The Call to Create: Marguerite Knutzen 1925-2017

April 18, 2017

...loving, kind and patient mom. To her I owe my life’s calling: the joys of making, doing and teaching. My mom taught junior high art, crafts and ceramics before I was born. She took a break to raise me and then went back to teaching as an elementary school aide. Teaching at the junior high level is no easy task. Schools dump students with academic and home problems into the arts classes just to keep them busy. My mom’s call to be a teacher wasn’t...

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A Sasquatch in the Garden?

Mr. Homegrown

November 6, 2020

Gardening

8 Comments

I keep a mental note of all the objects I’ve dug up while gardening over the years. The soil surrounding our house has mostly thrown up broken milk bottles from the days of the milkman. I’ve also found a lot of what I think are perfume bottles. Mostly though my shovel hits chunks of long buried concrete. Then I curse. But this week, while we’ve been working on version 5.3 of our difficult to garden steep front slope, I uncovered the strangest obj...

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Heirloom Expo in Photos

Mr. Homegrown

September 14, 2015

Food, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

6 Comments

I highly recommend making the trip next year to Santa Rosa to see the National Heirloom Exposition put on by the folks at Baker Creek Seeds. The centerpiece of the expo is the massive display of hundreds of different varieties of squash, melons, tomatoes and other edibles. It’s inspiring and frustrating all at once since, unless you have your own garden, you’ll never see such diversity at the supermarket. I came back with the will to improve our...

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In Praise of Disorder

Mr. Homegrown

March 29, 2008

Thoughtstylings

7 Comments

...ofiled in this blog: greywater, backyard poultry, and front yard vegetable gardening, to mention just a few. Ideally you have a balance between order and disorder–neither gunfire nor the prying eyes of city inspectors. Where I’m staying in Houston, with its flocks of loose chickens, packs of feral dogs, and broken down bungalows seems just about right. Our neighborhood in Los Angeles is seeming less ideal with the news from Mrs. Homegrown Evolutio...

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End of Season Tomato Review

Mr. Homegrown

November 26, 2008

Gardening, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening

7 Comments

...nefit of being fusarium wilt and verticillium resistant. It may be organic gardening heresy to say this, but hybrid tomatoes such as Roma are the best varieties for beginning gardeners to grow due to their trouble free and disease resistant qualities. The down side is that you can’t save the seeds. We also grew Syrian Giants, but unfortunately our Doberman Pincher ate most of them on late night raids. Perhaps because the Syrians grew in less than...

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