Greywater Design and Installation Workshop

...oduce and how many plants you can water What soaps and detergents are “greywater friendly” Tour Real L2L greywater system Gravity “branched drain” greywater system from sinks Date: February 22, 2014 – 10:00am to 12:30pm Location: Los Angeles EcoVillage 117 Bimini Place LA, CA 90004 Cost: Sliding scale $15 to $40, limited work trade positions available Register HERE Bring: Photographs of your laundry room and landscape. Site plan of your yard. For...

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Quick Relief for Poison Oak

...til I found one I liked from good ol’ Dr. Weil. He recommended running hot water over the rash, as hot as you can stand it. I don’t remember that he said how long you should do this, but I decided to do it as long as I could stand it, which in my case was probably a minute or so. He said the heat will cause the itching to flare temporarily, but then suppress the itching for hours, and speed healing as well. Results? It worked like a charm for me....

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Anagallis monellii : A New Favorite

...uited to the California climate, and it follows that it does not need much water. It is perennial in zones 9 to 11 (that’s us), but can be grown as an annual elsewhere. If you see Anagallis monellii without blooms, it is not much to look at. It’s a rangy, low-slung plant with uninteresting foliage. What it excels at is blooming. I believe it comes in a few colors, but “Blue Pimpernel” makes 1″ flowers in a rich gentian blue with magenta eyes, and...

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Dry Climate Vegetables

...the seeds we buy for our vegetable gardens are adapted to require lots of water. One solution is to find veggies that have reseeded accidentally without supplemental irrigation. Here’s a short list of reseeding rogue veggies from our garden that have thrived with just the small burst of rain we got last month. New Zealand Spinach The one I’m most excited about is New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides). It’s reappeared for at lest three y...

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

...aker Alejandro Jodorowsy once said, “One day, someone showed me a glass of water that was half full. And he said, “Is it half full or half empty?” So I drank the water. No more problem.” In her post Mrs. Homegrown mentioned that I had more to say about last year’s Age of Limits Conference. I don’t have much. She’s is a much better writer than I and she said pretty much everything I would have said. Not to minimize the challenges we all face from r...

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