Search Results for: label/least favorite plant

424 results

Derek Jarman’s Garden

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
1 Comment
Photo by angusf Avant-garde filmmaker Derek Jarman spent the last years of his life, after an HIV diagnosis, tending a bleak, wind-swept patch of land opposite a nuclear power plant on the southern coast of England. With just a few hardy plants and some scavenged pieces of wood he put together a stunning garden. He wrote a book about it called, simply, Derek Jarman’s Garden. You can also view a flikr photo set here. Photo b...

Continue reading…

Huntington Ranch Workshop: Foraging and the Living Kitchen

Mr. Homegrown
Events
RLeave a comment
...’s the details: Living Kitchen is a series of informal foraging and cooking workshops that aims to reorganize our connection to land, ourselves and our communities through the awareness of the spontaneous and cultivated plants around us. Led by Nance Klehm, this workshop will walk participants through the Huntington Ranch and discuss the strategy of food foresting that specifically incorporates or allows for spontaneous vegetation to build...

Continue reading…

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...

Continue reading…

Purple Sicilian Cauliflower

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Pests, Vegetable Gardening
3 Comments
The Homegrown Revolution compound’s purple Sicilian cauliflower (Cavolfiore di Sicilia Violetto from Seeds from Italy) from our illegal parkway garden is now ready for the table after four months since planting from seed. Cauliflower needs some attention; it needs to be kept moist and it’s prone to aphids, but the little buggers can be blasted off with a hose fairly easily. While the plant takes up a lot of room and doesn’t yi...

Continue reading…

The Barrier Method

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Pests
6 Comments
Over the years we’ve lost countless plants to digging, chewing, trampling and sucking critters, mammals and insects both. We finally got smart. It makes sense to invest a little extra time and money to protect your crops and your livestock with physical barriers. This practice started sort of piecemeal around here, with us only exerting ourselves over particularly problem-prone situations. Nowadays protection is standard for every bed we p...

Continue reading…

Rules for Eating Wheat

Mr. Homegrown
Bread, Food, Wheat
24 Comments
black swans? I think we need a wheat equivalent of Michael Pollan’s food rules, so here it goes: Acknowledge our ignorance in the face of the great complexity of nature. Thus, we should be conservative when it comes to plant breeding. Saving seed and developing local varieties are a good thing. Genetic modification is probably a huge risk.  Breed wheat for flavor and disease resistance not shipability and ease of mechanical harvesting....

Continue reading…

More Medlar Mania

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Gardening
3 Comments
...imbs they were on so I lost them. We are in a colder spot but still are only about 15 – 20 miles inland from the coast. If you have an existing pear tree you may want to graft medlar onto that so you don’t have to plant a whole tree to see if they will do well in your area. Make sure you sterilize pruning tools and grafting knives between cuts and do not share infected scion wood. This will help to control fire blight. If it does deve...

Continue reading…

Greywater Precautions

Mr. Homegrown
Water Conservation
2 Comments
...g greywater: Do not apply greywater to crops that you will eat raw, such as strawberries, carrots or lettuce. Using greywater on any vegetables is somewhat dodgy in general for heath reasons, but greywater is fine for edible plants such as fruit trees where the crop is far from the ground and the risk of direct contamination by contact with contaminated water is low. Do not apply greywater to lawns (lawns are evil anyways) or to the foliage of a...

Continue reading…

Your Essential Oil Toolkit

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus
31 Comments
...e essential oil price scale. [Ah! Before I go on, Erik reminds me that not everyone knows what essential oils are. He'd never heard of them before he married me. Essential oils are the distilled, concentrated scent essence of plants: "volatile aroma compounds" according to Wikipedia. They are also called volatile oils. Most are made processing fresh plant matter in a still, though some are made through other extraction processes. As scenting agen...

Continue reading…