Karp’s Sweet Quince

...for our small, steeply banked and awkward front yard: plant lots of fruit trees and keep them pruned. Thus began our mini-orchard, delayed for many years by messy foundation work. One of the newest additions to the mini orchard is a bare root tree we ordered from the Raintree Nursery, Karp’s Sweet quince. As you can see from the photo above it’s just started to leaf out. Quince (Cydonia oblonga), a tree native to the Mediterranean and the Middle...

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Chickens and Compost; A Match Made in Heaven

...ady quite passionate about, or perhaps obsessed with, composting and fruit trees. My composting area was way at the back of the yard ( I also keep three worm bins by the house for easy kitchen access). When we were deciding to put in the chicken coop we put it adjacent to the composting area. The composting area later became a part of the chicken run. There is a tangerine tree that is next to the compost that provides shade and protection to the h...

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Least Favorite Plant: Tree of Heaven

...new metric: the economic health of a city can be judged by the size of its trees of heaven (aka Ailanthus altissima). The higher the Ailanthus altissima, the more likely a city is to economically distressed. Tree of heaven is a super weed much reviled by gardeners and landscapers for its unstoppable ability to grow in nearly every climate in the most inhospitable conditions. In a move that will raise a lot of horticultural hackles, the Detroit Tre...

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On the Many Frustrations of Gardening: Pierce’s Disease

...t dry summers, which dry out local streams and rivers, and abundant citrus trees, make inland Southern California an especially bad place to try to grow grapes. Why nurseries continue to sell vines suseptable to Pierce’s here is a mystery to me. In the 1990s Pierce’s disease wiped out 40% of the vines in Temecula’s vineyards. Northern California’s vineyards have experienced what Turney described as an “edge effect”, with Pierce’s claiming the vine...

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Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land

...orocco. There, he’s built a dryland paradise, lush with heat adapted fruit trees, like pomegranates, mulberries and jujubes. He also grows olives, agave, citrus and poetic herbs like lavender and coriander. Bousfiha has built an oasis in a difficult climate and envisions of chain of oases spread around the world: oases for both nature and humanity. These oases are not carefully preserved bits of paradise, but rather are reclaimed from degraded spa...

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