The tale of the worm bin celery

...hope. Celery doesn’t like our climate much, and I consider it one of those plants which is easier to buy than to grow. To my surprise, the plant did quite well, though it did have a feral quality to it, despite its mild domestic origins. It didn’t grow fat, moist stalks which can be used to scoop up peanut butter. It grew stringy, dark green stalks which tasted powerfully of celery. It made excellent stock, and chopped into fine pieces, it was goo...

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How To Stop Powdery Mildew

...the vegetable garden back off on nitrogen Non-chemical approaches sprinkle plants with water mid morning–add soap for more effectiveness remove infected leaves promptly and dispose of them Fungicides: apply horticultural oil, neem oil or jojoba oil if the temperature is under 90° F. Do not apply any of these oils if you have used sulfur. DIY Options For home remedies I turned to advice from Washington State University horticulturalist Linda Chalke...

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Will the Lawn Rebate Turn LA into a Gravel Moonscape?

...ng gravel and mulch moonscapes. It’s an education problem. For most people plants are a sort of green background material. Our ancestors could distinguish between hundreds of plants, but that ancestral memory has been hijacked by commercial interests. Now, instead of plant identification skills, we name and distinguish things like cars and mobile devices. If there was a kind of car rebate program that inadvertently replaced BMWs with Pontiac Aztek...

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2014, a Year in Comments: Plant Thievery, Loquats, Breakfast Cerial and the Apocalypse

...l plant thievery news, a Los Angeles bakery lost most of its outdoor patio plants and the Episcopal Cathedral had an entire orange tree disappear. I like to think of these crimes from the plant’s perspective. Assuming they survive, the plant probably enjoys being able to travel and spread genetic material. Many plants, after all, evolve ingenious ways of, for instance, getting birds to eat seeds and poop them out over the landscape. Appealing to o...

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Phytoremediation of Heavy Metals

...them up as readily. One promising strategy is phytoremediation, the use of plants to uptake heavy metals. youarethecity, in New York, is experimenting with Indian mustard, mugwort, basket willow and sunflowers to remediate a contaminated garden. The results are promising with some metals down 50% in a year. Mugwort (Artimesia vulgaris) did an especially good job with a wide range of contaminants. I should note that Garm Wallace, who runs Wallace L...

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