Failed Experiment: Bermuda Buttercup or Sour Grass (Oxalis pes-caprae) as Dye

..., sing some folk songs, dance a dance, compost the solids and acidify your garden soil.with the spent dye. It sent me into fantasies of living in some groovy Sonoma-Portlandish nirvana where my house is clean and has plaster walls and wood beams in the ceiling (the wood beams are always in the fantasy) and a fire in the grate. I’d watch the goats graze in the back yard while I cheerfully sip tea and knit something marvelous out of hand spun angora...

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The End of California Citrus?

...se later on if nothing is done? What are my responsibilities as a backyard gardener to large scale growers? Do the benefits of international trade outweigh the inevitable appearance of invasive species? Should we close the downtown flower markets and produce distribution warehouses where state entomologists suspect the psylids might have come from? Rather than try to answer the unanswerable, I’m going back to two of my favorite books books that do...

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My Favorite Lettuce Mix

Earlier this week when I decried the sorry state of our winter vegetable garden, I neglected to mention the one big success: lettuce. We grow lettuce mixes almost every year and we’ve never been disappointed. Homegrown salad greens are much better than store bought. Plus, at least where we live, they are easy to grow. We just sow the seed directly and water them in. We thin by eating the seedlings. Judging from the crowding in the photo above, we...

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Skunks, are they edible?

Skunk issues in the garden this winter have led to murderous thoughts. Those thoughts, in turn, caused an intemperate Google search which turned up the following gem from the March 1959 issue of Boy’s Life: Incidentally, skunks are edible. The Indians ate skunk and so has many a trapper. I tried it, rolling pieces of cleanly-skinned carcass in flour and browning and steaming them in a skillet. The meat is light in color and well flavored. It is b...

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Saturday Linkages: Chicken Hot Dogs and Toilet Museums

...ly/S8pABN Gardening Home Depot’s Leaf Bags and their Eco-Terrible “Tips” | Garden Rant http://gardenrant.com/2012/12/home-depots-leaf-bags-and-their-eco-terrible-tips.html … Design High-Hanging Tea House Offers Suspended Getaway | Designs & Ideas on Dornob http://dornob.com/high-hanging-tea-house-offers-suspended-getaway/ … ??? South Korea’s toilet culture museum: http://boingboing.net/2012/12/03/south-koreas-toilet-museum.html … Chicken hotdogs a...

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