Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...l grounds, attractive club houses, neat, trim, well-kept homes with lawns, vegetable and flower gardens, clean vacant lots, and flowers, wild and cultivated, everywhere in greatest profusion. But of even greater value than these physical things are the effects upon the individuals who wrought the change–the teachers, children and parents–and the community at large. To the teachers the contest gave an opportunity for carrying gardening instruction...

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Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom

...ught I’d intersperse excerpts from his prose poem Unconnected Sentences on Gardening with a few of my disjointed reactions, A garden is not an object but a process. I need this sentence tattooed on my forearm as I tend to want the garden to be “finished”. A garden is never finished, never complete, never the same. A garden is like the ever unfolding novelty of the divine logos; it’s never static; it’s always in motion. As Heraclitis says, “You can...

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Straw Bale Gardens

...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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Saturday Linkages: Naked Gardening, Ticks, Walking in LA and Eating Giant Rats

Couple gets booted out of the first world naked gardening day. Watch out for the nettles . . . World naked gardening day–May 4: http://www.wngd.org [Editors note: NSFW and no we won’t be participating in WNGD, but I once saw a neighbor doing so while I was walking our dog a few years ago.] Making Things Paul Elkin, Maker of Many Things http://lloydkahn-ongoing.blogspot.com/2013/04/paul-elkin-maker-of-many-things.html#.UYSMGz1dyX8.twitter … The Cl...

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On the Many Frustrations of Gardening: Pierce’s Disease

Damn Pierce’s Disease! I really wish that glossy gardening magazines would, every once in a while, devote some space to capturing some of the soul-crushing disappointments of tending plants. Can we please have a cover of Sunset Magazine featuring an aphid and slug infested cabbage? Frustrations are compounded when a beloved perennial plant you’ve been growing for years comes down with a fatal disease. Such was the case when my flame seedless grap...

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