Our Disastrous Summer Garden

...ad to water our already alkaline soil with alkaline water. Only the native plants and what we call the Biblical plants seem happy (e.g. the fig and the pomegranate). The drought and an extreme heat wave pushed everything in the garden to the edge–and a few over the edge: in the last month we abruptly lost some garden stalwarts, including a rosemary bush and a culinary sage. Despite all these disasters, I came back from the Heirloom Expo with some...

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069 Understanding Roots with Robert Kourik

...lant fruit trees and the intricacies of how to water trees, vegetables and native plants. Then we delve deep into drip irrigation, dynamic accumulators and phytoremediation. If you’d like to pick up a copy of one of Robert’s books visit robertkourik.com. If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitche...

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Tomato Grafting Fail

...ng a greenhouse within which to create a “healing chamber” for the grafted plants would have made the process much easier. Since I have no space or desire to build a greenhouse I’m, most likely, going to give up on attempting to graft my own tomatoes. I did this project out of a geeky sense of fun but it resulted in a summer with no homegrown tomatoes and that’s a life not worth living. A better project, for our climate, would be to figure out how...

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Least Favorite Plant: Yellow Oleander (Thevetia peruviana)

...“suicide tree”, so named for its use in Sri Lanka, though I’ve found other plants with this same moniker. The scientific name is Thevetia peruviana, and it’s also known as “lucky nut” (can we change that to unlucky nut please?), Be Still Tree (presumably because you’ll be still if you eat any of it), and yellow oleander (it’s a relative of Southern California’s favorite freeway landscaping flower). I was able to dig up a research study on what the...

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Spreadin’ Seed

...ll. The Neighbors My mom’s elderly neighbor, who spends each summer in his native Greece, loves to garden and grows, among many other things, at least four different kinds of arugula, which he calls, “the Greek Viagra”. He gave us seeds for two different arugulas, some basil from the northern mountains of Greece and countless other untranslatable plants, and packed them up for us in blue medicine bottles. We’ve grown his vegetables before and, whi...

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