Search Results for: label/landscaping

50 results

Growing Artichokes on the Sly

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening
8 Comments
...food-bearing plants that grow well in your area. Check out the book Perennial Vegetables for inspiration. Herbs, like chives, are an easy place to start. Alternatively, consider tucking some annuals here and there among the landscaping. Garlic is a good bet. It blends easily into flower beds and grows with little care. (Of course, you’ll want to take note of whether your landlord is spraying the landscape with pesticides.) And homeowners...

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Nuts!

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
...e happy to know that you are helping the share holders of that big corporate chain, because they bought the nuts for a fraction of what quality fresh nuts would cost. The other moral here is to incorporate nut trees into your landscaping. Why plant a useless ficus tree when you can plant something that will provide food? And come harvest time you wont need to mix in any racing fuel....

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Fallen Fruit

Mr. Homegrown
Events, Food, Foraging, Gardening
2 Comments
...a manifesto: A SPECTER is haunting our cities: barren landscapes with foliage and flowers, but nothing to eat. Fruit can grow almost anywhere, and can be harvested by everyone. Our cities are planted with frivolous and ugly landscaping, sad shrubs and neglected trees, whereas they should burst with ripe produce. Great sums of money are spent on young trees, water and maintenance. While these trees are beautiful, they could be healthy, fruitful...

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Backyard Rebirth

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
Our shack as spied by Google. Our yard is a disaster. There’s some randomly planted natives, vegetable beds lying fallow after a mediocre summer and large areas of, well, nothing. However, this ongoing landscaping disaster brought a valuable lesson: sometimes it’s best to bring in someone from outside the household for design advice, particularly if that person knows what they are doing. Thank you Tara Kolla of Silver Lake...

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Visit the Eco-Home

Mr. Homegrown
Events
1 Comment
Julia Russell is Los Angeles’ original urban homesteader. If you haven’t visited her beautiful “Eco-Home”, now is the time. She’s a pioneer in edible landscaping, solar power, and many other things we all now take for granted. Best of all, you can take a tour: “Since the 1970’s, April has been home to Earth Day. The theme for this year’s Earth Day is “the Green Generation,” and what better way to strengthen y...

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A Prickly Situation

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
RLeave a comment
Today’s post is for clueless white folks as our hermanos y hermanas already know this shit. As we’ve suggested before the rule with landscaping at the Homegrown Evolution compound is, if you gotta water it you gotta be able to eat it. But there are a few miracle plants, well adapted to Southern California’s climate, that are both edible and don’t need watering. One of the most versatile is the prickly pear cactus, of whi...

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An Echo Park Weed Salad

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
1 Comment
There’s nothing like a little urban blight to produce an excellent salad. While not impoverished (not unless you consider dilapidated $600,000 bungalows a sign of destitution), our neighborhood ain’t exactly Beverly Hills, meaning that in terms of landscaping it’s a little rough around the edges. And the edges–parkways, cracks in the asphalt, neglected plantings were, on this warm February day, overflowing with weeds. Edi...

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Favorite Plants- New Zealand Spinach

Homegrown Neighbor
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
13 Comments
...em broke and most of the plants withered and died or were mercilessly attacked by bugs. But this plant kept on going strong. I have been growing it for many years and find it a reliable plant. In The Complete Book of Edible Landscaping, Rosalind Creasy writes, “New Zealand spinach makes a marvelous temporary ground cover, is good in hanging baskets, and will cascade over the sides of planter boxes. Grow it on the patio so it will be close...

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Least Farvorite Plant:–Heavenly Bamboo–Neither Heavenly nor Bamboo

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Thoughtstylings
12 Comments
...gly, diseased and caked with Los Angeles smog dust. A few hour later I ripped it out. Needless to say Mrs. Homegrown is dismayed that it takes two experts to confirm something before I’ll listen to her advice. Marital landscaping disputes aside, it’s not that this plant is inherently evil, it’s just not that interesting. Heavenly bamboo is not a bamboo It’s a member of the Berberidaceae or Barberry family. All parts of...

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Book Review: The New Sunset Western Garden Book

Mr. Homegrown
Reviews
6 Comments
...copy. Lavish photos have replaced the drawings of my 1998 copy. The new edition has significantly more coverage of edibles, including a vegetable planting schedule as well as nice photographs of veggies worked into ornamental landscaping schemes.  One of the improvements I’m most pleased to see are lists of plants for attracting bees, butterflies, birds and beneficial insects. And Hawaii, Alaska southern British Columbia and Alberta residen...

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