Search Results for: label/vegetable gardening

308 results

My Favorite Lettuce Mix

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Seeds, Vegetable Gardening
7 Comments
Earlier this week when I decried the sorry state of our winter vegetable garden, I neglected to mention the one big success: lettuce. We grow lettuce mixes almost every year and we’ve never been disappointed. Homegrown salad greens are much better than store bought. Plus, at least where we live, they are easy to grow. We just sow the seed directly and water them in. We thin by eating the seedlings. Judging from the crowding in the photo a...

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A Warning About Straw

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
10 Comments
Claude Monet used straw (or is that hay?) for art. We use straw to catch chicken droppings! Straw is a very inexpensive and useful material for composting, mulching and animal bedding (we use it for all of these purposes). If you use it for mulch you’ll probably get some seeds that will germinate, but I’ve never found it to be a big problem in a small vegetable garden. I get my straw from the feed store, but you can often get it fo...

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Geoff Lawton Soils Video

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Soil
10 Comments
Help, I’m turning into a soil geek. I just spent an evening viewing a video entitled Soils featuring permaculturalist Geoff Lawton. What I like about this video is that it’s not just about soil, but Lawton actually shows you what you can do to improve your soil. In the DVD he demonstrates how to build a compost pile (lots of carbon material), contoured vegetable beds, a compost pile heated shower and a simple vermiculture system usi...

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Favorite Plants- New Zealand Spinach

Homegrown Neighbor
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
15 Comments
...on long, rambling stalks. The seeds are triangular as well and the plant will reseed if you let it. It tends to spread and grow low to the ground. It can be used as a living mulch since it so effectively covers the soil in a vegetable bed. This green keeps on growing and seems to be unaffected by the bugs and problems that affect other greens. I have seen it growing wild among the rocks right along the ocean, so it can handle saline soils. This...

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Los Angeles Announces Parkway Cemetery Program

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
12 Comments
...as no surprise that city officials are seeking innovative ways of enhancing revenue sources.  Most often a tangle of weeds and compacted earth, parkways have seen attention in recent years as space for community orchards and vegetable plots. With LA’s new program, for just a $375 application fee and approval of the homeowner, you can designate your final resting spot on the street of your choice. In announcing the plan Los Angeles mayor An...

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Back to the Ranch

Mr. Homegrown
Events
7 Comments
...ers. 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 the jump: Auth...

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A tasty Italian chard: Bieta Verde da Taglio

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
2 Comments
A few folks have written to ask what we’re growing in our winter vegetable garden and we’ve been late to reply. Since we’re in USDA zone 10 and seldom get freezing weather here in Los Angeles, we can grow year round. One of my favorites this winter has been a Swiss chard variety from Italy called Bieta Verde da Taglio or “Green cutting chard”. Verde da Taglio has thin stems and thick leaves. It ain’t as pretty...

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Italian Dandelion Redux

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
7 Comments
...n temperature phenomenon known as La Niña which has caused alternating periods of cool weather followed by 80º days and little rainfall. Our deciduous trees did not loose their leaves until after New Years, most of the winter vegetables we planted seem unhappy and to top it all off someone took all of the shallots and daikon radishes that were growing in our illegal sidewalk garden before they were ready to harvest. All this leads me to muse abo...

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Make Mag

Mr. Homegrown
Events
2 Comments
...and more.” Here’s just a few of the many exciting projects: Chicago comrade Nancy Klehm tells you how to compost human waste. Homegrown Evolution has an article on how to install a drip irrigation system in your vegetable garden. Eric Muhs tells you how to collect rainwater to use for flushing your toilet (very clever!). Celine Rich-Darley tells you how to vermicompost in your apartment. Michael Perdriel explains how to make an off-...

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How to Process Carob

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Recipes
6 Comments
Before. Photo by Bill Wheelock. Our neighborhood has an abundance of carob (Ceratonia siliqua) trees that, around this time of year, drop thousands of pounds of pods. Now many of us may have unpleasant associations with carob as a 1970s era chocolate substitute, but the tree has a long history in the Middle East, where it’s used to make a tea, as a source of molasses, as a vegetable and as animal feed. The “locusts” th...

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