Defining a Garden’s Purpose

...covered when they placed cameras in 32 Los Angeles homes to see how people used their houses and back yards, “More than half of the families in the Los Angeles Study spent zero leisure time (none for kids, none for parents) in their back yards during our filming. In quite a few of these cases, no family member so much as stepped into the back yard for any purpose. For another 25 percent of the families, the parents did not carve out any back yard...

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How To Stop Powdery Mildew

...the temperature is under 90° F. Do not apply any of these oils if you have used sulfur. DIY Options For home remedies I turned to advice from Washington State University horticulturalist Linda Chalker-Scott. How about milk, widely touted as a powdery mildew treatment? According to Chalker-Scott the answer is yes it might work, but you may need to apply milk before powdery mildew appears. And the studies were done with whole milk, so the effectiven...

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Closed vs. Open Floor Plans

...s!). The “out of sight, out of mind” servant is one of the chief arguments used for the open floor plan: that is, that an open floor plan liberates the cook (often the woman of the house) from the servant role. But I’m not so sure. Sometimes it’s nice to be able to hide the mess and noise of the kitchen from the rest of the house. Likewise I appreciate that the back bedroom that serves as my office and a guest room has a door to hide my chaos. If...

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Eight Things to Consider When Saving Vegetable Seeds

...e packs of desiccant that come with electronic gadgets can be recycled and used in your seed storage boxes. There’s no shame in buying seeds In our small garden it would be nearly impossible to save the seeds of readily pollinated vegetables such as members of the Cucurbitaceae family. But it would be great to have varieties of vegetables adapted to our dry Mediterranean climate. Most seed saving operations use lots of fertilizer and water and the...

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