Search Results for: label/trees

142 results

How To Design a Garden Step II: Using Google Earth to Draw Up a Plan

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
5 Comments
So you’ve set the goals for your garden, as we outlined in a post earlier this week, and you’re ready to start putting pen to paper. Google Earth makes it easy to quickly create a plan to scale. Zoom in on the space you want to garden and print out an image. Next, take separate sheets of tracing paper and use them to map out: your goals existing conditions such as trees and buildings future plantings where water flows when it rain...

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A Primitive Bow Workshop

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
10 Comments
...d help us all shape our bows. The first step was to find some suitable wood. We used willow, a wood used by Native Americans in our region. It’s plentiful and makes an acceptable if short lived bow. Ash and oak and bay trees are local woods which are better for the purpose, but our goal for the day was a quick and dirty bow. These bows aren’t bowyers’ masterpieces. They are survival tools, and their effectiveness is not about t...

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Kelly’s 2012 To-Do List

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
20 Comments
...oon and in the evening. -Repaint the living room, hall, two bedrooms and the breakfast nook. -Spend more time outside loving the garden–just being with it, regarding it with joy instead of judgement. -Learn to identify trees. -Take up archery again. This means starting with practice in the back yard once or twice a week, until I have the chops back enough to visit the range without embarrassment. -Purge the closets. To do this, I’m...

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Nuts!

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
..., and you will be happy to know that you are helping the share holders of that big corporate chain, because they bought the nuts for a fraction of what quality fresh nuts would cost. The other moral here is to incorporate nut trees into your landscaping. Why plant a useless ficus tree when you can plant something that will provide food? And come harvest time you wont need to mix in any racing fuel....

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Pop Quiz Answer: Pineapple Guava

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening
9 Comments
...really nice addition to the landscape. I’ve heard of folks planting them in rows to form a hedge. It’s a great plant for small spaces. The fruit forms late in the year, which is also nice, since so few other fruit trees bear so late. But yes, I’m sorry, like so many things we mention here it is plant that prefers a warm climate. It’s hearty to 12 degrees, and generally recommended for zone 8 and up, though I think some peo...

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Advances in Gardening Series: The Fan

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs
6 Comments
...and seedling from marauding critters. We do this by stretching bird netting over wire hoops. Bird netting, also called aviary netting, is a super light, fine plastic netting that can be bought at most nurseries. You can drape trees or garden beds with it to protect them when in fruit, or when plants are tiny and tempting. Erik says he’ll do a whole post on the wire hoops one day, but right now can’t remember the name of the wire. But...

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How to Keep that Christmas Tree Fresh

Mr. Homegrown
Domesticus, How-to, Trees
2 Comments
Photo from WSU  Washington State horticulture professor Linda Chalker-Scott, has a podcast “Last minute advice about Christmas trees and other fun stuff” that details more than you’ll ever want to know about how to keep a Christmas tree fresh in the house. And, yes, it’s been studied. Apparently WSU has a Christmas Tree expert: Dr. Gary Chastagner, seen above counting dry needles....

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Simple Tech

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
RLeave a comment
At the intersection of third world need and our first world’s gadget obsession lies a number of non-profit organizations attempting to help poor folks through the development of clever low-tech interventions. The rocket stove we featured earlier exemplifies this approach. With a rocket stove, which is made out of simple, easy to repair materials, you can burn twigs, newspaper and scrap wood rather than cutting down whole trees to make char...

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Back to the Ranch

Mr. Homegrown
Events
7 Comments
...se bunch of speakers. The Ranch will provide much needed information on edible landscapes and food forestry, particularly for those of us in the southwest. Designed by Scott Kleinrock, the Ranch, with its combination of fruit trees, intensive vegetable plantings and California natives is already stunning–by next year it will be a paradise. The Ranch has a blog at http://huntingtonblogs.org/theranch/. Some highlights from the symposium after...

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About Us

Root Simple is Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen, authors of The Urban Homestead (Expanded and Revised Edition): Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (2008) and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World (2011).  They live in the heart of Los Angeles, in a little bungalow set on a 1/12 acre lot where almost all of their land is devoted to growing edible or otherwise useful plants and trees. Their obsessions include...

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