The Miraculous Lavender

July 25, 2014

...we’ve had no precipitation for months now. I don’t water it. I don’t send water down the stairs. The soil off the stairs is dry, because that slope is planted with natives, which are getting no irrigation. There’s no plumbing beneath the staircase, either. Yet the lavender keeps getting bigger. I’m going to have to pull it soon, before it ruins our stairs. But I don’t want to, because it’s so determined to live. And this goes to show that when a...

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Thankful for the New Rain Garden

Mr. Homegrown

November 28, 2019

Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants

7 Comments

...sting calculator, in an average year we could send almost 6,000 gallons of water to our backyard. We ran a pipe from the rain gutter way back into the yard along a fence. The pipe terminates at a simulated gravel filled stream bed that spills into the rain garden. Kelly has just started planting the wet lower part of the rain garden with native plants including water loving Douglas irises (Iris douglasiana). She planted the dry outer edges with de...

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The problem with polar fleece: it’s in the ocean, it’s in sea creatures, it’s on our plates

Mrs. Homegrown

August 17, 2016

Domesticus

24 Comments

...essen the shedding by using liquid detergent and fabric softener in a cold water wash, but this is not a solution, just a mitigation. It turns out that over the years here at our house we’ve sent a good deal of these stray fibers into the soil around our house, since we’ve been using a greywater system. I’m not sure what to think about that. I doubt that the fibers are as disruptive in the soil as they are in a marine ecosystem, but still, it’s no...

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McDonald’s Corporation Headquarters Used to Have a Suede Waterbed Think Tank

Mr. Homegrown

May 4, 2021

Design

...r cent a year in the downtown office, has been 30 per cent in the new surroundings, where the colors tan and burnt‐orange predominate. I guess we can conclude that toxic work places can be cured with some tan and burnt‐orange suede walls and a 700 gallon water bed? Corporations these days have ditched the water bed pods for “mindfulness” classes but I doubt the workers are any happier. I’ll leave it to some of the commenters on Collins’ Twitter po...

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A happy tangle

Mrs. Homegrown

October 12, 2015

Animals, Nature Awareness

2 Comments

...ubbing alcohol, which I keep in a spray bottle to sterilize my pruning shears. It’s just handy. If I didn’t have that, I’d use vinegar. Clean out your birdbaths, too. You don’t have to bleach them, but change the water regularly and don’t let them get all gunky. And if you keep hummingbird feeders, you probably know those need to be cleaned out with hot water every few days, so mold doesn’t form in the sugar....

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