Picture Sundays: A Keyhole Bed and Straw Bale Garden in Texas

...garden. John says, This is my first year to use compost tea. I am growing plants in two Keyhole Gardens, self watering 5 gal plastic buckets and two hay bales (coastal Bermuda hay) that have a wooden framework on top containing bulk landscaping compost from a local nursery. My plants are growing super fast and my tomatoes are loaded. This looks to be the best garden I have ever had. Judging from the fencing it looks like you’ve also figured out a...

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A happy tangle

...hope for survival–and yet I’ve learned to respect the choices of volunteer plants, as Fukuoko-san advised. Sure enough, the sunflower knew what it was doing. It concentrated all its resources into an epic twelve foot growth spurt, straight up, like a bamboo stalk. Only once it crested the top of the pomegranate and found the sun did it begin to spread its arms, and I swear that when it did, I could hear a sigh of relief. Now this monster sunflower...

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130 Farm Unfixed with Jessica Rath

...of the land effects non-human species from the propagation of agricultural plants to the sensoria of bees.” She is on the faculty of the Art Center College of Design and her previous projects include works about apple breeding, co-evolutionary communication between flowering plants and their pollinators and a long term project called Farm Unfixed that we spend most of this conversation discussing. During the podcast Jessica mentions, Foxfire The m...

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My Fellow Californians, Please Water Your Trees

..., at least, most long-lived and valuable components around which the other plants intermesh, if not depend. Mature trees are among the most valuable and difficult-to-replace plants in urban areas. Their loss would be devastating. Trees can be likened to the steel framework of a building; how could the building exist without it. So, keep the trees watered. Not watering the trees results in an arid cityscape, trees that fall over and kill people and...

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A Celebration of Craft

...t. A third person I met at the festival is Alice Doyle, owner of Log House Plants a wholesale nursery in Eugene Oregon. In her lecture she went alphabetically through a list of edible plants she thought were interesting. By the end of the hour, I think she reached the letter “J.” I wished we could have had a few more hours to get to “Z.” And this is another quality of the craftsperson, a selfless enthusiasm that can turn a list of vegetables into...

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