A Plea for Plastic Vegetables

September 22, 2014

...se let me know if you carry any of the following: 1. Purple Bulb Shaped Eggplants and Eggplant plants 2. Green and yellow squash (zucchini) 3. Cucumbers 4. Red Hot chilly Pepper Plants 5. Red Cherry Bomb Plants 6. Yellow Banana Pepper Plants 7. Green bean (string bean and lima bean) plant that is vine-like that I can weave onto a trellis or a vine that looks like the leaves of a string bean plant 8. Tomatoes and Tomato plants (All Varieties) 9. Gr...

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Reader Favorite California Native: Ceanothus

Mr. Homegrown

June 7, 2017

Gardening

8 Comments

...meet my “bombproof” criteria, at least in our garden. It’s one of the many plants we’ve managed to kill. It’s true that once you get it going, other than yearly pruning, you can retire to the nearest bar and rest on your gardening laurels. But getting it established can be tricky. The most common mistake is over-watering during the summer months and planting in overly fertile soil. We didn’t over-water, so how we manged to kill three of them is a...

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Leave Your Leaves Alone

Mr. Homegrown

January 2, 2019

Gardening, Native Plants

1 Comment

...an plant dialectic here, perhaps? Are we on the cusp of a synthesis in the native/non-native plant debate? This is a complicated question, but I think that Eisenstein makes some good points in this provocative interview. Props to David Newsom at the Wild Yards Project to allowing this conversation go where it went. Eisenstein goes on to talk about what she considers most important for attracting birds and insects to our gardens. Spoiler: it’s more...

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Our new front yard: history

Mrs. Homegrown

November 11, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

19 Comments

...to see in the pic, but there is a young olive tree planted there, and some native plants. That land will tie into our redesign, and I’ll talk about it when I talk about the design. But its history and development has been separate from the slope–and that’s too much to cover here. The first plantings After the dust of the foundation work settled, we had to figure out what to do with our barren slope. As first time homeowners new to the whole concep...

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Our new front yard, part 4: a digression on the new paradigm

Mrs. Homegrown

November 19, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening, Miscellaneous

5 Comments

...ginal idea of the kinship of all things is that we should be humble before plants. As Fukuoko-san said, we know nothing. Starting from a place of humility, I’m trying to find a new path. I’m trying to develop a new relationship with plants, and as a result, a new approach to landscaping. This is the path of the post-wild. New paths often run rough. Meanwhile, the lawn n’ shrub is a path worn into smoothness. In fact, it is a rut. So yes, learning...

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