This weekend is the Los Angeles Green Festival, where I will be speaking on Sunday, October 30 at 2 p.m in the
Sustainable Home and Garden Pavilion. Heirlooms and Open-pollinated Seeds will be the topic of the afternoon, and if you want to learn why it's so important for us to grow these gems, and save the
seeds, come on down and find out.
The latest post from Mar Vista's Bounty Hunter is live and ready for your perusal. Find great ideas for cooking and decorating with pumpkins and other beautiful fall winter squash varieties:
Celebrate Halloween and Fall with Winter Squash
...
D. Landreth is the oldest seed house in America, and it's going out of business unless we help them. The bank has seized the company's assets and in order to pay back its debt, D. Landreth is selling seed catalogs to raise funds. Here's the scoop from their website:
Just a few moments in the garden reveal that it must be mating season for the cabbage moth. These deceptively cute white butterflies can be found twirling around one another and fluttering about the garden, looking for a good place to lay their eggs. Be prepared.
We planted out our kale and cabbage crops early this year, but took the precaution of covering them with floating row cover to keep the critters from settling in.
...
If you grow from seed this fall, you'll have a chance to enjoy the benefits of thinning your seedlings right into the salad bowl. Baby greens may be expensive in the market, but they're free when you pick from the excess of sprouts in your garden.
Even when using Square Foot Gardening, I like to have a little bit of insurance. I plant two or three seeds in each planting hole, then wait for survival of the fittest to make itself known. The smaller seedlings are then snipped off (with scissors, rather ...
The latest post from Mar Vista's Bounty Hunter is live and ready for your perusal. Learn all about Rita's Roman Recipes (website coming soon), and where to get them:
A Taste of Italy in Mar Vista
...
And now a moment of shameless self-promotion...
I've entered the Gardenerd Test Garden in a competition for cash and fame, and I need your help. YourGardenShow.com has partnered with Mother Earth News to give two lucky gardeners $500 cash and a chance at being featured in an upcoming issue of Mother Earth News Magazine.
We're currently holding in the Top 25 Gardens, ...
Aquaponics is a combination of hydroponics and aqua-culture. It is a closed-loop system that uses aquariums (or aquaria if we're going to use proper Latin) of fish to produce the nutrient fertilizer for plants to feed upon. The plants then grow in the water that is infused with fish droppings (and filtered for solids). It uses no soil. The water recycles back through the system to the fish and the whole process starts all over again.
I paid a visit to EVO Farm, a local experimental site that combines yardsharing with aquaponics. ...
The latest edition of Mar Vista's Bounty Hunter is ready for your perusal. Find out where to get organically grown pistachios in Los Angeles, and try the mouth-watering sweet and savory recipes:
Go Nuts with Organic, Kosher Pistachios
...
Ever heard of biochar? Maybe the term "Terra preta" rings a bell? Back in 2008 National Geographic published an article about a discovery of man-made nutrient-rich soil in the Amazon. Yes, man-made. It appears that by layering soil, charcoal, pottery sherds (yes, that's the correct spelling), and plant and animal wastes, the soil was transformed from nutrient-poor, desolate soil into the fertile ground that grew sustenance for ancient jungle inhabitants. I remember reading about it and thinking, "Hey, this could save ...