Tips and tricks it took to have our most successful harvest of the best tasting red grape we grow. For years animals were steeling the homegrown grapes before we picked them. We finally outsmarted all the orchard pests.
A little over two years ago, my daughter, B, started an after dinner gardening project of trying to grow a pineapple. She plopped a discarded cut-off pineapple crown with leaves into a pot. She treated it like many of her succulent plants: no prep, no rooting hormone, just potting soil and occasionally a bit of leftover water from her school lunch. It still lives in a pot on the front porch, getting about half-day sun. Last winter she did remember…
Most of my flowers and perennials these days are generally low water users, at least once they became established, however the same is not true of all my edible plants. When the state officials announced the need for even deeper cuts to our water use early this year, I decided what my most prized or hard to replace plants were, mainly the fruit trees and camellias, and then I diverted the limited grey water from our front load washer machine…
Okay, maybe not tons, but at least 50 or 60 lbs. of Kiwis, is my best guess at this point. Although in past years, I have grumbled and griped a lot about the lack of pollination on my Kiwi vines, this year we have a bumper crop, and now that we have had a few cold snaps, it is time to begin harvesting. If I had to guess, I would say there are at least 500 kiwis on the female…
The past couple of years I have been received lots of questions via email regarding how to prune Bababerry plants, a variety of everbearing raspberry that grows well in Southern California and other low chill – warm climates. Managing Baba raspberries is much the same as any other everbearing or fall bearing raspberry variety. Most folks are able to pick fruit the first year they buy and plant an everbearing raspberry, including Baba. That is not the case on summer bearing…
Depending on what garden resource I read or who I listen to, what I do around our property is referred to by a variety of names…urban homesteading, Permaculture, backyard orchard culture, edible landscaping, victory gardening, etc. I really don’t care what it is called, except when my husband calls it an addiction. This is a small sample of what’s growing around here, and more pictures can be found throughout my blog. We live on a 1/12th of an acre, smack…
This new video by a local film student features a few volunteers from SoCal Harvest. If you are local to the Greater Long Beach area, and if you don’t want backyard fruit to go to waste, SoCal Harvest has a team of volunteers that will come out, pick any fruit within reach of picking poles and small ladders, and box it all up for Food Finders to pass out to local food pantries. Homeowners can even get a receipt for…