Win Two Tickets to the 15th Annual Theodore Payne Native Plant Garden Tour

...ns (including our neighbor Lora’s house!). If you’re thinking of including native plants in your garden or pondering a garden re-design, the Theodore Payne Garden Tour is a great way to get ideas. To enter our contest leave a comment on this post naming your favorite native plant. Please make sure to enter your email in the comment form (your email will not be published nor used for anything else other than contacting you to send the tickets). We’...

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Front Yard Update: Welcome to Crazy Town

...ardoons are technically invasive plants and one of the bêtes noires of the native plant folks. I doubt we’ll ever be on a native plant garden tour with this monster crowning our so-called native landscape, but Erik loves, loves, loves this plant for inexplicable reasons, so I can’t take it out. The cardoon’s huge leaves are perpetually reaching out to overshade my natives, so I keep hacking them back (more make-work activity). However, I learned t...

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The Wonder of Worms

...at is. This got me wondering if there are other places where worms are not native, and where we should be careful. Clearly they are not native to desert regions, but I doubt they could survive outside of the artificial environment of the worm bin. But perhaps I speak to soon. Southern California, with its long annual dry cycle, also seemed to me to be a place where the earthworm could not be native, but in fact it turns out we have worms, lots 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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