Search Results for: label/native plants

318 results

Perennial Vegetables

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
12 Comments
For lazy gardeners such as ourselves nothing beats perennial vegetables. Plant ‘em once and you’ve got food for years. For novice gardeners, perennials are plants that, unlike say broccoli (an “annual”), don’t need to be replanted every spring. The best known perennial vegetable in the west is probably asparagus which, given the right conditions, will produce fresh stalks for years. But there are many thousands more...

Continue reading…

Black Nightshade (Solanum nigrum) is Edible and Delicious

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
22 Comments
...ity are commonplace (in fact, I’d argue that they are a universal feature of human culture) while myths of edibility are exceedingly rare, since they are soon discredited.” I strongly suspect that there are many other plants wrongly accused of toxicity. Remember that tomatoes were long thought poisonous, in part due to similarities in appearance to Atropa belladonna, and associations with witchcraft. The second lesson is the importance o...

Continue reading…

A Warning About Straw

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
10 Comments
...ould be a warning about clopyralid and its close cousins. Which bears some mention: Halogenated pesticides aren’t broken down by any but a few soil organisms. Clopyralid and aminopyralid mimic the hormones in broad-leaf plants, causing them to grow un-evenly and die from wrong-facing, crinkled leaves and other symptoms. Grasses are un-affected, so fields of grain and lawns have been sprayed with this sort of chemical, as a cheap way of keep...

Continue reading…

Too Much Phosphate

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Soil
6 Comments
...resulting in interveinal chlorosis, a yellowing of the leaves between the veins. So adding fertilizer that contains phosphate to soil that doesn’t need it is a waste of money, damages the environment and can kill your plants. Of all the soils I’ve tested in Los Angeles, all are already high in phosphate, meaning that most fertilizers, both organic and chemical are both unnecessary and potentially toxic to plants. As the Garden Profe...

Continue reading…

Planting a Mini-Orchard

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Water and Power, Water Conservation
2 Comments
...e it possible. Step one was figuring out how to reuse our washing machine water (read our earlier post on the washing machine surge tank we built). Step two was matching that washing machine water output to the right kinds of plants for the mini-orchard. We settled on the three “Ps” — pomegranate, persimmon, and pineapple guava, plus a mission fig tree to replace the substandard one we cut down (even though God Hates Figs!). The...

Continue reading…

Shibori Challenge Proves Challenging

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Mistakes
9 Comments
...beige out of coffee. These shades are fine in themselves, especially if you want to dress like a hobbit, but not really strong enough to show off shibori patterns. I know it’s possible to get strong colors out of common plants–it seems other people manage it–but I’m beginning to understand why indigo is the classic choice for shibori techniques. Wanting to play with shibori and having no luck with local plants, I experimen...

Continue reading…

My Big Fat Greek Squash

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
12 Comments
Every time I visit my mom, her Greek neighbor pops over the fence to offer me seeds and plants. He visits Greece each summer and comes back with seeds for plants whose names he can’t translate into English. As a result I always have a few mystery Greek vegetables growing in the garden. This spring he gave me a squash seedling he had propagated. It grew into a massive vine and produced two winter squashes whose weight exceeded the capacit...

Continue reading…

Moonlight Medicine Foraging Expedition!

Mrs. Homegrown
Events
2 Comments
...with-nance-klehm/ ************** Echo Park Medicinal Forage with Nance Klehm Wednesday, Dec 9th, 20097-8:30pm Cost: $15/person >>>> An after dark exploration of the sidewalk cracks around Machine Project for local medicinal plants, led by Nance Klehm. Get ready for the long winter dry, cold haul with simple knowledge on how to identify common wild plants that can be used in herbal remedies. >>>> Nance Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urb...

Continue reading…

Why I Grow Vegetables From Seed

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Seeds
23 Comments
...seed. All of the seedlings at the nursery were uninteresting varieties and root-bound–way too big for their pots. And someone tell me what’s up with the trend I’ve noticed recently of selling mature tomato plants in small pots? I suppose novice gardeners probably think they’re getting a better value with a large plant, so the nursery has an incentive to sell root-bound stock. In fact, every last vegetable seedling at th...

Continue reading…

Hugo, humanure and nettles

Mrs. Homegrown
Composting, Reviews
10 Comments
...ater. As I recall, Hugo also had a thing for nettles….hey, wait a minute! Turns out that his rant about nettles is in Les Mis too: One day he saw some country people busily engaged in pulling up nettles; he examined the plants, which were uprooted and already dried, and said: “They are dead. Nevertheless, it would be a good thing to know how to make use of them. When the nettle is young, the leaf makes an excellent vegetable; when it...

Continue reading…