Day to day, our decisions count

April 30, 2015

...es seasonal. How to develop a spirit of adventure. There are so many weird vegetables in the world–and they are delicious! Eating this way is also a good primer for vegetable gardening. It teaches you what grows well in your area, and how the seasons run, and gives you some inspiration as to good local varieties you can seek out. By the by, I thought I’d mention Azure Standard here, too. This is a U.S. based company–it does not operate in every st...

Read…

Let’s Get Biointensive

Mr. Homegrown

October 16, 2009

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

11 Comments

...d up a handy tip on plant spacing from John Jeavons’ book How to Grow More Vegetables. Jeavons dislikes rows and instead uses the triangular spacing of the French biointensive method. You can view a nice diagram of biointensive spacing on the LandShare Colorado website. And see some images of the way Jeavons’ spaces his garden on This Girl’s Gone Green. Triangular plantings squeeze more veggies into small spaces. The tight spacing, with leaves all...

Read…

The Wonder of Worms

Mrs. Homegrown

May 21, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening, Vermiculture

5 Comments

...ture to take her course. Or even if we can manage that, we want more. More vegetables. Bigger flowers. More fruit. Now. And to do that, we construct artificial, hyper-productive systems–like garden beds. To support these systems, we also construct artificial systems in which to raise worms, so we can harvest their castings and put them where we want them, when we need them. These are worm bins. What exactly do you do with worm castings? Worm casti...

Read…

071 Farmer Mai Nguyen

Mr. Homegrown

December 16, 2015

Food, Podcasts, Wheat

...bout the next generation of farmers? Meet Mai Nguyen. She grows grains and vegetables in Northern California using a no-till, dry-farming method with draft horses–all in the midst of a historic drought! During the course of the conversation we discuss: Southeast Asian vegetables Growing rice Dry farming No-till agriculture Growing wheat Sonora wheat Red Fife wheat Dark rye Managing risk Sheep and draft horses on a small farm To find out more about...

Read…

How to Garden With California Natives: Lessons from the 2016 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

Mr. Homegrown

April 5, 2016

Garden Design, Gardening

7 Comments

...ust because you have native plants does not meant that you can’t also have vegetables and fruit trees. In fact, edibles benefit from the insect habitat provided by native plants. Over the years we’ve increased our natives and decreased our vegetables. I think we might be getting more veggies now from a smaller space. We also need to remember that many native plants are edible and medicinal such as these strawberries from the LaPlant/D’Auria garden...

Read…