Book Review: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer

May 23, 2016

...eak, but it shows its love through selfless acts of giving, like a mother. Plants shower us with abundance. They give us food, medicine, textiles building materials, and less material gifts like beauty and solace. They even give us oxygen: their love for us fills our lungs with every breath. Plants are the basis of the food chain, so at the root of things, our lives are wholly sustained by and dependent on the beneficence of the plant world, and y...

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What are trees worth?

Mrs. Homegrown

August 20, 2015

Fruit Trees, Gardening, Nature Awareness, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings, Trees

21 Comments

...in the summer, reducing your energy bills. Low lying cactus and succulent plants do little or nothing nothing to cool the city, while gravel, concrete and artificial turf make your yard a blistering heat trap. Trees help the land absorb rain, increasing ground water levels and preventing destructive run off and storm flooding. (See this and this.) A single tree can absorb thousands of gallons of rain water as it falls, like a giant sponge. What w...

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Dudley brittonii “Giant Chalk Dudleya”

Mr. Homegrown

March 8, 2014

Gardening

3 Comments

...o thrives in a pot. Mature, it’s around 18 inches across. Annie’s does mail order and we’ve had a lot of luck with their plants. I visited the nursery on a blogger junket last year and was very impressed with the variety and quality of the seedlings–no root bound plants! Now I’ve got to remind myself that a garden needs to be viewed from an overall design perspective, not as collection of pretty plants. Maybe there’s a place for Dudley brittonii i...

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Gardening Mistake #12: The Annual That Ate Your Backyard!

Mrs. Homegrown

September 6, 2013

Gardening, Mistakes, Vegetable Gardening

21 Comments

...l over your yard, that you’re not looking at it with a critical eye. Also, plants are sneaky. One day they’re nowhere near that little sage seedling you planted, the next day, they’ve swallowed it, and you’ve forgotten it was even there– and you won’t remember until you find its sad, withered skeleton when you’re cleaning out the faded annuals at the end of the season. Generally, our worst culprit is the rampant nasturtium. This year, though, the...

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Compost and Pharmaceuticals

Mr. Homegrown

May 2, 2013

Composting, Gardening, Humanure, Straw Bale Gardening

17 Comments

...from sewage sludge may easily lead to the elevated concentrations in food plants, if the compost is used as a fertilizer. A slightly contradictory Estonian study concluded: In the current study, uptake of ciprofloxacin, norfloxacin, ofloxacin, sulfadimethoxine and sulfamethoxazole was demonstrated in lettuce. The uptake of fluoroquinolones and sulfonamides by plants like lettuce does not seem to be a major human health risk, as the detected level...

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