Native Plant Workshop

February 4, 2009

...tive plants the whole garden has to be natives. In fact, it’s great to mix natives with non-native plants. The natives bring in beneficial wildlife, are hardy and are efficient in terms of water use. Flexibility is key here–go ahead and mix natives with vegetables, fruit trees and other climate-appropriate plantings. 2. Natives aren’t edible. Many natives yield edible and medicinal crops. In North America the best way to delve into this topic is t...

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Our new front yard, part 3: design

Mrs. Homegrown

November 17, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...ight work out well, but you also have to be careful and make sure that non-native blends well visually with the natives. For instance, here in Southern California our native greens are not a very rich green, they tend toward silver. If I bring in plant from somewhere else, and it is a rich green, it might really stick out. And of course, it’s easier to put together a functioning plant community with native plants because you know, theoretically, t...

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Top Six California Native Plant Performers

Mr. Homegrown

June 5, 2017

Gardening

9 Comments

...w initiative called the Wild Yards Project to encourage people to “restore native plant and animal habitat, one yard at a time, using native plants and trees wherever you live.” Note that this project is for people all over the US, not just in California. We’re going to have him on the podcast to discuss the project in depth, but before we do that I’d like all of you to join the Wild Yards Facebook and Instagram. David would especially like people...

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The Manzanita Miracle, or, why you should love native plants if you live in a dry climate

Mrs. Homegrown

December 17, 2015

Gardening, Native Plants

6 Comments

...is that nature has provided us with everything we need. We have beautiful native plants which can thrive with no supplemental water whatsoever, even in drought, provided we plant them correctly, and treat them well. (That last part is actually a huge caveat, since we don’t do either very often.) Here in Los Angeles we seem to be trapped between two competing and unhealthy ideologies. One is “You’ll pry my lawn out of my cold dead hands” and the o...

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Making It

Mr. Homegrown

April 26, 2011

Publications

12 Comments

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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