What benefits does your drought-tolerant garden provide?
A California Natives garden can be a beautiful haven for bees, pollinators, butterflies, beneficial insects, birds, and urban wildlife. An edible garden can feed you and your family, perhaps with extra to share with your neighbors and the food pantry…
Make your own flowerpot ollas
Ollas are old-tech made new. They are a GREAT tool for watering your garden during drought-stricken summers. And you can make your own — quickly and easily, for very little money — with parts from the warehouse home supply store.
Raised beds vs. Sunken beds
“To be a successful vegetable gardener you need raised beds,” the garden catalogs and East Coast garden magazines try to persuade us with effusive and glorious terms. Consider what is behind their arguments: a drive for commercial sales, and a…
Are you Ready for Rain?
[see also “Are you prepared for el Niño?” I’ve been thinking about rain a lot lately, especially since we have 151 adobe bricks laid out right now, supposedly drying in the sun. We’ve had to do tarp-foraging, and monitor hourly weather…
Building water-saving features with urbanite
Today was our first earth-building workshop. Since I’m a little lean on earth-building handouts, here’s a substitute. It’s not particularly about earth-building, but it is about earth-wise construction. It’s about building with “urbanite,” which is a name for reused broken concrete.…
How to Build a Garden Sink
You pull a carrot from your garden and take it to your kitchen for dinner. Before you can put it on your kid’s dinner plate, you have to wash it. A mess of black dirt spatters all over your kitchen…
What we can do about water use
We have a “use it once, then send it away” attitude about many earth resources, and water is just one of these. Right now, we’re feeling the pinch because of the California drought. But these times are a reminder to shift…
Drought-tolerant food plants
Vegetables and food plants that thrive in low water conditions in Southern California … Amaranth African basil (Ocimum kilimandscharicum) Arugula sylvetta – the small-leafed, intensely-flavored perennial arugula Arugula (W) Chicory (W) Grapes Cowpea / blackeyed pea – especially the varieties…
8 Things you can do now, to prepare for summer heat
If you’re reading this and you live in L.A., California, or the U.S. Southwest, here are some simple things you can do now — as an individual or as a community group — to prepare for summer heat before the…
The One-Finger Test
In the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, we use what we call “the one finger test.” That means you take your finger and stick it into the garden soil – about one inch down into the soil. The soil…