De-Cluttering the Garden

...rd has accumulated a few items that need to go. Replacing under-performing plants. Particularly in small spaces like ours there is no room for plants that are sickly or just don’t look attractive. Ditto for fruit trees that have never produced. I’m with Piet Ouldolf on this: if possible, plants in our tended spaces need to look good year round (even when dormant) and they need to provide wildlife habitat. Rethinking the garden. Even the best garde...

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Physalis pruinosa a.k.a. “Ground Cherry”

...ich includes edible plants such as tomatoes and potatoes, and psychotropic plants such as datura and tobacco. Many plants of the nightshade family combine edibility and toxicity–Physalis pruinosa has edible fruit that tastes something like a cross between a pineapple and a tomato, with the rest of the plant being poisonous. The Physalis genus, which includes Physalis pruinosa, is somewhat of a neglected backwater of the nightshade family with a nu...

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Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...the far-reaching beneficent effects of this civic housecleaning and garden-making campaign. The general conclusions arrived at by the committee are: that the chief lesson of the garden-paying for things through work-is within the understanding of even young children. A contestant, a girl of thirteen who had had three years of instruction in a school garden, when asked what she was going to put in her home garden replied: “Well, my father is out of...

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A Homemade Mattress?

...the wool. It took her about 6 hours to fill the mattress. 3) Here is a webpage, in French, showing the mattress making process. Lots of useful pictures. I have to run it through Google Translate for more clues. 4) Do not fall for the eHow result if you search for how to make a wool mattress. It gets off to a great start by recommending you use glue, rather than stitching, to construct your mattress tick . (They call the tick a “fabric sheet pouch...

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