Daikon Radish!

...e Homegrown Evolution compound this winter though, as you can see from the picture above, the artichokes and rosemary in the background are thriving as they always do. Here in Los Angeles, winter is usually the best season for growing things, as perverse as that may sound to folks in the rest of the US. But for us, some combination of bad timing (not getting stuff in early enough), depleted soil and cold temperatures have contributed to a less tha...

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More on our gardening disasters

...ey were a wonder and a marvel to me. Somewhere we have a fourteen year old picture of me holding my first cabbage, grinning my head off. That, folks, is why we should garden. Not to get woo-woo and people away, but I think there’s a spirit to the garden, and it responds to our intentions. This is not to say that good intentions alone can make a good garden. You need knowledge, the cooperation of the elements, and the willingness to put in the work...

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Interview With Apartment Gardener Helen Kim

...ts were supported by steel mesh baskets and lashed to building with 50 lb. picture wire. I never heard back from him and he was replaced by another in a long line of building managers. Several years of walk-through inspections have come and gone, and nobody has mentioned it since. While I still wonder as to what the actual law is on windowsill plants, I’m not about to stir the pot by clarifying it with the management here. HE: You’re an amazing ch...

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Spam Poetry Sunday

In lieu of our usual picture Sunday, we offer instead a beautiful word picture from our friends the spammers. Our software blocks thousands of these every day, but some get through and we have to hand prune our comment sections: We wish to thannk you yett agai ffor the gorgeous ideas you offered Janet when preparing her own post-graduate research and, most importantly, pertaining to providing masny of the ideas in a blog post. If we had been awar...

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Front Yard Update: Welcome to Crazy Town

...n ongoing experiment. The golden yarrow is the small yellow flower in this picture. Surprise number one is Golden Yarrow (Eriophyllum confertiflorum) which is not a true yarrow at all. This was supposed to be a relatively small plant, maybe one foot high by two feet wide. I planted 3, and they’ve taken over the left side of the slope. Obviously, they like sunny hillsides! But you know, that side of the slope gets some shade, too, and the shade pat...

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