Help Plant a Garden — and Help a Local Eagle Scout

...removed a large area of lawn, and on Friday they’ll be planting six fruit trees. It will transform the entrance to the church. Friday is supposed to be Taylor’s completion date, and there’s still a lot to do: installing headerboard (9am) composting the planting areas (morning) planting trees, flowers, vegetables (afternoon) assembling benches (all day) It’s a fun chance to work with an (exuberant) team of young scouts and to help get another sect...

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The Brooklyn Bee

...him. Howe’s suspects that in addition to pollinating the local plants and trees his bees also collect pollen from cut flowers at outdoor florist stands. Homegrown Revolution wishes that we could end this story musing about a bright future for urban beekeeping, a future in which each neighborhood has a beekeeper to pollinate the many fruit trees that should grow on our city’s streets, but sadly bee news these days is on the depressing side. If the...

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Induced Demand

...when it comes to greywater, but it’s a good point. Did I plant more fruit trees because I had a greywater system? Has this caused more water consumption in our current drought? Honestly, I think the answer is yes. You could probably find induced demand between the lines of David Homgren’s permaculture principles. But perhaps we should insert a thirteenth principle: acknowledge induced demand and work to prevent it. Simply being aware of the pheno...

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Karp’s Sweet Quince

...for our small, steeply banked and awkward front yard: plant lots of fruit trees and keep them pruned. Thus began our mini-orchard, delayed for many years by messy foundation work. One of the newest additions to the mini orchard is a bare root tree we ordered from the Raintree Nursery, Karp’s Sweet quince. As you can see from the photo above it’s just started to leaf out. Quince (Cydonia oblonga), a tree native to the Mediterranean and the Middle...

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Yet More Reasons to Mulch

Image: Wikimedia. From a water conservation perspective alone, our trees need a good layer of mulch. But there are many more reasons to mulch, according to research by James Downer, Farm Advisor with the Cooperative Extension in Ventura County, California: Mulch provides nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. A serendipitous accident in one of Downer’s studies revealed that mulch changes soil structure so that mulched soils are able to absorb more w...

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