Search Results for: label/soil

219 results

Vegetable Gardening for the Lazy

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
12 Comments
...ere, jam making with the fruit here, avoiding the spines here and penned a very early potty-mouthed love letter to the plant here. Needless to say, a plant that needs no added water or fertilizer and grows in dismal, alkaline soil while producing an abundant crop is a plant that allows more time to get the perfect vermouth/gin ratio for those late afternoon cocktail sessions on the urban homestead....

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Joshua Tree Earthen Oven Class With Kurt Gardella

Mr. Homegrown
Events
1 Comment
...nd do-it-your-selfers, and is a great introduction to adobe construction and earthen plasters covered in more depth in adobeisnotsoftware’s other classes. Topics Include: Local considerations and the siting your earthen oven Soil and material selection, sourcing and testing Foundations and oven base design and materials Sizing Sand Form and Oven Domes Natural oven plasters and finishes Firing and baking in your oven. Instruction Type: This is...

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Loofah Sponges

Mrs. Homegrown
Cleaning, Domesticus, Gardening
14 Comments
...s does limit its cultivation to more southern latitudes, unless you can maybe get a jump start by sprouting indoors.  Some tips: The seeds need warmth to sprout–sort of like tomato seeds. They won’t start in cold soil. Start them indoors over heat if you have to.  Basic growing requirements are lots of sun, lots of water, warm weather and time. Again, three months for food, for months for sponges. Here in SoCal March is a good...

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Moringa!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Permaculture
1 Comment
...ulating blood pressure, dealing with joint pain and treating inflammation. The seed pods can be pressed to produce a high quality cooking oil. The leaves are also edible and the plant is drought tolerant and will grow in poor soil. Native to the southern foothills of the Himalayas, the Moringa tree is cultivated in many parts of Asia as well as Mexico and Africa. Here’s what Wikipedia says: The immature green pods, called “drumsticks” are p...

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More On the National Heirloom Exposition

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
Squash tower at the National Heirloom Exposition Quite honestly, between the lead and zinc in our soil and an endless heat wave that seems to portend climactic disaster, I’ve been a bit dispirited with our little urban homestead project this summer. The Heirloom Exposition up in Santa Rosa lifted me out of my petty depression. The amazing speakers, exhibits and vendors, left me inspired and ready to get back to work. This week I...

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Solitary Bee Nests: Why Having Bare Ground is Good

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
8 Comments
...ociety Guide to Conserving North American Bees and Butterflies and Their Habitat , 70% of solitary bees (not to be confused with honey bees) build their nests in open, dry spots of dirt. While I’m all for mulch to build soil and suppress weeds, the Xerces Society makes a good case for keeping a small part of your yard bare and thus open for native bee habitat. In case these are the infamous Los Angeles sandworms, Anne plans on avoiding rhyt...

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Tips on Composting from Will Bakx of Sonoma Compost

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening
2 Comments
Sonoma Compost’s composting operation. On Thursday at the National Heirloom Exposition, Will Bakx, soil scientist and operations manager of Sonoma Compost, gave a rapid fire lecture on the nitty gritty details of composting. Here’s some of his useful tips: Temperature and Turning Compost should stay above 131ºF for 15 days to kill pathogens. Bakx recommended getting a thermometer to check the temperature every day during the...

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Garden Like a Pirate

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
1 Comment
...g our own open pit mine or built our own miniature coal fired power plant without any City of LA official giving a damn. For our piratical parkway garden we built two six by six foot raised beds, filled it with quality garden soil, and stuck in two matching wire obelisks for growing beans and tomatoes. Much to our surprise it has been a big success – we had a bumper crop of carrots, beans, turnips, garlic, onions, and beets in the winter an...

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Laundry to Landscape 2.0

Mr. Homegrown
Water and Power, Water Conservation
13 Comments
...8211;I’ll do a blog post on this shortly, as I discovered one major manufacturer claiming that a detergent was safe for greywater only to discover that it contained several different sodium compounds, definitely bad for soil! Ludwig gives both a version of this project in PVC and another in HDPE plastic. I chose to work with the politically incorrect PVC since I couldn’t find the groovier 1-inch HDPE in less than 300 foot rolls. If a...

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Homegrown Evolution in the LA Times

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
11 Comments
...and tomatoes. We constructed it in October of 2005 and have grown a few season’s worth of crops. Here’s our parkway garden just after putting it in. We installed raised beds because of the compacted, poor quality soil. Winter and early spring is the best season for most vegetables here in Los Angeles. In January of 2006 we had a riotous crop of sweet peas, greens, calendula and garlic. This past winter we planted dandelion greens, co...

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