What Will Be the New Kale?

October 31, 2014

Our 2011 crop of spigarello. Since 2011, we’ve been saying that Spigarello is the new kale. Thanks to a tip from the folks at Winnetka Farms, we may need to wait for BroccoLeaf™ to have its fifteen minutes of fame as the new kale. The Salinas, California based Foxy Organic is, quite sensibly, marketing broccoli leaves. Broccoli leaves are indeed edible and tasty. Foxy has the recursive media to prove it, a Facebook photo of someone Instagramming...

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More on our gardening disasters

Mrs. Homegrown

January 21, 2013

Gardening, Mistakes, Thoughtstylings

15 Comments

...to put the heart back into our garden. (Our Heart of Flax from way back in 2011) I thought I’d chime in on the subject of this year’s garden failures. Before I do, I’d like to thank you all for your kind advice and commiseration that you left on Erik’s post. First, I will agree that it really, truly has been a terrible year in the garden. Sometimes Erik gets a little melodramatic when it comes to the crop failure (e.g. the Squash Baby adventure)...

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Our new front yard, part 2: theory

Mrs. Homegrown

November 13, 2015

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

12 Comments

...ch makes working on it real fun.) That might be one reason why the idea of making it into an orchard had so much appeal. When garden design books bother to address hillside gardens, they always feature much bigger hills than ours, and these hills feature expensive hardscaping, like artfully arranged imported boulders, fancy staircases which sweep along the contour of the hill, or dazzling water features. Nobody designs in 15 foot wide spaces stuff...

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Age of Apocalypse

Mr. Homegrown

May 31, 2013

Age of Limits, Thoughtstylings

41 Comments

...shelter, and maybe defending one’s family . . . This is why the return to simplicity offered by the most extreme scenarios is providing so alluring to so many of us. The apocalypse meme also recalls Freud’s observation the the fear of death paradoxically results in a condition of pathological inaction that mimics death. It’s an impulse, in my opinion, that is best resisted. This impulse has long been recognized. Seneca said, “One must avoid that...

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The Tiny House

Mr. Homegrown

January 15, 2007

Design

...e. In 1997 Jay Shafer took it upon himself to try an experiment in radical simplicity and create the smallest possible living space he could. Measuring just 100 square feet, his tiny house violated local building codes for the minimum amount of living space required for each occupant. So Shafer attached wheels to it and called it a trailer. But unlike a trailer, his house and subsequent houses he designed have an attention to detail, and a cozines...

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