Saturday Linkages: Battling Herbicides, Solar Wall Ovens and Jaywalking

February 8, 2014

...ricas-public-transit-rout.html … LA residents: The city offers free native trees for street planting. Coast Live Oaks are approved as street trees! http://environmentla.org/pdf/2014/Theodore_Payne_Foundation_FlyerTA.pdf … Documenting the NYC snowpocalypse’s neckdowns: latent traffic calming revealed by climate and crowds: http://boingboing.net/2014/02/05/documenting-the-nyc-snowpocaly.html … Tom Vanderbilt in NYT: Jaywalking Tickets Don’t Make Str...

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069 Understanding Roots with Robert Kourik

Mr. Homegrown

December 2, 2015

Fruit Trees, Gardening, Podcasts, Vegetable Gardening

8 Comments

...’s new book Understanding Roots. From there we touch on how to plant fruit trees and the intricacies of how to water trees, vegetables and native plants. Then we delve deep into drip irrigation, dynamic accumulators and phytoremediation. If you’d like to pick up a copy of one of Robert’s books visit robertkourik.com. If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmail.com. You...

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Admitting Gardening Mistakes

Mr. Homegrown

August 17, 2015

Garden Design, Gardening

15 Comments

...and a unwillingness to admit mistakes. Take, for instance, the stone fruit trees in our front yard. The “new normal” that climate change has brought to our region–fewer chill hours and drought–has greatly diminished the health and productivity of most of our stone fruit. It’s time for those trees to go and for the execution of a more coherent and attractive landscape plan. As Hermann von Pückler-Muskau advises in his 1834 book Hints on Landscape G...

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Camping on Halloween Night

Mrs. Homegrown

November 11, 2014

Miscellaneous, Nature Awareness

18 Comments

...t significant rain in maybe 9 months or so. All night long the wind in the trees roared and boomed–it sounded like waves crashing on rocks. The rain sheeted down on my tent while the wind shook the sides. (A five year old tent which has never been tested in the rain–that’s SoCal camping for you!). It did not leak, thank the Great Pumpkin. I have to say, I have never been happier on any Halloween. At dawn I woke up to a world soggy and remade. The...

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Yet More Reasons to Mulch

Mr. Homegrown

October 14, 2014

Gardening

4 Comments

Image: Wikimedia. From a water conservation perspective alone, our trees need a good layer of mulch. But there are many more reasons to mulch, according to research by James Downer, Farm Advisor with the Cooperative Extension in Ventura County, California: Mulch provides nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus. A serendipitous accident in one of Downer’s studies revealed that mulch changes soil structure so that mulched soils are able to absorb more w...

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