Mallow (Malva parviflora) an Edible Friend

February 21, 2008

...laginous nature of the plant can be exploited by making a decoction of the leaves and roots to use as a shampoo, hair softener, and treatment for dandruff. And yet, like so many other gardening books, the oh-so-bourgeois Sunset Garden Guide only tells you how to get rid of mallow, and fails to note its many useful qualities....

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LA’s Parkway Garden Dilemma: Not Fixed Yet

Mr. Homegrown

August 20, 2013

Gardening, Urban Farming

9 Comments

...crackdown came two years after Ron Finley was busted for being a vegetable gardening outlaw. Over the weekend I started seeing articles, Tweets and Facebook posts (some of which I’m guilty of spreading) stating that the city council had approved parkway vegetable gardens. This is not technically correct. The city council has just suspended enforcement of parkway planting regulations while they await a report from the Bureau of Street Services. Whi...

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UC IPM on Facebook

Mr. Homegrown

October 13, 2015

Gardening, Pests

...sts, we send people to the University of California’s excellent Integrated Pest Management page. Now, UC IPM has a Facebook page. Along with the Garden Professor’s Facebook page, you’ve got pretty much all the social media based gardening information you need. Kelly adds: We’d be remiss if we didn’t also mention the useful and better known, What’s that Bug. But you will need UC IPM if you have too many of one sort of bug and wonder what you can do...

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Day to day, our decisions count

Mrs. Homegrown

April 30, 2015

Back to the Garden

6 Comments

...nd they are delicious! Eating this way is also a good primer for vegetable gardening. It teaches you what grows well in your area, and how the seasons run, and gives you some inspiration as to good local varieties you can seek out. By the by, I thought I’d mention Azure Standard here, too. This is a U.S. based company–it does not operate in every state, unfortunately, but it delivers bulk whole and natural foods to community drop-off points. You c...

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Composting: Nothing is Wasted

Mrs. Homegrown

May 7, 2015

Back to the Garden, Composting, Gardening

23 Comments

...he life of the soil. Forget that compost is the alpha and omega of organic gardening, and that any good gardener doesn’t like to see so much as a carrot peel go to waste, because it seems you can never have enough compost. No, just forget the vast practical utility of compost and think about what it symbolizes. Compost is the purest alchemy. It is the nigredo, the black matter of putrefaction, which is the first step on the path to creating the ph...

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