Search Results for: label/rooftop gardening/page/3/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

553 results

Least Favorite Plant: Asparagus Fern (Asparagus setaceus)

Mr. Homegrown
Least Favorite Plant
46 Comments
Today, a new feature on the blog: least favorite plants. I’ve always thought that it’s more fun to read a bad review than a glowing one, so why not extend the concept to the plant world? But we’re not going to rant about “weeds”, which Ralph Waldo Emerson defined as, “a plant whose virtues have not yet been discovered.” As active foragers we’ve found virtues in what most people think of as weeds,...

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Animal Tracking

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Preparedness, Resources
8 Comments
A track trap we laid to capture chipmunk tracks. We got some mice, too. No one wanted our peanuts–the chipmunk actually hopped over them. These critters had an advanced palette, preferring locally sourced pine nuts from the pinon pines. Photo courtesy of one of my classmates, Kurt Thompson.  Mrs. Homegrown here: I just returned from an amazing five-day sojourn in the mountains, at the Windy Springs Preserve, in which I learned the...

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Grow Italian!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
RLeave a comment
It’s almost time to start planting seeds for the most productive growing season in Southern California – winter. While our friends in the cold parts of the country will be freezing their asses off we’ll be picking gourmet salads (sorry to rub it in). Since the climate here is like southern Italy, we like to plant Italian varieties. Which brings us to the source of many of our seeds at the Homegrown Evolution compound, Seeds fr...

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Stirred, Not Shaken

Mr. Homegrown
Biodynamics, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
27 Comments
“Matter is never without spirit and spirit is never without matter.” – Rudolf Steiner This past weekend I had the good fortune of attending an amazing workshop in biodynamic gardening taught by master gardener Dory Rindge. For those of you unfamiliar with biodynamics, it’s a system of agriculture based on the work of early 20th century philosopher and mystic Rudolf Steiner. In the 1920s, at just the point when chemical f...

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Saturday Linkages: Coop Plans, Moonshine and Mercury in Seafood

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
3 Comments
...vilion: Eco-Friendly Retreat Meets Regional Style | Designs & Ideas on Dornob http://dornob.com/pastoral-pavilion-eco-friendly-retreat-meets-regional-style/ … Gardening Loving David Culp’s Layered Garden. Scheming to see the garden. | Garden Rant http://gardenrant.com/2012/12/loving-david-culps-layered-garden-scheming-to-see-the-garden.html … The story of Mission grapes: http://garynabhan.com/i/archives/1942 Signs of the Mayan Apocalypse Ci...

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Farm in a Box

Mr. Homegrown
Aquaculture, Preparedness
11 Comments
Farm in a Box ‘Little Tokyo‘ I never thought I’d see “permaculture” and “Home Depot” in the same sentence, but an article in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (For a Green Thumb, Just Add Water) connects the dots between the two with a new product line called Farm in a Box Aquaponics from Earth Solutions. Farm in the Box is a combined fish tank/planter box. Waste from the fish circulates into the p...

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Basil all winter long

Mrs. Homegrown
Herbs
9 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: Basil is a summer plant. When the nights get cold, basil turns unhappy. It yellows and loses flavor. Here in LA that doesn’t happen until quite late in the year. Erik just pulled out our summer basil a couple of days ago to make room for winter plants. I’m replacing it–in a culinary sense–with Italian parsley, which loves cool weather, but hates the heat. It seems our gardening year swings between...

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Another Panel Solar Cooker

Mr. Homegrown
Solar
3 Comments
Poyourow demoing her solar cooker design There’s no one size fits all solution when it comes to the world of solar panel cookers. All have their advantages and disadvantages. I got an email from author Joanne Poyourow, leader of the amazing Los Angeles Environmental Change Makers, with a simple and effective design she came up with. Pouyourow’s cooker comes together much faster than the CooKit design that I blogged about earlier th...

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Introducing Lora Hall

Mr. Homegrown
Events
4 Comments
Please put your hands together and welcome Homegrown Evolution guest blogger Lora Hall. Lora is a neighbor, owns Los Angeles’ largest hen, Southern California’s largest rhubarb plant and is currently finishing a graduate degree at Cal Poly Pomona. Her master’s work involves the use of vermicomposting to break down a variety of materials (maybe we can get her to explain this!). You can meet Lora in person and pick up some seed...

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Mosaics

Mr. Homegrown
Design
14 Comments
Above is a table the Kelly and I made many years ago with glass mosaic tile. We copied a portion of an ancient Roman mosaic depicting sea life. It took about 40 hours of painstaking work. We still have a box of glass tile sitting in the garage and I’m thinking about breaking up the ugly concrete patio in the back yard and doing some mosaics. Kelly is less than enthused about this for a number of reasons, not least of which is that it will...

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