Olive Questions

...season the brine? While my attempt at growing annual vegetables was a disaster this year, let me say how thankful Kelly and I are to have planted fruit trees ten years ago. The most successful: pomegranates, figs and olives. If you’d like to try curing olives, but don’t have any trees of your own, you can always forage them. In the past month I’ve spotted fruiting olive trees in Hollywood on a side street adjacent to the Kaiser complex, in a park...

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Saturday Linkages: Thanksgiving Weekend Edition

...s://t.co/snomX79T5f — Road Ecology Center (@roadecology) November 20, 2017 Trees in eastern US head west as climate changes. Breaking from the general poleward movement of many species, flowering trees take an unexpected turn. https://t.co/UVDilKTrxa pic.twitter.com/O3DRF2E6RD — Thomas Rainer (@ThomasRainerDC) November 25, 2017 @rootsimple https://t.co/zKBLnvlhZ3 — TommyBerbas (@TommyBerbas) November 21, 2017 College is so much different than high...

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February 2019 Garden Update

...1998, about what to do with our yard I would say this: Be bold. Remove any trees that are in the wrong place, too big or just plain ugly. Then plant trees that either feed native wildlife (such as oak) or provide fruit. Think carefully about their placement. Do all hardscaping first and build it out of durable materials. Those retaining walls that failed in the front yard are wood and only lasted 15 years. If you don’t know what your doing hire a...

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There is Something Beyond the Straw Bale

...ised bed or a straw bale or an alternation of both bed and bale. The fruit trees, for those keeping score, consist of a fig, pomegranate, avocado and olive as well as a few stone fruit trees that we will likely remove since the squirrels get every single fruit. In the perennial vegetable catagory, there’s also a few artichokes that pop up here and there, prickly pear cactus and an indestructible stand of New Zealand spinach. When Laramee is done w...

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How to Garden With California Natives: Lessons from the 2016 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

...o establish those new plantings. And we should continue to irrigate mature trees. OK, enough with the rant. One of the great benefits of garden tours like the one Kelly and I went on this past weekend, sponsored by the Theodore Payne Foundation, is that they give examples to imitate for people like us who can’t afford the services of landscape architects. Perhaps most importantly, they show how a coastal California landscape can be lush without us...

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