More on our gardening disasters

...ut there every day to see how much they’ve grown. I remember one the first vegetables I ever planted in our garden was cabbage. I don’t know why I planted cabbage. Now I’d recommend that newbie gardeners in this climate plant start with something a little less risky, a little more climate appropriate, a little less time invested. Like arugula! But back then, I was blissfully ignorant and wanted to plant cabbages in our first proper vegetable bed b...

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The Strange World of Artificial Plants

...s a Hollywood art director, grabbed me late one evening to help her fake a vegetable garden for a movie. From her I that learned that their are businesses in Hollywood that do nothing other than provide fake plants. Not just flowers, but everything from corn to . . . hemp. Having a bad year with your tomatoes? Green Set Inc. will set you up with some fake ones: They even have a very large (and suspiciously shiny) fake zucchini: But I think my favo...

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Beans 101 (Return of Bean Friday!)

...k to that later.) Stock stuff ready for the pot Note I’m leaving the stock vegetables in big chunks because I intend to take them out later. I want my final product to be plain beans, not vegetable bean soup. Leaving the pieces big makes them easy to fish out at the end. The herbs are tied in a bundle with a piece of string for the same reason. The added benefit of this is that you don’t have to chop or peel to getting this together. Note I didn’t...

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Make Mag

...volution has an article on how to install a drip irrigation system in your vegetable garden. Eric Muhs tells you how to collect rainwater to use for flushing your toilet (very clever!). Celine Rich-Darley tells you how to vermicompost in your apartment. Michael Perdriel explains how to make an off-grid laundry machine. Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone hook up a electricity monitor to a computer to twitter their energy usage. You’ll have to buy a co...

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Matt’s Wild Cherry Tomato

...s a wild-type tomato that grows without supplemental irrigation. Many avid vegetable gardeners have probably had the experience of tomatoes that reseed and grow without care. In my experience these hardy rogue tomatoes are invariably on the cherry side of the tomato size spectrum. This makes sense as the tomato’s wild ancestor is much smaller than modern beefsteak varieties. Matt’s Wild Cherry was obtained in Hidalgo, Mexico by Teresa Arellanos de...

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