How to Keep Squirrels and Birds From Eating Your Fruit

January 25, 2013

...ors and friends to save them for me and in a short time amassed a large collection. They snap shut over most fruit like these mangos and this helps to control fruit damage. Since they have vent holes, they don’t collect water inside. They can be washed and stored and are durable enough to last several seasons. After they serve their duty, they can be put in the recycling bin. Noel is the person who sent the picture of all the winter fruit h...

New Zealand Spinach is the New . . . Spinach

Mr. Homegrown

August 31, 2012

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

10 Comments

Spotted in a neglected corner of our backyard: New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides). What’s interesting is that it self-seeded and grew with no supplemental water in the middle of summer in lead and zinc contaminated soil. We’ve never been able to grow regular (and unrelated) spinach here. But there’s no stopping the New Zealand spinach. Due to the heavy metal problem we won’t be eating this particular specim...

Clever Canadian Shitter

Mr. Homegrown

January 6, 2007

Design

1 Comment

Way back in 1998 the Canada Mortgage and Housing association sponsored a “Healthy Housing Design Competition“. The winning house included this novel waste composting system as shown in this thrilling video. OK, so SurviveLA has a weakness for industrial video, but you just can’t beat the combination of rotating shit and peppy music–we just wish he’d drink the water in that glass....

The Survivor

Mr. Homegrown

January 4, 2007

Thoughtstylings

1 Comment

...we’re more the stern gin drinking types around here, but the citrus vodka seemed to provide the right note of tartness to balance out the sweet pomegranate juice. The name, Survivor, is in part a dedication to the plant itself. Pomegranates can survive with little or no water in terrible soil and never seem to need to be fertilized. As a symbol the pomegranate can be found in all of the cultures of the Mediterranean. From the Wikipedia ent...

Polyculture

Mr. Homegrown

December 7, 2006

Permaculture

12 Comments

Here at SurviveLA we are experimenting with something called polyculture in the the garden. We read about it first in the worthy permaculture guide, Gaia’s Garden, by Toby Hemenway. Polyculture is the practice of planting a community of interrelated, interdependent plants, mimicking in your garden (in our case a raised vegetable bed) the complex relationships that are found between plants in nature. In the case of food crops, a polycultu...

Cooking With Heritage Grains: Sonora Wheat Pasta

Mr. Homegrown

February 9, 2012

Food, Wheat

2 Comments

Once you start working with heritage grain varieties it’s hard to go back to the few choices in the flour aisle we have at most supermarkets. I managed to get my hands on some Sonora wheat a few months back and have been experimenting with it ever since. Traditionally used for tortillas, it’s also great for pancakes and bread. Yesterday I made pasta with Sonora wheat using a recipe by Whole Grain Connection founder Monica Spiller. Y...

Are Raised Beds a Good Idea?

Mr. Homegrown

July 7, 2011

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

44 Comments

...orn (Sorghum bicolor ) doing just fine straight in the ground. A partially sunken bed. Extra points for finding the stinkhorn mushroom. This bed is somewhat of a compromise. I cut the bed in half lengthwise to make it half as tall as it used to be thus getting two beds for the price of one. Then I sunk it into the ground In effect, the veggies are in the ground but I still have the neatness and defined borders of a raised bed. Again,...

USDA Releases New Hardiness Zone Map

Mr. Homegrown

January 30, 2012

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

8 Comments

The United States Department of Agriculture has just released a new zone hardiness map that reflects both a warming climate and new algorithms that take into account things like terrain, and proximity to bodies of water. The map is also now searchable by zip code. You can access the new map here: http://planthardiness.ars.usda.gov/PHZMWeb . For the background on how this map is different from the previous (1990) version, the USDA has a press...

How To Design a Garden Step II: Using Google Earth to Draw Up a Plan

Mr. Homegrown

January 26, 2012

Garden Design, Gardening

5 Comments

So you’ve set the goals for your garden, as we outlined in a post earlier this week, and you’re ready to start putting pen to paper. Google Earth makes it easy to quickly create a plan to scale. Zoom in on the space you want to garden and print out an image. Next, take separate sheets of tracing paper and use them to map out: your goals existing conditions such as trees and buildings future plantings where water flows when it rain...

Growing Greens Under Fruit Trees

Mr. Homegrown

January 25, 2012

Fruit Trees, Garden Design, Gardening, Permaculture, Vegetable Gardening

9 Comments

In the photo above is Scott Kleinrock showing off a section of the edible garden he designed at the Huntington Gardens. At first glace it looks like a lot of weeds, but it’s a clever idea: growing greens in the understory of fruit trees. In this picture, which was taken last weekend, you see a field of: mallow daikon radish arugula mustard vetch calendula cabbage Except for the vetch, which helps build soil, all are edible and nutrit...

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How to Keep Squirrels and Birds From Eating Your Fruit

New Zealand Spinach is the New . . . Spinach

Clever Canadian Shitter

The Survivor

Polyculture

Cooking With Heritage Grains: Sonora Wheat Pasta

Are Raised Beds a Good Idea?

USDA Releases New Hardiness Zone Map

How To Design a Garden Step II: Using Google Earth to Draw Up a Plan

Growing Greens Under Fruit Trees