Search Results for: label/native plants

318 results

Bleach Alternatives for Disinfecting Pruning Shears

Mr. Homegrown
Fruit Trees, Gardening
1 Comment
Apples with fire blight: one reason you should disinfect pruning sheers. Photo by Peggy Greb Neighbor Anne tipped me off to an interesting fact sheet on disinfecting pruning sheers by Dr. Linda Chalker-Scott, a horticulture professor at Washington State University. I’ve been using bleach which, it turns out, is not the best choice. Bleach is both toxic to humans and to plants as well. It also stains clothes and damages tools. Chal...

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Growing Strawberries in a Self Irrigating Gutter (SIG).

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Self Watering Containers
12 Comments
...dium and how much of it would be taken up into the fruit? I don’t have an answer to either. If you know of science-based information (i.e. not Livestrong articles) on PVC and growing food please leave a link. Generally, plants do not take up toxins into fruit so I’m not losing any sleep thinking about eating a few strawberries grown in my small PVC SIG. I might think twice about eating greens grown in PVC. The other issue is the use o...

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Mulberries

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
8 Comments
The Mulberry trees (Morus nigra) along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou are producing their delicious fruit. The picture above is an immature berry–this particular tree produces a dark purple berry when ready to eat. Some sources on the internets, as well as Delena Tull’s excellent book Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest warn against consuming the unripe fruit, claiming that doing so produces an unpleasant, mildly psyc...

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Vertical Vegetables

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Self Watering Containers, Thoughtstylings, Vegetable Gardening
6 Comments
...d start up costs just to name a few. And I’m not alone. The New York Times did some critical reporting on the subject of vertical garden systems in a recent article, “Gardens That Grow on Walls.” For certain plants vertical growing might work. I haven’t tried it, but this DIY vertical succulent garden in Sunset Magazine certainly is striking. But vegetables? Their roots need space and you’d need to do a lot of wateri...

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It’s Calendula Season!

Mrs. Homegrown
Body Care, Domesticus, Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs
17 Comments
...#8217;m using it right now to treat my sunburn–which is what made me think of this post. But outside of this, it’s an all around useful herb.  Here’s a couple of profiles to check out if you need convincing: Plants for a Future;  University of Maryland It takes about 60 days for Calendula to reach maturity from seed, so if it’s spring where you live, now is a good time to plant it. Note that Calendula is a happy volunteer....

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Garden Design Trends: Interplanting and Plant Communities

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
4 Comments
...ssed form. The example he uses is the striking garden at Arthritis Research UK. You can see a video of that garden here. Rosalind Creasy has demonstrated, this same interplanting strategy can be used with edible and medicinal plants. Another related design strategy are gardens inspired by wild plant communities. The example Rainer cites is the Daily Telegraph garden seen in the picture above. You can watch a video about that garden here. Now how...

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Genetically-Engineered Organism Secretes Diesel

Eric Thomason
Solar
13 Comments
...n produce 15,000 gallons of diesel fuel per acre annually, over four times more than the most efficient algal process for making fuel. And they say they can do it at $30 a barrel. Normally I am opposed to genetically modified plants but this would appear to be a contained situation. Would it be a good thing for the planet if we had unlimited diesel fuel? I would guess that the CO2 would be net neutral whatever escapes the exhaust pipe would have...

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Essential System #9 – Hydration

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
RLeave a comment
...e our foundation repairs, is the construction of a rainwater storage system. We plan to feed one of our roof downspouts to several fifty gallon plastic drums that will be linked together. We will use this water for irrigating plants in the front yard. While, admittedly, we don’t have room for much rainwater storage to make a big difference, we plan on filling these drums with municipal water after the rainwater runs out. That way we will al...

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Compost Rebuttal

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening
35 Comments
...ens. Kill root nematodes. Don’t just believe me, listen to soil scientist Dr. Elaine Ingham in this youtube video: Ingham’s work is controversial, but I believe time will prove her ideas correct. To grow fussy plants like vegetables we need to introduce beneficial microorganisms and fungi into the soil via well made compost. To make that compost we need to monitor the pile’s temperature carefully (it should be between 55ºC a...

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Laundry to Landscape 2.0

Mr. Homegrown
Water and Power, Water Conservation
13 Comments
...projects I’ve done. No cursing whatsoever! Now Lora can’t wait to do the laundry. She, of course, uses only Oasis Biocompatible Laundry Detergent. Note that many “eco” detergents will kill terrestrial plants–I’ll do a blog post on this shortly, as I discovered one major manufacturer claiming that a detergent was safe for greywater only to discover that it contained several different sodium compounds, definitel...

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