Hipster Compost

June 30, 2014

An updated, urban version of the soil food web. In the nearly sixteen years we’ve lived here we’ve seen our local stretch of Sunset Boulevard go from boarded up storefronts and auto body shops to restaurants, bars and cafes. Along with those new businesses and artisinal facial hair, comes a great new set of compost sources. Some of my enterprising neighbors, one in particular, have been creating what could be called hipster compost or, at least,...

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How to Get Skunks Out of Your Basement and Yard

Mr. Homegrown

March 19, 2014

Animals, Gardening, Pests

4 Comments

Basements and crawl spaces under houses make idea dens for urban critters. If we could charge rent for all the skunks, raccoons and feral cats that have taken up residence under the house we’d have paid off the mortgage by now. Our particular crawl space critter B&B was opened by virtue of a flimsy access door. Some animal, most likely a raccoon, pried it open. The problem with this situation is that you can’t just close up the door. Some poor cr...

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A Not So Close Shave

Mr. Homegrown

April 25, 2019

Domesticus, Shaving

7 Comments

...log and our books? How many times have I presented some neatly tied up homemaking*]}*/gardening tip when the actual results were more ambiguous? Or, to go deeper with this, how often have I presented a “failure” as a kind of false modesty? At the risk of doing the latter, and via a long winded media theory laden introduction, permit me update my ongoing struggle with shaving. Most folks don’t know that, long before the advent of social media deep in t...

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A Sasquatch in the Garden?

Mr. Homegrown

November 6, 2020

Gardening

8 Comments

I keep a mental note of all the objects I’ve dug up while gardening over the years. The soil surrounding our house has mostly thrown up broken milk bottles from the days of the milkman. I’ve also found a lot of what I think are perfume bottles. Mostly though my shovel hits chunks of long buried concrete. Then I curse. But this week, while we’ve been working on version 5.3 of our difficult to garden steep front slope, I uncovered the strangest obj...

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Growing Food in a Hotter, Drier Land

Mrs. Homegrown

June 19, 2013

Miscellaneous

10 Comments

...g to the problem, it will also not be able to deal with the changes in the making. It is ill-suited to chaotic weather. In sum, if we don’t start growing food in different ways, we’re not only looking at a dry future, we’re looking at a hungry future. To solve this puzzle, Nabhan takes a look at at existing desert agriculture, from the Sonoran desert to China to Oman. From the ancient past right up into the present, humans have been cleverly manag...

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