Growing Watermelons

September 4, 2008

...uit, early watermelon varieties get you to harvest faster. This means less time for pest and disease problems to develop. While we’ve got a very long season here in Southern California for summer vegetables, with almost no chance of a fall freeze, I’ve begun in the past year to plant early varieties of most vegetables simply because there is less time for bad things to happen. 3. Watermelon is a living mulch. Watermelon, an enormous vine, makes an...

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A Tour of the Homegrown Evolution Compound

Mr. Homegrown

April 13, 2008

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

7 Comments

...ct some misconceptions: Our place looks like Versailles. Truth is, at some times, our garden looks terrible. It depends on the season, and the amount of time we have to put into it. It looks good now, but in December it looked like crap. We try to plant things that do well in our climate and provide food, medicine or habitat for birds and beneficial insects. But we’ve made plenty of mistakes, and continue to do so. We’re survivalists. Can we live...

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Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Dealing With the Crisis of Overconnection

Mr. Homegrown

February 19, 2013

Reviews, Thoughtstylings

1 Comment

...old tools: Powers gives the example of note taking with paper and pen. Sometimes older tools can help reduce distractions–your paper notebook, after all, is not going to chime in with an incoming email. Rituals: As Powers puts it, “Vow to finish all screen tasks by a given time, with a reward if you make it.” Don’t check email first thing in the morning–get some work or exercise done first. I have a disclaimer at the bottom of my emails stating th...

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Parkway Plantings

Mr. Homegrown

October 3, 2006

Vegetable Gardening

1 Comment

...the best growing season for vegetables here in Los Angeles, and now is the time to start planting. Our parkway garden consists of two 1.8 x 1.8 meter raised beds with a central wire frame obelisk in each bed to support beans. We ordered all of our seeds this winter from Seeds from Italy and have begun succession planting seeds every two weeks. North Bed as of October 2, 2006 In the north bed we have: Broccoli Rabe – Cima di Rapa Novantina, which m...

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De-Cluttering the Garden

Mr. Homegrown

February 12, 2015

Domesticus, Gardening, Tidying up

8 Comments

...gangly, trees shade out other plants and things just generally change. Sometimes you have to mimic nature’s floods and fires and make a radical shift. Weeding and thinning. We got behind on this and we’re paying the price. This is a matter of poor scheduling, subject matter for an upcoming series of posts (if I can ever schedule time to write those scheduling posts). Let’s just say there was some cursing while pulling out a robust and thorny Opunt...

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