Search Results for: label/native plants

318 results

A Question About Gophers

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Pests
17 Comments
...his in our first book. The main problem I have with this advice is that the galvanized metal used for hardware cloth and gopher wire leaches significant amounts of zinc as it breaks down. Zinc, in high quantities, is toxic to plants. And, when using cages for trees, I’d worry that the cages would not break down soon enough, causing the roots to circle. Plastic, I’m fairly certain, would not work as the gophers would chew through it. A...

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Seaching for Seeds

Mr. Homegrown
Seeds
3 Comments
Old school seed searching: order assembler standing next to racks containing packages at the W. Atlee Burpee Company, 1943 It’s never too early to start planning that garden. And towards that goal, Mother Earth News has created a nice custom Google search engine that scours over 600 seed suppliers. It’s the perfect way to find those obscure plants and varieties not at the local nursery. The search engine even includes our favorite s...

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Self Watering Containers

Mr. Homegrown
Self Watering Containers
18 Comments
Today, something for our apartment homesteaders. If you’ve got a patch of sun and want to grow some food crops container gardening is the way to go. But container gardening has several drawbacks. Containers dry out quickly and if you forget to water, especially with vegetables, you can easily kill your plants. In fact inconsistent watering is probably the number one cause of container plant failure. Container gardening also uses a lot of...

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In the Gutter

Mr. Homegrown
rainwater harvesting
1 Comment
Our roofs, of course, are another impermeable surface that prevents rainwater from going where it should go–to our edible landscape. We can minimize the surface area by living in as small a house as possible and trying to maximize open ground. At our own compound we’ve even gone so far as to remove some previous resident’s bad addition and reduce the footprint of our house. So called green roofs, which have soil and plants growing on them...

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The Survivor

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
1 Comment
We interrupt this dull series of articles about rainwater harvesting for important breaking news at our urban homestead–the development of the SurviveLA signature cocktail–the Survivor. For a long time we’ve cursed the previous owners of our compound for their useless, inedible landscaping. One of the plants they left us that we’ve lived with for all these years is an ornamental pomegranate tree (Punica granatum) that, wh...

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Tips on Composting from Will Bakx of Sonoma Compost

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening
2 Comments
...een unable to verify this–if any of you know about this issue, please leave a comment. Alleopathic plant material such as eucalyptus leaves and walnut leaves, on the other hand, are ok to add. Bakx cited studies where plants were successfully grown in leaf litter made entirely out of eucalyptus leaves. He suggested keeping such alleopathic material to less than 15% of the pile. Web links Sonoma Compost’s website: www.sonomacompost....

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Bucket Flushing

Mr. Homegrown
Water Conservation
4 Comments
...et next to the shower and collect the water that you run before the shower gets hot. Since you haven’t even stepped into the shower this water is pure water, and not even technically greywater. You can use this water on plants or to flush the toilet manually by pouring it directly in the bowl. It’s also possible to disconnect the bathroom sink from the sewer system and send the water into a bucket that you keep under the sink. This wa...

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Greywater Guerrillas in LA this Weekend

Mr. Homegrown
Water and Power, Water Conservation
4 Comments
...imited so register early! Workshop will include a presentation on greywater reuse, the design process of the system we’ll be building, and the construction of a greywater system from the washing machine to ornamental of plants. Activities will involve digging, measuring, cutting pipes, observing, and more! Sunday July 20th: Presentation: How to Disengage from the Water Grid: With Greywater, Rainwater, and Composting Toilets. Time: 7:30- 9:0...

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Toby Hemenway On How Horticulture Can Save Us

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings
6 Comments
...t by “horticulture” is not, say, propagating begonias. Rather, he defined horticulture as gardening, the kind of gardening some indigenous people did when they influenced the landscape to produce useful and edible plants. In other words, what we in the West would call permaculture. This is in contrast to agriculture which Hemenway considers to have a destructive influence on ecosystems, human health and culture. Hemenway also, justif...

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Whiteflies

Mr. Homegrown
Pests
2 Comments
...might have had a bigger problem on our hands, but biodiversity in our tiny backyard means that the whiteflys don’t have many other options for feeding. What we could have done better is to have kept a closer eye on our plants. Daily inspection of more sensitive vegetables is always a good idea, but something we’ve been lax about lately. Keeping intensively planted annual vegetable beds close to places of daily activity means being ab...

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