White Sage and Bees and our other sage friends

...alifornia. I enjoy the aromatics of our Mediterranean and native chaparral plants as much as the bees do. Here’s what we’ve got going right now–and I think I’m going to add more this fall. Below is our native black sage, Salvia mellifera, just coming into flower. The bees like this sage, too. (They like all sages). This one arranges its flowers in little sipping cups for them. It has dark green leaves, which is less common than greyish foliage in...

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July Linkages

...ks in the series, “Home Dairy” and “Beekeeping”, will be available in April 2011. Hopefully we’ll be having English on our new Homegrown Evolution Podcast that will debut when we can get our computer, seen above, to record audio. A few blog posts ago we answered a question about soil testing. Visiting journalist Michael Tortorello tipped us off to the University of Minnesota’s Soil Testing Laboratory that will test out of state samples for their r...

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Our new front yard: history

...ng guides and determined that we should plant the slope with Mediterranean plants. Through this process we began to learn the common names of plants, as as well as their exotic, hard to pronounce scientific names, and we began to pick up on basic vocabulary: terms like root ball and perennial and massing. We planted tough, shrubby plants like lavender and Mexican sage and lantana. We planted these around a couple of young prickly pear cactus (Ficu...

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Planting a Mini-Orchard

...p two was matching that washing machine water output to the right kinds of plants for the mini-orchard. We settled on the three “Ps” — pomegranate, persimmon, and pineapple guava, plus a mission fig tree to replace the substandard one we cut down (even though God Hates Figs!). The advantage with these four trees is that they can survive, once established, should we find ourselves unable to use any water due to the aforementioned bad-ass draught sc...

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Make Your Own Chalkboard Paint II

...e Root Simple compound was making our own chalkboard paint and using it to label all of the cabinets in our garage workshop. In the past month, inspired by a visit from über-maker Federico Tobon, I’ve taken up the task of pimping out the workshop with a proper workbench and table saw. I’ll blog about Workshop 2.0 when I’m finished with the renovation, but the chalkboard paint hack is worth a repeat mention. Thanks to the chalkboard paint, when I w...

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