Community Power! Elect Hugo Soto-Martinez!

...ary working people. He supports building social housing, jobs programs and making our streets safer for everyone. You can read more about his platform on his website. Electing Hugo is just the beginning. There’s a lot of work to do to turn this city around. Thankfully, more people are starting to pay attention to local elections. You can help out by going to my fundraising page for Hugo and chipping in a few dollars. Wherever you are you can be a...

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Root Simple Redesign

...me big improvements to our website. Roman Jaster, the designer of our book Making It (seen at the console in the picture above taking some last minute refinements from Mrs. Homegrown), is just about to pull the switch on the new design. We’re switching from Blogger to WordPress. Our new website design will feature: improved search functions an easier to navigate interface improved comment moderation better graphic design podcasts videos All of the...

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The Three Sisters

...eds we installed. In fact one of our neighbors has planted her own parkway vegetable garden just down the street. Since it was so late (July) we decided to cultivate heat tolerant vegetables and upped the ante by planting the Native American three sisters–corn, beans and squash. The three sisters are textbook permaculture, the idea being that the beans nitrogenate the soil and climb up the corn while the squash provides mulch. All plants are usefu...

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The Mulch Robs Nitrogen Myth

...lches such as gravel. I sometimes get asked what kind of mulch to use in a vegetable garden. I use straw since it’s inexpensive and easy to clean up at the end of the summer growing season. I wouldn’t use wood chips on vegetable or other annuals since they might get churned into the soil even though I don’t ever till or double dig. Wood chips are for perennials. Now, my Root Simple friends, go forth and tell people that mulch does not rob the soil...

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Going to Seed

...shrubs for kitchen floors. Popular opinion seems to believe our flower and vegetable gardens should be maintained like trophy rooms, like curio cases. Our mistake, of course, is thinking that everything is about us. That our yard, our garden, our little patch of land actually belongs to us and we have the right to maintain it exactly as we like. We might own it on paper, but we share it with hundreds, thousands, millions (if you want to get into s...

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