043 Growing Vegetables with Yvonne Savio

April 15, 2015

Gardening, Podcasts, Vegetable Gardening

...Favorite vegetables. How to harvest vegetables. How to prepare a vegetable garden. Making compost. The problems with municipal compost. Raised beds vs. growing in the ground. Where to buy soil. Testing soil. How to irrigate vegetables in a drought. Buried buckets for watering vegetables. Seeds vs. seedlings. Succession planting. How to plant seedlings. The website and calendar that Yvonne is putting together. Grow LA Victory Garden Program You can...

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2014: The Year in Review

Mr. Homegrown

December 29, 2014

Thoughtstylings

5 Comments

...otices . . . February Advantages and Disadvantages of Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening After a successful straw bale garden in the summer of 2013, I finally got around to building new raised beds to replace some that we had taken out. Our lead and zinc contaminated soil necessitates this, but I wish I didn’t have to use raised beds for reasons I outlined in this post. March Is Ham Radio Useful? The jury is still out on this question, to be honest. I...

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The Hugelkultur Question

Mr. Homegrown

November 17, 2014

Gardening, Permaculture

48 Comments

...hould be experimenting, I thought. And we have a pile of wood. But, like a gardening version of Hamlet, I started waffling again. I decided to post the hugelkultur question to the Garden Professor’s Facebook page. One of those horticulture professors, Linda Chalker-Scott is someone who I seek out when writing a magazine article. A civil discussion ensued on that Facebook page, proving that Facebook is good for something other than angry political...

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Gardening Mistakes: Six Ways We’ve Killed Plants

Mr. Homegrown

May 13, 2014

Gardening, Mistakes

25 Comments

...ay to break up compacted soil is with a broadfork, a spendy item. We use a garden fork instead. 3. Soil fertility When it comes to growing vegetables, in particular, you need rich soil. Get a soil test first. But soil fertility is a lot more than chemistry–it’s about life. Healthy soils have a rich and diverse microbial and fungal ecosystem. You can jump start that fertility with compost. But somehow we never have enough compost. 4. Bad nursery st...

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Decomposed Granite as Mulch: A very bad idea

Mr. Homegrown

April 30, 2014

Gardening, Native Plants

36 Comments

...years down the road will be pulling decaying bits of plastic out of their garden for evermore. What’s a better approach? Wood chips. Pile it on thick. Skip the plastic liner. Eventually your new plantings will cover any bare areas if you space them correctly. It looks good, and the mulch breaks down and turns into soil. You will still need to weed but that’s called gardening. Save the DG for walkways. Or use mulch on your walkways too. Mulch is f...

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