The tale of the worm bin celery

...hope. Celery doesn’t like our climate much, and I consider it one of those plants which is easier to buy than to grow. To my surprise, the plant did quite well, though it did have a feral quality to it, despite its mild domestic origins. It didn’t grow fat, moist stalks which can be used to scoop up peanut butter. It grew stringy, dark green stalks which tasted powerfully of celery. It made excellent stock, and chopped into fine pieces, it was goo...

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Getting Hardscaping Right

...good one. Get the hardscaping done first, do it right and be bold. Putting plants in first and then building things like decks and seating areas is a recipe for disaster. Any construction project, even carefully done, causes a considerable amount of destruction. Some other lessons I’ve learned from fifteen years worth of hardscaping mistakes at our house: Design the hardscaping before even thinking about plants. Open the wallet and get quality mat...

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Phytoremediation of Heavy Metals

...them up as readily. One promising strategy is phytoremediation, the use of plants to uptake heavy metals. youarethecity, in New York, is experimenting with Indian mustard, mugwort, basket willow and sunflowers to remediate a contaminated garden. The results are promising with some metals down 50% in a year. Mugwort (Artimesia vulgaris) did an especially good job with a wide range of contaminants. I should note that Garm Wallace, who runs Wallace L...

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Will the Lawn Rebate Turn LA into a Gravel Moonscape?

...ng gravel and mulch moonscapes. It’s an education problem. For most people plants are a sort of green background material. Our ancestors could distinguish between hundreds of plants, but that ancestral memory has been hijacked by commercial interests. Now, instead of plant identification skills, we name and distinguish things like cars and mobile devices. If there was a kind of car rebate program that inadvertently replaced BMWs with Pontiac Aztek...

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On why our vegetable garden is such a disaster this year . . .

...h little enthusiasm for ongoing gardening maintenance. Ego–forgetting that urban homesteading is not about self-sufficiency—to chase self-sufficiency is a fool’s errand. I should be happy just to have a few good salads and be thankful that I can buy good vegetables at a local farmer’s market. I don’t think self-sufficiency is a good goal even on a large piece of land. We humans are meant to work together, hang out in groups and share goods and kno...

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