Attractive Ornamental Flowering Trees

...petiginosa (pink trumpet tree) A tough and beautiful tree that’s great for urban locations. Tabebuia chrysotricha Of all the trees Dr. Turney showed, I think this one was my favorite. The yellow flowers really pop out against a blue sky. Brachychiton acerifolius (Australian Flame Tree) Speaking of popping out, red flowers are also really dramatic. Chionanthus retusus Another good urban tree. To these suggestions I’d add one of my own that also pro...

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La Alternativa

...tree. What we like most about Gálvez is that she is a strong proponent of urban gardening, maximizing every available space for food, a contrast to Martha Stewart’s useless pesticide and fertilizer drenched flower gardens. See the the film Power of Community How Cuba Survived Peak Oil for more on Cuba’s inventive urban gardening. While we hope that the US does not face a Cuban style economic crisis, we at SurviveLA believe that it’s time for la a...

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Saturday Tweets: Thanksgiving Weekend Edition

...ned – Urban Digs Farm https://t.co/8HWF4jgCVL pic.twitter.com/826NcJzCe2 — Urban Agriculture (@UrbanAgRRicult) November 28, 2015 HGVs: designed for the open motorway & inexplicably now commonplace on crowded city streets. pic.twitter.com/DqpIhb3F7o HT @Cycle_Kix — KarlOnSea (@KarlOnSea) November 28, 2015 How do I get my agapanthus to flower? @AlysFowler has the answer #askalys https://t.co/hBbUMnainM pic.twitter.com/y4KdI1toNB — Guardian gardening...

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Dog Cheese

...nd in our nation’s supermarkets simply isn’t worthy of the table. As urban homesteaders we’re particularly interested in finding sources of food in our dense concrete jungles, and we are not alone. The movement is full of solutions to small scale animal husbandry: from pigmy goats, to pot-bellied pigs, city dwellers are trying to do that farm thing in the city–but sometimes with limited success. So we were thrilled to find out that one of the best...

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Hipster Compost

An updated, urban version of the soil food web. In the nearly sixteen years we’ve lived here we’ve seen our local stretch of Sunset Boulevard go from boarded up storefronts and auto body shops to restaurants, bars and cafes. Along with those new businesses and artisinal facial hair, comes a great new set of compost sources. Some of my enterprising neighbors, one in particular, have been creating what could be called hipster compost or, at least,...

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