The Homegrown Mailbox: How and Where Do I Get My Soil Tested?

June 5, 2009

...kindly sent me the following list of labs with comments. Biological Urban Gardening Service PO Box 76 Citrus Heights, CA 95611 (916) 726-5377 URL: www.organiclandscape.com Email: bugs@organiclandscape.com Organic recommendations, very user-friendly Owner Steve Zien and I co-author “Organic Matters” organic gardening column in Sacramento Bee for 20 years. Wallace Laboratories 365 Coral Circle El Segundo, CA 90245 (310) 615-0116 www.bettersoils.com...

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Getting started with worms

Mrs. Homegrown

August 29, 2014

Composting, Gardening, Vermiculture

8 Comments

...utrients which will make your house plants, your landscape plants and your vegetable garden grow strong and healthy. Worm castings and vermicompost, the products of a worm bin, are superb soil conditioners and plant tonics. Some quick definitions: Worm castings , also called vermicast, are worm poo. Vermicompost is the product of a worm bin, and it’s made mostly of worm castings, along with some compost material–that is, broken down organic matter...

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Parkway Plantings

Mr. Homegrown

October 3, 2006

Vegetable Gardening

1 Comment

...asses for agriculture in this country have taken all the flavor out of our vegetables. Rapa da Foglia senza Testa, i.e. rabe without a head. Yet another bitter vegetable, this is a kind of turnip green that looks kind of like broccoli rabe, except that you eat the leaves. A bit susceptible to bugs, but we had a successful crop last year. Carrots – Carota Pariser Market. This is a small round carrot that French folks apparently like. Around the wir...

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Going to Seed

Mrs. Homegrown

June 24, 2016

Back to the Garden, Gardening, Nature Awareness, Vegetable Gardening

14 Comments

...shrubs for kitchen floors. Popular opinion seems to believe our flower and vegetable gardens should be maintained like trophy rooms, like curio cases. Our mistake, of course, is thinking that everything is about us. That our yard, our garden, our little patch of land actually belongs to us and we have the right to maintain it exactly as we like. We might own it on paper, but we share it with hundreds, thousands, millions (if you want to get into s...

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Is Purslane the New Kale?

Mr. Homegrown

June 27, 2014

Food, Foraging, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

29 Comments

...rslane (Portulaca oleracea) could soon be ready for its fifteen minutes of vegetable fame. We planted some this year in our summer vegetable garden and I’ve used it in a lot of salads this week. Purslane is a common weed in North America. We’d love to be able to forage it in the neighborhood but, for some reason, it only tends to appear in unappetizing locations: usually the gutter (I think it needs a bit more water than what falls naturally from...

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