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

March 4, 2019

...cleaning up faster. Don’t worry, I leave the leaves in place to enrich the soil. The leaf blower just helps me clear the hardscaping. There’s actually a nice brick patio under the weeds 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...

Read…

133 Trees of Power with Akiva Silver

Mr. Homegrown

September 18, 2019

Food, Foraging, Gardening, Podcasts, Trees

3 Comments

...Crops (Free download on Archive.org) Kat Anderson Tending the Wild Mulch, soil and water Processing acorns Exotics vs. natives – should we learn to love the invasives? Tree of heaven! Coppicing and pollarding Arborist fails and #arboristfails How to plant trees If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmail.com. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and...

Read…

Thankful for the New Rain Garden

Mr. Homegrown

November 28, 2019

Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants

7 Comments

...la villosa) and assorted grasses. Alas, my hopes of building a little boat in which to row back and forth across our new seasonal pond have been dashed by the fact that our soil drains quickly (which is a good thing). We’ll post periodic updates to let you know what worked and what we killed....

Read…

The Perfect Crisis Vegetable: Prickly Pear Cactus

Mr. Homegrown

May 8, 2020

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

9 Comments

...or’s garden. Plant things like broccoli and carrots and, depending on your soil and experience level as a gardener, you’re in for a lot more work and, likely, disappointment. Trust me, I’ve killed a lot of vegetables in the past twenty years. I’ve never once killed a prickly pear cactus. Luther Burbank’s allegedly spineless prickly pear. We have one specimen that came with the house and another that I picked up a few years ago: Luther Burbank’s sp...

Read…

The Obligate Resprouter

Mr. Homegrown

November 12, 2020

Animals, Goats

...ssure on the very resources that climate change makes scarce—water and top soil. Now, at least temporarily, we find ourselves having to feed the goats hay grown by pumping water in the nearby desert, the very thing we have tried to avoid. Developing a new understanding of this agriculture’s relationship to climate change, drought and wildfire is necessarily the new project, and we are pleased to have you along for the exploration. You can subscrib...

Read…