Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom

August 18, 2015

...the installing and not enough time contemplating the placing. In so doing gardening has become more of a chore than a pleasure. Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees. I take this to mean that a garden should express moods and ideas and not be just a collection of plants or a collection of objects set amidst plants. Finlay’s garden is a poem. While it has a lot of sculpture in it, it’s not what you would...

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Admitting Gardening Mistakes

Mr. Homegrown

August 17, 2015

Garden Design, Gardening

15 Comments

...As Hermann von Pückler-Muskau advises in his 1834 book Hints on Landscape Gardening, I know of nothing more pathetic than when a failed detail is allowed to remain as an eyesore in a completed project, rather than being removed and replaced by a better idea, simply because it has already cost such and such in the first place, and changing it might cost again as much. . . Once changes have been found advisable, though, it is also dangerous to put...

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On the Many Frustrations of Gardening: Pierce’s Disease

Mr. Homegrown

July 5, 2009

Gardening, Mistakes

17 Comments

...ntinue to sell vines suseptable to Pierce’s here is a mystery to me. In the 1990s Pierce’s disease wiped out 40% of the vines in Temecula’s vineyards. Northern California’s vineyards have experienced what Turney described as an “edge effect”, with Pierce’s claiming the vines on the outside of vineyards. The only way to prevent the spread of the sharpshooter is frequent application of pesticides (on both grapes and citrus), not practical for the ho...

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Straw Bale Gardens

Mr. Homegrown

March 25, 2013

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

27 Comments

...drag a straw bale up the hill rather than bulk or bagged soil. Straw bale gardening is an old and tested practice. Straw bale gardening comes with the endorsement of horticulture professor and noted garden myth debunker Linda Chalker-Scott. The practice has been tested in dry climates like ours. After the bale has decomposed you get compost you can use elsewhere in the yard. I suspect that skunks will be less interested in digging in a bale (plea...

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California Gardening Guides

Mr. Homegrown

May 27, 2020

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

2 Comments

...few useful links for Californians on how to start a vegetable garden. All gardening advice is local. One of the tricky things about California is that we live in a Mediterranean climate and most of the information on what, how and when to plant vegetables is written for places where it snows. So here’s a few links courtesy of our Extension Service that should help you get started with your vegetable garden: Burpee California Planting Guide Vegeta...

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