SIPS and Kraut at Project Butterfly

August 24, 2009

Events

...our community and our planet. Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, authors of The Urban Homestead, have become increasingly interested in the concept of urban sustainability since moving to Los Angeles in 1998. In that time, they’ve slowly converted their 1920 hilltop bungalow into a mini-farm, and along the way have explored the traditional home arts of baking, pickling, bicycling and brewing, chronicling all their activities on their blog Homegrown Evo...

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Rain Barrels

Mr. Homegrown

January 9, 2007

rainwater harvesting

1 Comment

...isk of sounding like a broken record, our strict rule around the SurviveLA homestead is that all irrigated plants must be useful, i.e. you gotta be able to eat it or make tea with it. Priority in our plantings goes to useful plants that don’t need additional water once established. But it’s still nice to have citrus trees, salad greens, rapini, beets, and other fruits and vegetables that do need supplemental irrigation. For these types of plants i...

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Eat Food, Mostly Plants, Not too Much

Mr. Homegrown

May 8, 2008

Thoughtstylings

7 Comments

In the course of writing and researching our book, The Urban Homestead, coming out this June, we learned a lot about contemporary agricultural practices. And what we learned sure ain’t pretty. It has made our trips to the supermarket, to supplement the food we grow at home, a series of moral dilemmas. Where did this food come from? How was it grown or raised? What are these mysterious ingredients? Our book contains practical how-to advice for way...

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Plants: When to Hold Them, When to Fold Them

Mr. Homegrown

October 24, 2012

Gardening

17 Comments

...gs are flowing.” The best gardeners I know don’t suffer the attachments to plants that I do. They are much more ruthless. If a tree is in the wrong place it gets cut down. If two plants are too close together, one gets ripped out. What Pierce’s disease looks like. I’m trying to get the hang of this lack of attachment. This fall I get to rip out a grape vine that has graced our entrance arbor for a few years now. It’s a muscat of Alexandria that pr...

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Pl@ntNet: “Shazam” for Plants

Mr. Homegrown

March 1, 2016

Gardening

5 Comments

...roid phone app that uses image recognition and crowd-sourcing to recognize plants. It’s free, so I downloaded a copy yesterday and ran around the yard to see how it works. You take a closeup of a leaf, flower, fruit or bark and the app takes a guess on an identification. My first attempt was Nasturtium, which the app immediately identified despite my bad photo. It also correctly identified daffodils and got close to identifying Malva parviflora. I...

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