Search Results for: label/rooftop gardening

219 results

Straw Bale Gardens

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
16 Comments
Tasha Via’s straw bale garden. Michael Tortorello (who profiled us when Making It came out) is one of my favorite writers covering the home ec/gardening subjects we discuss on this blog. He had an article last week in the New York Times, “Grasping at Straw” on straw bale gardening. We’ve very tempted to give the practice a try in our backyard. Why? We have lead and zinc contaminated soil so growing veggies in the ground...

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Advances in Gardening Series: The Perennial Herb Bed, Patience and Plant Spacing and Breaking Your Own Rules

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening, Herbs
4 Comments
No, this is not a pile of weeds. Someday it’s going to look good. Mrs. Homegrown here: One of the big lessons of gardening is patience. One way gardening patience is expressed is in planting perennials: buying leeetle teeny plants and planting them vast distances apart and then waiting with your hands politely folded until they grow to full size. A very common landscaping mistake is to go out and buy a bunch of gallon-sized land...

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More on that nice rooftop garden . . .

Mr. Homegrown
Rooftop Gardening, Self Watering Containers
RLeave a comment
Bruce F. the creator of that nice rooftop garden we featured last week dropped us a note to say that he kept a diary about the process that you can read here, via the Daily Kos. Bruce also mentioned a few other interesting links: Humanure Composting via Feral Scholar A fiery essay, The Politics of Food is Politics via Counterpunch and A 35-Point Practical Guide for Action by Bruce himself Thanks Bruce F! And we’ll be back soon after we rec...

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Skid Row Community Garden Gets SIPs

Mr. Homegrown
Appropriate Technology, Gardening, Preparedness, Self Watering Containers
3 Comments
ow-income residents on skid row.  Hars, Lobl, myself and a bunch of folks from LACAN put together a few SIPs and planted vegetables on the LACAN rooftop. The plants are thriving in a space where previous attempts at container gardening met with mixed success. Gardening, like all the ways we humans interact with our surroundings is all about context. If you’ve got soil, as I’m lucky to have, work with that first. But if you have only a...

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Guerrilla Gardening: Over and Out

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Thoughtstylings
20 Comments
Seed Bombs at Whole Foods! Photo by Jimmy Chertkow Proof that all counter-cultural movements eventually get subsumed into the mainstream: a Whole Foods seed bomb display sent to me by Root Simple tipster James Chertkow, who pointed out the anthropomorphized orange with a Mohawk. Maybe it’s time to retire the whole guerrilla gardening/punk rock thing and just, well, plant some flowers and not make a big deal out of it....

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Root Simple Edible Gardening Classes at the Huntington Ranch

Mr. Homegrown
Events
4 Comments
There are still some spots available for our edible gardening class at the Huntington that starts this Saturday. In the course of the three consecutive Saturday sessions, we’ll build a compost pile, dissect soil test reports, make a seed starting mix and discuss incorporating fruit trees and native plants into your edible landscape among many other topics. The class will be held at the Huntington’s spectacular Ranch. Here’s th...

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Vegetable Gardening in the Shade

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
21 Comments
New Zealand spinach in partial shade Inspired by Scott Kleinrock’s work at the Huntington Ranch, I’ve been experimenting with growing vegetables in partial shade. Two of our vegetable beds sit under two large deciduous trees. In the winter these beds get full sun, but in the summer they might get as a little as four or five hours of direct sun. Now my shade gardening experiment may not be applicable to northern climates. In...

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Two Vegetable Gardening Commandments

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
9 Comments
Two of our vegetable beds looking kinda shabby. I spent the Thanksgiving weekend up on the vegetable gardening equivalent of Mount Sinai receiving a set of revelations. Someday I’ll have Mrs. Homegrown transcribe the complete stone tablets (urbanite rather than stone, technically) I received in their entirety. In the meantime, I’ll share two of the commandments: 1. Thou shalt not have more vegetable beds than thou canst ma...

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Organic Gardening Magazine Tests Seven Different Potato Growing Methods

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Resources, Vegetable Gardening
14 Comments
Doug Hall, writing for Organic Gardening magazine, did a test of seven different potato growing methods: hilled rows, straw mulch, raised beds, grow bags, garbage bags, wood boxes and wire cylinders. His conclusion? Raised beds worked the best giving the highest yield. Some of the other methods worked well too, though I wonder about black materials, such as grow bags, in our hot climate. The last time we grew potatoes we used a stack of tires....

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Gardening in an Apartment Windowsill

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening
11 Comments
...hyme, strawberries, mustard greens, lemon grass, and what Helen describes as “a curryish plant that is awfully nice for smelling but underwhelming for cooking.” Read an interview with Helen about this garden here. Gardening is not about the quantity of space one controls or the weight of the food harvested. It’s about a love for beauty, an attention to detail and an appreciation of good food. Imagine if all our unused or negle...

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