What are trees worth?

August 20, 2015

Fruit Trees, Gardening, Nature Awareness, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings, Trees

...ich cools the ground, which cools the environment at large, countering the urban heat island effect. They also cool the air by passing water through their leaves. A healthy urban forest makes for a much more liveable city for us all. (The city of Melbourne understands this.) And trees clustered around your own house make your home cooler in the summer, reducing your energy bills. Low lying cactus and succulent plants do little or nothing nothing t...

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Our new front yard, part 3: design

Mrs. Homegrown

November 17, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...rsist long after the bloom. Filler plants: These are the transitory, often self-seeding plants which pop up opportunistically to fill empty spaces. Wild flowers are a good example. They will fill open space in the garden in the early spring, while the perennials are getting up to speed. By the time the perennials shade them out, the wildflowers are pretty much done anyway. How I started: I started by considering the site, the light and the soil co...

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Saturday Linkages: Beetle Party, Floating Homes and Cilantro

Mr. Homegrown

June 9, 2018

Saturday Linkages

4 Comments

...rower) June 9, 2018 Fire prevention … goat browsing #goatsquad #citygoats #urbanagriculture @ucanr @ucdavisvetmed @UCUrbanAg pic.twitter.com/98Noy6XipG — Alda Pires (@piresalda1) June 9, 2018 First time I’ve seen a canoe being towed on the downtown #yeg bike grid. #yegbike pic.twitter.com/QcemoJhr2M — Damian Rogers (@abcrimlaw) June 7, 2018 Vacant land and urban agriculture are rejuvenating wild bee populations. Bees love cities. What can cities d...

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Aerated Compost Tea: Does it Work?

Mr. Homegrown

December 6, 2012

Composting, Gardening

15 Comments

...gadgets or novel techniques with no analog in nature. I’ve also tried it myself and found that a thick mulch of plain compost seems to work better. That being said, I want to present a balanced story. I’m interested in hearing from readers about their ACT experiences. Have you tried it? Do you think it works? Or are you skeptical? Leave a comment or send me an email with your name, where you live and whether ACT did or did not work for you. I’d li...

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The Gathering Storm

Mr. Homegrown

January 11, 2025

Thoughtstylings

3 Comments

...5 off on a dark note. Yesterday, on my evening dog walk, I found a charred page from Winston Churchill’s book The Gathering Storm that must have come from one of the many destroyed homes in Altadena, carried aloft by hurricane force winds a distance of 12 miles. We have never lived in Altadena but Kelly and I both feel a deep connection to the place. We met a lot of people there in the years after our two books came out. Altadena is the kind of pl...

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