How to Garden With California Natives: Lessons from the 2016 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

April 5, 2016

...ing a residential garden in California: natives look best when grouped and appropriately spaced into a mass that mimics the density of native chaparral. Spacing can be tricky. You have to pay attention to nursery labels and not plant too far apart or too close together. Not that plants always perform predictably. You have to go back and edit: fill gaps in or take stuff out. The best gardens on the tour got the massing right like the Hessing/Bonfig...

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There is Something Beyond the Straw Bale

Mr. Homegrown

May 31, 2019

Fruit Trees, Garden Design, Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

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...w” that supports beneficial wildlife. We’re also fans of hardy and climate appropriate perennial fruits and vegetables–beyond that solitary straw bale we have a lot of edible perennial plants and a bunch of work to do to straighten out the yard after years of other priorities. Site of future seasonal rain garden. Towards that end, our landscaper, Laramee Haynes and crew are coming next week to clean things up, install a kind of seasonal rain garde...

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Saturday Linkages: Murder Hornet Halloween

Mr. Homegrown

October 31, 2020

Saturday Linkages

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...terdämmerung,” in a Detroit Parking Garage I close with a quote that seems appropriate both for Halloween and for the political crises we’re in. It’s from one of my favorite books, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? and builds off of Marx’s love of a snarky vampire metaphor: The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the livi...

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All Politics Are Local

Mr. Homegrown

November 6, 2012

Thoughtstylings

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I thought it appropriate on election day to repeat one of my favorite equations for happiness–a stoic flowchart that comes via Mark Fraenfelder of BoingBoing. At the end of the day, about half of America will be happy, and half will be dismayed. All we can do is remember that beyond voting, we cannot control the outcome of the election. So a stoic would advise us to not to rail against what we cannot change or affect, but to focus on what we can...

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Thomas Pynchon on Pizza

Mr. Homegrown

September 30, 2021

Food, Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...as all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover. Pynchon being Pynchon, pizza appears fr...

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