Tomato Grafting Fail

September 26, 2016

...d to have volunteer cherry tomatoes along a wall now dominated by a massive Vitus californica vine. Next year I’m going to keep things simple, choose a drought tolerant tomato from Native Seed Search and plant it directly in the ground early in the season. How did your tomatoes do this year? What kind did you grow?...

Read…

Earth Building Classes!

Mr. Homegrown

January 27, 2015

Events

...chool at their Farm. All of the adobes were made on site by students using native soil, and they’ve been baking bread and making pizza with ingredients grown on-site! It was great to work with such an enthusiastic group – cooking with dirt is more than mud pies! Got something going on?: Drop us a line! We’re anxious to hear about new projects, preservation efforts, classes and folks doing recreational or professional adobe work in California. Ther...

Read…

Picture Sundays: Agave Roast

Mr. Homegrown

April 12, 2015

Picture Sundays

3 Comments

...he Malki Museum on the Morongo Reservation to sample a large assortment of Native American foods as well as celebrate the end of a agave harvest and roast. I’ll nudge Mrs. Homegrown to blog about it, but let’s just go over a few of the delicious items on this plate: agave, yucca, beavertail cactus, chola buds, two forms of acorn mush, venison, rabbit stew, fry bread and a salad with a white sage dressing. I didn’t get to the fried crickets in time...

Read…

An Open Letter to Our Mammalian Friends

Mr. Homegrown

August 10, 2015

Animals, Gardening, Pests

13 Comments

...home released you back in 1905. From there you displaced your more polite, native cousins. I get that you’re not going away. But can you please leave at least one peach for us humans? Keep this up and I’ll put together an unfavorable social media strategy to rebrand you as “#cuterats.” To the possums of Los Angeles: I appreciate your freakishness and you’re actually kind of cute up close. But you guys don’t look so good under the glare of an unfla...

Read…

Of paper wasps and scrub jays

Mrs. Homegrown

June 2, 2015

Bees, Gardening, Insects, Nature Awareness

15 Comments

...honey bee from a yellow jacket from a wasp–and we won’t even start on the native bees. Yet it pays to be able to do so, because each is quite different, and we can interact peaceably with all of them if we know their ways. Paper wasps, also called umbrella wasps, are those guys who build smallish, open celled nests in protected places, often the eaves of your house. Wasp stings are quite painful, but few people know that these wasps rarely attack...

Read…