How to Garden With California Natives: Lessons from the 2016 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

...oxton/Clark garden: Or one of the many fantastic sheds in the Loxton/Clark garden: Or this inventive bit of garden art from the Hessing/Bonfigli garden in Altadena: Kelly and I both have mixed feelings about using found materials in a garden. I think the focus is often too much on telling a kind of visual joke, like when you, say put googly eyes on a old muffler and paint it purple. What works about the found art examples below and above from the...

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Urban Homestead Trademarks Cancelled!

After six years of legal wrangling, “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” belong to us all. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has cancelled the trademarks thanks to the hard work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the law firm of Winston & Strawn. Here’s the press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Urban Homesteaders Win Cancellation of Bogus Trademarks Global Community Had Faced Baseless Legal Claims and Content Remo...

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Defining a Garden’s Purpose

...od isn’t practical? Organic Mechanics Succulents in the Organic Mechanic’s garden. The first stop on the Garden Blogger’s Fling was to a garden designed by Sean Stout and James Pettigrew (who, together, run a landscape design firm called Organic Mechanics). They turned the difficult space behind the apartment they live in—two small, very shady yards in adjoining buildings in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin district—into a place to sit, eat and e...

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“Urban Homesteading” belongs to us all

...r Urban Homesteading, for winning the right for all of us to use the term “urban homesteading” freely from now on out. Longtime readers may remember that back in 2011, the Dervaes Institute sent notices to a dozen or so organizations, informing them that they could no longer use the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” unless speaking about the work of the Dervaes Institute, as they had registered trademark on both terms. Beyond that,...

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Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...ve teachers to part time work to assist the twenty-two regular teachers of gardening. A new feature-that of supervised home gardens–was added. This arrangement gave children not under school garden instruction an equal chance with those who were. The committee furnished the rules, prepared and supplied manuals, gave score cards, lists of plants, planting calendars, cultural directions, etc., helped with the planning of all gardens, handled and fur...

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