Why You Should Grow Pomegranates if You Can

...might be a pomegranate. Why? Pomegranate trees have beautiful, bright red flowers in the spring and handsome yellow leaves in the fall. They grow fast. They have few pests. They are drought tolerant. They produce delicious fruit. Require low chill hours. They live long–200 years or more. The big downside for, probably, most of the readers of this blog is that pomegranates are frost sensitive. And the fruit will split if it rains in the fall. But...

Read…

The Brooklyn Bee

...llinating the local plants and trees his bees also collect pollen from cut flowers at outdoor florist stands. Homegrown Revolution wishes that we could end this story musing about a bright future for urban beekeeping, a future in which each neighborhood has a beekeeper to pollinate the many fruit trees that should grow on our city’s streets, but sadly bee news these days is on the depressing side. If the Albert Einstein quote is correct we’re in t...

Read…

In Praise of Backward Compatibility

The garden of nerdiness has many flowers: comic book nerds, computer nerds, fantasy nerds, sci-fi nerds–too many to list. After fifty years I’ve finally recognized my own personal nerd category. I’m an electromechanical nerd. This tendency manifests in an obsession with old telephones, the ability to thread a 16mm projector, fantasizing about the mimeographed version of Root Simple and spending evenings watching films about old office equipment....

Read…

Saturday Tweets: Touch Your Opuntia

...s #cacti pic.twitter.com/rIqJMmgV3B — Jennifer Possley (@JennPossley) April 10, 2018 Eat. Mor. Figs.@CaFigs @ValleyFig https://t.co/RaSOARO7T0 — Ernest Miller (@RLMProvisions) April 13, 2018 One of the reasons I love this herbal so much is that, in addition to the beautiful drawings (mugwort in this instance), there are intricate scenes in the background of 16th-century Italian rural life British Library Add MS 22332, f. 111rhttps://t.co/EjOqRvvnz...

Read…

Reforming City Codes

...elped change the code in LA that made it illegal to grow and resell fruit, flowers or nuts in a residential zone. It was legal, for some reason, to grow and sell vegetables. City staff were very helpful in changing the code. They knew it didn’t make sense and were just as eager to change it as we were. As DRBREW points out, these ridiculous laws tend not to be enforced at all until a feud begins between neighbors. To prevent these situation we can...

Read…