Garden Update Part II: The Good the Bad and a Lot of Ugly

March 4, 2019

...eds and clutter here. Ugh, more junk. Here’s the nice new patio the Haynes landscaping folks built. The adobe oven is under a blue tarp. Blue tarps are the architectural equivalent of a comb over. The oven needs a little roof which, to extend the metaphor would be the architectural equivalent of a decent wig, if such a thing exists. And, man, do we need some outdoor furniture. Thankfully I came up with an idea for some outdoor furniture that I’ll...

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News From Around the Root Simple Compound

Mr. Homegrown

April 2, 2018

Design

2 Comments

...week a crew will descend on our backyard to begin phase one of a backyard landscaping reboot. First they will break out the word’s ugliest concrete patio and remove the infamous grape arbor, a.k.a. rat canopy. Then they will dig down to adjust the grading at the back of the house so that water flows away not towards the house. I struggle for words to fully describe the ugliness of this concrete patio. It’s a cracked abomination made of red tinted...

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The Soil Beneath Our Feet

Mrs. Homegrown

April 23, 2015

Back to the Garden

4 Comments

...en plot, or we may help in the school garden, or attend meetings about the landscaping of a local park or the future of a recreation area. In all these places, we can exercise soil stewardship. Soil is so important that I’m going to really drill down into this topic. In the next few posts I’ll be talking about 5 areas of personal action on behalf of the soil: Our consumer decisions Composting Mulching No-till gardening Committing to not using chem...

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What does the loving landscape look like?

Mrs. Homegrown

April 16, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening

18 Comments

...can start with what it might look like. The fantastic thing about this new landscaping paradigm is that it is entirely local. If we remove the heinous, homogeneous, ubiquitous lawn from our tool box, suddenly a yard in Santa Fe looks quite different than a yard in Michigan or a yard in Florida. We return, after a long period of delusion, to the realm of common sense. Because the new landscapes are entirely local, I can’t even begin to list or imag...

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Rain Garden Update

Mr. Homegrown

March 17, 2021

Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants

4 Comments

...sides. Volunteer New Zealand Spinach (Tetragonia tetragonoides) She says, “Landscaping the pit is like 3D chess–it’s hard enough to plant a flower bed but this is harder because you have in the same space different growing conditions and you have to make use of this unusual space in a clever way. Is it densely or lightly planted? Is it like a rock garden or do you have plants that cascade down the sides? How do you balance all this and not look cr...

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