Garden Update Part II: The Good the Bad and a Lot of Ugly

March 4, 2019

...eds and clutter here. Ugh, more junk. Here’s the nice new patio the Haynes landscaping folks built. The adobe oven is under a blue tarp. Blue tarps are the architectural equivalent of a comb over. The oven needs a little roof which, to extend the metaphor would be the architectural equivalent of a decent wig, if such a thing exists. And, man, do we need some outdoor furniture. Thankfully I came up with an idea for some outdoor furniture that I’ll...

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Backyard in Progress

Mr. Homegrown

June 17, 2019

Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...is morning I thought I’d update progress on the garden. A crew from Haynes Landscaping worked hard over the past week to clean up our backyard and install the hardscaping for a rain garden fed by the downspout from the back end of our house. The rain garden will fill out a problematic area we’ve struggled with over the years. When we moved into this house in 1998 the spot was occupied by a dead tree. A few years ago we used the area to mine clay f...

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The Soil Beneath Our Feet

Mrs. Homegrown

April 23, 2015

Back to the Garden

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...en plot, or we may help in the school garden, or attend meetings about the landscaping of a local park or the future of a recreation area. In all these places, we can exercise soil stewardship. Soil is so important that I’m going to really drill down into this topic. In the next few posts I’ll be talking about 5 areas of personal action on behalf of the soil: Our consumer decisions Composting Mulching No-till gardening Committing to not using chem...

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Rain Garden Update

Mr. Homegrown

March 17, 2021

Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants

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...sides. Volunteer New Zealand Spinach (Tetragonia tetragonoides) She says, “Landscaping the pit is like 3D chess–it’s hard enough to plant a flower bed but this is harder because you have in the same space different growing conditions and you have to make use of this unusual space in a clever way. Is it densely or lightly planted? Is it like a rock garden or do you have plants that cascade down the sides? How do you balance all this and not look cr...

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2014: The Year in Review

Mr. Homegrown

December 29, 2014

Thoughtstylings

5 Comments

...thought that before. Right now, why Kelly is away, I’m working on a secret landscaping project. Let’s see if she notices . . . February Advantages and Disadvantages of Raised Bed Vegetable Gardening After a successful straw bale garden in the summer of 2013, I finally got around to building new raised beds to replace some that we had taken out. Our lead and zinc contaminated soil necessitates this, but I wish I didn’t have to use raised beds for r...

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