...one variety of any given vegetable even at high-end stores. So you gotta grow your own. Coming soon (again, as soon as book #2 is done), we’ll list what we grew this winter and what we plan on growing this summer. From Garden Edibles, this summer, we’re planting San Marzano 2 tomatoes and Rosso Dolce Da Appendere peppers. We always have some San Marzanos growing because they are so damn reliable. But we’re particularly excited...

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

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Native Plants, Pests
8 Comments
Coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis) photo by Art Shapiro I’ve always been suspicious of some of the popular companion planting advice of the sort dispensed in old books like Carrots Love Tomatoes. From what I understand research just hasn’t proven a lot of the relationships these sorts of books tout. What makes intuitive sense to me, however, is that biodiversity in in a garden can create habitat for beneficial insects and bi...

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Giveaway: The New Sunset Western Garden Book

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
101 Comments
We’ve got five copies of the The New Sunset Western Garden Book to give away to lucky readers. All you have to do is leave a comment here telling us where you live (not your address, but your city or region) and name your favorite tomato variety. This way we’ll build a list of the best tomatoes to help everyone with their summer selections. Tuesday, March 6th we’ll announce the five winners here by the name they leave in the c...

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White Sage and Bees and our other sage friends

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs, Native Plants
19 Comments
One of my favorite plants in the garden (I’ve posted about it before) is in bloom right now: the white sage, Salvia apiana.  Salvia apiana means “bee sage” and boy howdy did they get that one right. This sage puts up tall spikes covered with small white flowers that bees can’t resist. Unfortunately, our white sage is situated right by the garden path. So these days, every time I go into the garden I have to squeeze past...

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Get Off Your Ass and Plant a Survival Garden!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
RLeave a comment
Tired of going to the market to buy crappy vegetables that taste out of season no matter what time of year it is? Tired of garlic from China and grapes from Chile? Why waste land, if you have it, on things you can’t eat? And why not have some fresh produce on hand in case of the inevitable zombie invasion. Now, vegetable gardening takes some practice and unfortunately very few books deal with the specifics of Los Angeles’ unique Medi...

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Chop and Drop: Leaving Plant Residues in the Garden

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
6 Comments
...inches, coupling no-tillage with practices preserving high residues could reduce summer soil evaporative losses by about 4 inches (13%). While this study is about commercial agriculture, much of its findings apply to home gardens as well, in my opinion. Leaving residues from the previous crop as a mulch layer saves water and builds soil. It does, of course, make it harder to direct sow seeds, but this is one of the reasons I like to work with...

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More on that nice rooftop garden . . .

Mr. Homegrown
Rooftop Gardening, Self Watering Containers
RLeave a comment
Bruce F. the creator of that nice rooftop garden we featured last week dropped us a note to say that he kept a diary about the process that you can read here, via the Daily Kos. Bruce also mentioned a few other interesting links: Humanure Composting via Feral Scholar A fiery essay, The Politics of Food is Politics via Counterpunch and A 35-Point Practical Guide for Action by Bruce himself Thanks Bruce F! And we’ll be back soon after we rec...

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