Top Six California Native Plant Performers

June 5, 2017

...in the scientific name for this member of the buckwheat family. Give this baby some room. Ours is doing well in partial shade. 5. Toyon (Heteromeles arbutitolia) This treeish native stared the drought in the face and laughed. We planted it in the neighbor’s yard where it got cut down accidentally. A year later it had grown back to its former glory. Birds love the little red berries, which can be dried for a not very exciting human snack. 6. Coyot...

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Acedia, iPhone Addiction and the Noonday Devil

Mr. Homegrown

May 31, 2024

Thoughtstylings

4 Comments

...watching a cat riding on a robot vacuum and the next you’re reading about “Baby Gronk rizzing up Livvy.” In this insanity, signifier and signified get detached, precisely in the way Jacques Lacan defined schizophrenia: as a thought salad of disconnected images and thoughts. To get back to the Desert Fathers, they mapped many of acedia’s extended symptoms, some paradoxical: narcissism, hypochondria, binge eating, aversion to physical work and doing...

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Bad Forager: Mistaking Hemlock for Fennel

Mrs. Homegrown

October 31, 2013

Food, Foraging, Mistakes

12 Comments

...ies, and are hard to fool. Some notes on hemlock: I’ve always been wary of baby hemlock. It likes to grow where chickweed grows, so its easy to pull up a few hemlock sprouts along with young chickweed, and it doesn’t take much fresh hemlock in your salad to make you very sick. The main poison in hemlock coniine, which is similar to nicotine in both its chemical structure and pharmacological properties. It takes about 100 mg of coniine to kill an a...

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How to Remove Bees From a Tree

Mr. Homegrown

March 20, 2013

Animals, Bees, Gardening, Trees

21 Comments

...es. Next to the exit the beekeeper places a hive box with some brood comb (baby bees) in it. The worker bees leave but can’t get into their old home. They take up residence in the new box and make a new queen. If all goes well the beekeeper comes in six weeks and takes away the box. I took bees out of a kitchen vent this way and wrote about it in a blog post. Know the difference between a swarm and a beehive. Swarms are how bees reproduce. Often t...

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The problem with polar fleece: it’s in the ocean, it’s in sea creatures, it’s on our plates

Mrs. Homegrown

August 17, 2016

Domesticus

24 Comments

...ap fleece goods have become ubiquitous at chain stores, in everything from baby clothing to home decoration. As a result, at this point, only the most militant lentil eating do-gooder, the most pure of the pure, do not have at least one polar fleece (polyester fleece) pullover in their wardrobe or blanket on their bed. I have a few polar fleece items, and as with all artificial fibers, I knew when I bought them that these things will never decompo...

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