Lessons from the 2018 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

April 16, 2018

...ticket contest winner (who gave us the most beautiful basket of home grown fruits and preserves ever–thank you Donna!) came to the same conclusion. We’ve hired a designer, which is why our backyard looks like a strip mine: A crew took out an ugly concrete patio last week and has been digging down to lower the level of the new patio they will install. The old patio was above the level of the sill plate and was causing the back part of the house to...

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Kent’s Composting Tips and Secret Weapon

Mr. Homegrown

October 27, 2006

Composting, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

...ood gets into the mix, even oily stuff, but mostly it’s the usual veggies, fruits, paper napkins, etc. Though experts say no fats should go in, I’ve yet to see (or smell) a problem. Each time I add new kitchen scraps, I add 1-2 shovels-full of dry leaves and some water if needed, turning and mixing the old and new stuff with a cultivator or shovel to aerate the pile. The proportion of dry to wet material is important. There should be enough dry le...

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Growing Watermelons

Mr. Homegrown

September 4, 2008

Gardening

10 Comments

...er watermelon vines I have going (in a better location) already have a few fruits developing on them. Some things I’ve learned about watermelons: 1. Fighting powdery mildew. Our inland coastal climate, with its hot summer days and cool evenings, is not the best place for melons as we tend to get powdery mildew, a white fungal growth that covers the leaves. However, our watermelon vines seem to be resistant to this problem, unlike the cantaloupes t...

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There is Something Beyond the Straw Bale

Mr. Homegrown

May 31, 2019

Fruit Trees, Garden Design, Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

2 Comments

...icial wildlife. We’re also fans of hardy and climate appropriate perennial fruits and vegetables–beyond that solitary straw bale we have a lot of edible perennial plants and a bunch of work to do to straighten out the yard after years of other priorities. Site of future seasonal rain garden. Towards that end, our landscaper, Laramee Haynes and crew are coming next week to clean things up, install a kind of seasonal rain garden fed by a downspout,...

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A Plea for Plastic Vegetables

Mr. Homegrown

September 22, 2014

Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

A supplier’s offerings of fake fruits and vegetables in Japan. We get a lot of good spam emails at Root Simple. This one, which came in last week, is one of my favorites: Hello, I work for a TV show in New York and we are in need of several artificial vegetables and vegetable plants. Please let me know if you carry any of the following: 1. Purple Bulb Shaped Eggplants and Eggplant plants 2. Green and yellow squash (zucchini) 3. Cucumbers 4. Red H...

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