Search Results for: label/vegetable gardening/page/14/2011/04/making-it

589 results

Flower Gardening Class at the Huntington

Mr. Homegrown
Events
1 Comment
Our friend Tara Kolla is teaching a flower gardening class at the Huntington Library and Gardens in San Marino this coming Saturday Oct. 2nd from 10 a.m. to noon. From the class description: “Save money at the flower market by growing your own organic blooms. Urban farmer Tara Kolla of Silver Lake Farms shares tips for growing seasonal flowers that make beautiful arrangements in the home.” I can’t say enough good things abo...

Continue reading…

On the Many Frustrations of Gardening: Pierce’s Disease

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Mistakes
17 Comments
la fastidiosa) spread by an insect called the sharpshooter. Pierce’s was discovered in 1892 in Anaheim and is basically the reason we no longer have many vineyards in Southern California. Once a vine gets Pierce’s it will die within a few years. You have to admit failure and rip it out, which I plan to do soon. “Wood on new canes matures irregularly, producing patches of green, surrounded by mature brown bark.” To confir...

Continue reading…

Advances in Gardening Series: The Perennial Herb Bed, Patience and Plant Spacing and Breaking Your Own Rules

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening, Herbs
6 Comments
No, this is not a pile of weeds. Someday it’s going to look good. Mrs. Homegrown here: One of the big lessons of gardening is patience. One way gardening patience is expressed is in planting perennials: buying leeetle teeny plants and planting them vast distances apart and then waiting with your hands politely folded until they grow to full size. A very common landscaping mistake is to go out and buy a bunch of gallon-sized land...

Continue reading…

Making Beer in Plain Language

Mr. Homegrown
Beer, Fermentation, Food
13 Comments
...r.” -Guggenheim Fellowship-winning professor of rhetoric and comparative literature Judith Butler via the Bad Writing Contest Huh? At least the terminology surrounding beer making ain’t that obtuse, but it certainly could use some simplification. For novice home brewers, such as us here at Homegrown Evolution, the terminology creates an unnecessary barrier as impenetrable as a graduate school seminar in the humanities. Let...

Continue reading…

2011 in Review: The Garden

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
20 Comments
It’s was a difficult year in the garden. A lead and zinc issue screwed up my winter vegetables garden plans. At least we managed to find some river rocks and put in a path. I found this photo from December 2010. I was certainly a lot more organized that year. For 2012, I’m putting in raised beds to deal with the heavy metal issue and we’ve already planted more native plants. But most importantly one of my New Years resolution...

Continue reading…

Back on the Yogurt Train: How to Make Yogurt

Mrs. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food, Recipes
16 Comments
...what I can. Lately I’ve realized that one consistent source of waste plastic in our kitchen comes in the form of yogurt tubs. This is a little silly, because we know how to make yogurt. In fact, I do believe we covered it in our book. Thing is, back in the day when we made yogurt, it was Erik’s job. When he slacked on it, I didn’t even consider picking it up. Chalk it up to the mysteries of division of labor in a household. An...

Continue reading…

USDA Zone Based Veggie Planting Schedule

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
20 Comments
Knowing when to plant vegetables is one of the big keys to edible gardening success. Unfortunately, many gardening books, websites and the back of seed packages assume you’re in a place with easily delineated seasons. What about those of us in Alaska, Southern California, Texas, Florida or Arizona? Wouldn’t it be nice to have a web-based vegetable planting calendar based on zip codes? While it’s not down to the zip code level,...

Continue reading…

Front Yard Vegetable Garden Update

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
4 Comments
One advantage of living in a slightly rough-around-the-edges Los Angeles neighborhood is that nobody gets bent out of shape about front yard vegetable gardens. Indeed, they are  a tradition in immigrant neighborhoods. The picture above is an update of one of the front yard gardens Kelly blogged about back in May. It looked like this when she first blogged about it. Not sure exactly what’s growing here. It looks like beans from a distanc...

Continue reading…

Three Front Yard Vegetable Gardens

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening
17 Comments
ther complicated or expensive. Neighborhood gardens like this are really what inspired us when we started out. They taught us to plant boldly, to plant casually, and to plant anywhere we wanted. This yard above delighted me. It seems they’ve given up on their lawn and instead have planted an army of caged veggie seedlings in orderly rows across their front yard. Not pictured is a little strip of  established food garden at the front of the...

Continue reading…

Our Keyhole Vegetable Bed: What Worked and What Didn’t Work

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
9 Comments
This is what our keyhole bed looked like yesterday just before I fed the remaining vegetables to our chickens and the compost pile. Ignore the large pot–that’s a future solar powered fountain that will be incorporated in a new vegetable garden we’re working on. Here’s what the keyhole bed looked like just after I installed it back in October. Note the compost repository in the center of the bed. I used straw wattle (ava...

Continue reading…