Hops in Southern California

April 28, 2009

...th hops vines growing up string attached to the east side of the building. Homegrown Evolution’s own hop farming experiment ended in the spring of last year after we accidentally plopped some home built scaffolding on top of the tiny vine while undertaking the heinous task of scraping and painting the front of the house. Planting it in terrible soil doomed it to failure anyways. We’re experimenting with growing both Cascade and Nugget hops in a bi...

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On the Many Frustrations of Gardening: Pierce’s Disease

Mr. Homegrown

July 5, 2009

Gardening, Mistakes

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...how up someday. Might as well get ready. Gardening is a humbling lesson in evolutionary biology. It’s all about survival of the fittest. Work with evolution by selecting for immunity to pests and disease and you’ll harvest the rewards. Resistance is futile. More info at piercesdisease.org. If any of you readers know of a comprehensive list of resistant varieites for California please leave a link in the comments! So far I’ve been able to find list...

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The Sami Way

Mr. Homegrown

March 18, 2009

Permaculture

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...ft who know how to take care of reindeer even if they now use snowmobiles. Homegrown Evolution had the privilege of meeting Nils Anders Kuhmunen today, along with a bunch of art students, in an arctic village in northern Sweden. Kuhmunen is a Sami, an indigenous people populating the northernmost parts of Scandinavia and part of Russia. The Sami tended reindeer for thousands of years. The pictures of our visit speak for themselves (though you won’...

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Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima)

Mr. Homegrown

March 19, 2009

Gardening

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...nd grows just about everywhere–hot, cold, humid, dry–with the exception of Homegrown Evolution’s temporary residence in the Swedish Arctic. Odds are you’ve got one of these supertrees busting up through some nearby broken asphalt. One of my hosts, Swedish artist Ingo Vetter, is a member of a unique artists collective, the Detroit Tree of Heaven Woodshop, that has experimented with using the wood of this abundant tree. While not easy to work with (...

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Swedish Shack Attack

Mr. Homegrown

March 22, 2009

Design, Thoughtstylings

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...ry David Thoreau, the Unabomber, the bloggers over at Ramshackle Solid and Homegrown Evolution all have one thing in common. We’re all proud owners of shacks. We’ve posted before about the wonderful Tiny House Company and the virtues of actually living in your shack. Today we share a photo of a lovely Swedish shack we spotted in the arctic town of Kiruna. A family of five used to live in it in the early 20th century and it can’t be much more than...

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