Search Results for: label/least favorite plant/page/5/2011/04/making-it

657 results

Testing the Lead Testers

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Lead, Soil
8 Comments
...n extractant, AB-DTPA (ammonium bicarbonate Diethylene Triamine Pentaacetic acid). Here’s how Wallace described their lead testing techinique, We use AB-DTPA (ammonium bicarbonate Diethylene Triamine Pentaacetic acid). It is a gentle extractant and it mimics roots in extracting minerals from the soil. Most often environmental tests are made with boiling acids which are more aggressive than roots. The AB-DTPA method is a standard testing me...

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Plantain!

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Gardening, Water and Power, Water Conservation
RLeave a comment
Homegrown Revolution neighbors Annelise and Eric intercepted us on our nightly dog walk and not only invited us up to their front porch for a glass of wine, but also sent us away with a couple of plantains harvested from their next door neighbor’s tree. It’s exactly what we’d like to see more of–folks growing food instead of lawns and everyone sharing the abundance. While there’s a lot of banana trees in Los Angeles...

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Sunset Magazine’s Take on Zones

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
13 Comments
re finely delineated micro-climates. You can find your Sunset zone here. With your Sunset zone you can then use their handy online plant finder or one of their many books. While an excellent resource, unless I failed to find it, I couldn’t locate any vegetable planting schedule based on Sunset zones. Perhaps its an impossible question, proof of the adage that “all gardening advice is local.”...

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Behold the Western Electric 500

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
There’s much to love about the Western Electric 500 telephone. It’s easily serviceable and built like a tank. Why? When it was manufactured you didn’t own your phone, the telephone company leased it to you. This relationship served as a powerful incentive to manufacture a device that would last. In the 90s I went through three or four cheap cordless phones that broke after a few months of service. I switched back to an old tou...

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How to Process Carob

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Recipes
6 Comments
Before. Photo by Bill Wheelock. Our neighborhood has an abundance of carob (Ceratonia siliqua) trees that, around this time of year, drop thousands of pounds of pods. Now many of us may have unpleasant associations with carob as a 1970s era chocolate substitute, but the tree has a long history in the Middle East, where it’s used to make a tea, as a source of molasses, as a vegetable and as animal feed. The “locusts” th...

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Blueberries in a Self Watering Container

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Self Watering Containers
10 Comments
It may not be pretty but Homegrown Revolution has blueberries. To grow blueberries in a warm climate such as Los Angeles you’ll need to choose a heat tolerant southern highbush variety. Southern highbush blueberries are hybrids that don’t require the winter chilling of their northern relatives. Blueberries also need cross pollination so they should be planted in pairs. We mail ordered two different varieties, “Oneal” and...

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Shiitake Happens

Mr. Homegrown
Mushrooms
11 Comments
Well, actually, shiitake doesn’t happen. It’s back to the drawing board for our first experiment in mushroom growing. We ordered a kit and dutifully followed the directions, but a combination of high temperatures and too much or too little water resulted in the result you see above, what looks like a cake with a skin disease. And even if we got a crop the cost of the kit was too high to make the process economical. The kit came pre-...

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Waiting for our tomatoes/Tomatoland

Mrs. Homegrown
Reviews, Thoughtstylings, Tomatoes
17 Comments
...t a store. I haven’t for years. In this excerpt, Estabrook explains why Erik and I avoid store-bought tomatoes like a plague. I haven’t read his book, so can’t comment on the whole, but I liked the excerpt. It focuses on the tomato industry in Florida. Here in California, we’re not often offered Florida tomatoes. Ours seem to come mostly from Mexico at this time of year–and I have no idea how those tomatoes are grow...

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Spore 1.1

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
7 Comments
Spore 1.1 from matt kenyon on Vimeo. From artists Matt Kenyon and Doug Easterly of S.W.A.M.P.(Studies in Work Atmospheres and Mass Production), “Spore 1.1.” It consists of a rubber tree plant, purchased from Home Depot, that is hooked up to a self-contained watering mechanism and calibrated on a weekly basis, according to the performance of Home Depot stock. If the Home Depot stock does well, Spore 1.1 gets watered. If Home Depot stock does...

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