Native Plant Workshop

...ives bring in beneficial wildlife, are hardy and are efficient in terms of water use. Flexibility is key here–go ahead and mix natives with vegetables, fruit trees and other climate-appropriate plantings. 2. Natives aren’t edible. Many natives yield edible and medicinal crops. In North America the best way to delve into this topic is to figure out the plants that Native Americans in your area used. 3. Southern California is a desert and native pla...

Read…

A Used Tire Hose Caddy

...could use a sharp knife, but electricity makes this task a lot easier. You’ll end up with the half cut out tire you see above. But your work is not yet complete. Drill a bunch of drainage holes in the bottom of the tire, at least one hole every three inches. This is to keep water from pooling when it rains. Incidentally, used tires combined with water make the perfect breeding ground for mosquitoes (more on the tragic global consequences caused b...

Read…

Growing Watermelons

...adds a little more to the shade and water retention effort. 4. Irrigating watermelons. Watermelons have large root systems and if you use drip irrigation make sure that the emitters extend in a ring around the roots. Putting an emitter at the stem of the plant, as we did, does not adequately water the roots. We’ll get into the topic of drip irrigation in detail later this year. 5. It ain’t easy picking the world’s largest watermelon. See for your...

Read…

Dookie in the Tomatoes

...rrives at a centralized packing facility where it is loaded into a massive water bath by underpaid workers to mingle with thousands of other tomatoes. The water bath acts as our second salmonella Petri dish along the tomato’s path to our table. Alternately, a blade used to automatically slice tomatoes gets infected with salmonella, thereby spreading the bug to all the other pre-sliced tomatoes headed to the food assemblers (a more accurate term th...

Read…

Moldy Grapes!

...e is to weight them down somehow. In this case, I had a baggy full of salt water (salt water so that if it leaked, it wouldn’t dilute the brine) sitting at the top of the jar. But I didn’t pay attention to the jar during the fermentation, and a couple of the rolls popped up at the sides and mold set in––a kind of fluffy, spider-webby black mold that crept from the exposed bundles up the sides of the jar. The lesson to be learned here is to pay som...

Read…