Altadena Heritage of Abundance

May 30, 2009

Events

...CA. We’re going to talk about self irrigating planters, chickens, bees and vegetable gardening. Here’s the 411: Saturday, May 30 from 9 to 11 a.m at the Altadena Community Center First in a series of events, workshops, and home tours on sustainable living. Reserve your place at this free series kickoff event for members ($5 non-members). More info here. To RSVP, please leave your name, email or phone contact, number of reservations, and event name...

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A Year After the Age of Limits: Mr. Homegrown’s Take

Mr. Homegrown

May 7, 2014

Age of Limits

12 Comments

...d court outside the tent and discussed many of my favorite topics: organic gardening, Ham radio, appropriate technology, fraternal societies and even letterpress printing. When a talk or activity annoyed me, I’d walk out and find Greer. What I would have liked to have seen at the Age of Limits was a wider range of voices. A few mainstream climate scientists would have been a good start. Instead, we were only hearing the most extreme points of view...

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Our New Straw Bale Garden–Part I

Mr. Homegrown

April 23, 2013

26 Comments

...l be a solar powered fountain. We’re going to experiment with a straw bale vegetable garden in our backyard, inspired by Michael Tortorello’s article in the New York Times. The plan is to grow in the bales and harvest the resulting compost for use in permanent raised beds (that have yet to be built). We’ll keep growing in bales until we have enough compost for the beds. The problems presented by our property–lead and zinc contamination and a backy...

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Rucola Selvatica A Foglia D’ulivo: the arugula you’ve never heard of

Mr. Homegrown

March 7, 2016

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

4 Comments

If I could boil down my vegetable gardening advice to one sentence it would probably be: just grow stuff that does well and tastes good. Let some other schmuck fight aphids on those Brussels sprouts. Another bit of advice is that you can never have enough arugula. The stuff at the market is wilted, tasteless crap. Grow your own and you’ve got an incredible diversity of arugula varieties to choose from. This year I grew two varieties from Franchi,...

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Should I Put Coffee Grounds in a Worm Bin?

Mr. Homegrown

May 3, 2016

Composting, Gardening, Vermiculture

8 Comments

...is my takeaway. If and when someone studies the issue to determine a safe percentage, it would be unwise to recommend the practice, given the results of the referenced paper. Coffee grounds also form large anaerobic clumps worms don’t like. Clearly, they prefer vegetable scraps and large amounts of fluffy carbon material like cardboard and wood shavings. Now wouldn’t it be great if Elon Musk would fund local Extension Service home gardening resear...

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