Planting a Mini-Orchard

...e we cut down (even though God Hates Figs!). The advantage with these four trees is that they can survive, once established, should we find ourselves unable to use any water due to the aforementioned bad-ass draught scenarios. Our house sits on a small hill, with the front yard sloping down towards the street. We placed the trees at the top of the slope and made mulch basins like the one illustrated above. The outlet chamber consists of a upside d...

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Gardening Resources in Los Angeles County

...ebruary delivery. Get your order in soon as they often sell out of popular trees. Get trees with low chill hour requirements. Look up your chill hours here. Paradise Nursery in Chatsworth. Papaya Tree Nursery in Granada Hills. Check out Dave Wilson Nursery’s handy guide to backyard orcharding, Do not plant any grapes that aren’t Pierce Disease resistant. Vegetable Gardening When to plant: http://www.scribd.com/doc/154952660/What-to-Plant-When-in-S...

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How to Squirrel Proof Your Fruit Trees

We’ve been guilty in the past of claiming that growing fruit is labor-free. That’s a lazy blogger’s lie. The truth is that you have to stay on top of pruning, irrigation, fruit thinning, fertilizing and pest prevention if you want to harvest any fruit. After not getting a single peach off our small tree last year due to squirrels, I vowed to do things differently this year. I considered a number of squirrel prevention techniques: Metal collars on...

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Home Orchards for Year Round Food Resiliency

...o toast. Growing fruit takes knowledge and effort. Thankfully, we have a great resource in UC Davis’ guide to backyard orchards. My advice: talk to avid gardeners in your area to learn what grows best. Pay attention to irrigation and pruning. Take out under-performing trees. Buy bare root trees to save money. If you don’t have a yard perhaps a school, business or faith institution in your community could be convinced to plant a small orchard. One...

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Two Podcasts You’ve Got to Hear: Thinking Trees and Rewilding

The Oostvaardersplassen, an attempt to rewild a very unwild place in the Netherlands. In case you can’t get enough of our podcasts, let me suggest two other podcast episodes that will definitely be of interest to Root Simple readers and listeners: WNYC’s Radiolab released an episode, From Tree to Shining Tree which features the mind-bending research of Suzanne Simard. Her work shows that the root systems of forests form a sort of neural network,...

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