Our Disastrous Summer Garden

September 15, 2015

Fruit Trees, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

...e. We had to water our already alkaline soil with alkaline water. Only the native plants and what we call the Biblical plants seem happy (e.g. the fig and the pomegranate). The drought and an extreme heat wave pushed everything in the garden to the edge–and a few over the edge: in the last month we abruptly lost some garden stalwarts, including a rosemary bush and a culinary sage. Despite all these disasters, I came back from the Heirloom Expo wit...

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In Praise of the Hedgerow

Mr. Homegrown

November 10, 2014

Gardening

8 Comments

...uld function as hedgerows? What if we took out all those lawns and planted native and/or flowering climate-appropriate plants instead? In a somewhat rambling lecture I just gave to a group of Master Gardeners, I sang the praises of that UC study and also linked it to another nice resource, the UC Davis Arboretum Allstar list of plants that look good, provide habitat and don’t need a lot of maintenance. Combine these two resources with a third, Pie...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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