High-yield vegetable gardens
How to obtain incredible yields from a small urban square footage, and make it all look beautiful, too! 1. Plant edibles. It sounds really obvious, but Americans tend to plant way too many flowers. Fill your space with food plants…
Nourishing with Compost
When we broke ground at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, the site was old grass and junipers. Not the nice kind of grass, but the scratchy stuff that kids won’t even romp on. Photographic records showed that the space…
How Much Mulch
Emilia Hazelip, gardening near the fields of France, used straw — about 10 inches of it! A local homestead project once stated on their blog that they use 4 to 6 inches of mulch. Lowenfels and Lewis are far more…
A Thick Quilt of Mulch
“Nature abhors bare soil,” said French Permaculturist Emilia Hazelip. When you take a hike in the mountains, have you ever noticed how the shrubs drop a thick layer of leaves? In their natural state, shrubs make their own mulch. Peel…
Smooth or Chunky
In the gardens of my youth, the soil texture was definitely chunky. Chunky then meant sandstone and shale rock pieces – chunks so hard you could not break them with a pick, let alone with the tender root of a…
Drop Yer Bloomers
Lately I’ve been growing impatient with impatiens. Petunias, snapdragons, bouganvilla, ficus, bird-of-paradise: our Southern California cities luxuriate in year-round ornamental gardens. Pretty bloomers, yes. But truly, a mix of non-functional tropical plants slurping water in what is really a desert…
Going Organic
Going organic is much more than just switching from Monsanto-manufactured chemical warfare, to herbal sprays and less-toxic powders. Going organic is an opportunity to rethink. It is a journey of rebuilding with different, yet similar, basic components. When we build…
The Lost Art
“Can she bake a cherry pie?” chants the American folk song. That didn’t mean opening a can of goo from the supermarket and dumping it into a frozen pie shell. It mean knowing when the cherries were sweet and ripe,…
Vegetable Garden Design in brief
a handout written for the Emerson Avenue Community Garden 1) Include food. There are so many reasons we need to be growing food right now in this society (list here http://envirochangemakers.org/FoodSecurity.htm ) and this garden is the place to show…
Places to learn about seed saving
An online booklet to get you started http://www.seedalliance.org/download-form-1/ (more cool stuff from them http://www.seedalliance.org/Publications/ ) A beautiful YouTube about seeds and genetic heritage http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9K0cZGQgHA A graphic that explains F1 hybrids and why so few will breed true. http://scienceforhumans.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/punnet-square-mendel-results.jpg At my…