I had the pleasure of helping harvest, along with a bunch of other volunteers, over 450 lbs of Bearss Limes, Valencia Oranges, and Satsuma Mandarins this morning with SoCal Harvest, a local charity group. While finishing up, one of the harvesters mentioned her orange tree at home was covered in what looked like road dust, soot, or black sticky dirt. Based on her brief description, I told her it sounded like her tree may have a fungus commonly called sooty mold. She…
While out on a walk with my daughter, we almost breezed right past a couple of fairy garden apartments up high in a few street trees. It was a very unexpected, whimsical find. According to a friend that lives nearby, the figures are different almost everyday. I may have to set some scrap lumber aside for a fairy apartment in our parkway tree.
There’s a certain kind of fun in having the latest and greatest, but I’ve also learned that it’s often more rewarding to fix broken things, propagate, being resourceful, and making do rather than buying new. This is just as true in a modern day garden, as it was in a frugal or vintage 1940s home or victory garden. Use it Up – Don’t throw out old seed packets just because they say they were packaged for last season. Many seeds…
Happy Thanksgiving from Hanbury House! One of my favorite things about having a garden and growing my own organic flowers is sharing them in floral arrangements with the folks I love and care about. This year, my daughter, B wanted to help make our arrangement to take to Nana’s house, so I decided something more kid friendly was called for. We still had a left over unused pumpkin from Halloween out on the front porch that I figured would make…
Short answer: Just use an electric citrus juicer. My overly detailed, way too long response to the same dilemma: Although we have a young “Sweet” Pomegranate tree, sadly it is still too small to produce much fruit. However, my husband has a friend at work with an established “Wonderful” pomegranate tree that had a giant bumper crop this year. We often share our organic bantam eggs and homemade jelly with his friend, and recently he has been giving us lots…
Much to the relief of my patient hubby, I was finally able to settle on a vintage 1940s/ 1950s Formica table that fit the majority of my search criteria. No more constant browsing craigslist multiple times a day for new listings or driving half way across the Southland on our weekends to check out tables. I found a retro yellow Howell dinette set with four chrome & vinyl chairs, stamped on the under side of the table top with the…
We wanted the bathroom’s style to blend in with the rest of our old 1940’s house, using both new and vintage materials. We were going for a look that “the bathroom has been this way all along” and that it just had a few noticeable green updates over the years, like low flow fixtures, Low-E coated/ vinyl window, and florescent lighting over head. After two months of using it, we absolutely love the bathroom and wish we had done it…
The retro bathroom remodel we have been working on, kind of off and on for the last year, is finally finished! Our reinvented early 1940’s bathroom included walling up the doorway to the laundry room, lots of framing, breaking through the opposite wall and opening it into our bedroom, jackhammering out part of a concrete slab under the floor to make room for drains, insulating, updating all the electrical & plumbing, adding venting, adding the cast iron tub, moving the…
Happy Halloween from Hanbury House! I find lots of spiders in the yard all the time, and finally managed to get a couple of pictures of my favorite, the Bold Jumper. According to BugGuide.net Bold Jumpers are classified as Phidippus audax, and can be easily distinguished by the green fangs and three markings on the abdomen. The Bold Jumper is a highly variable species, and the markings on their back can come in white, orange, or reddish, but they always…
Although my gardening passion is mainly for edible plants, I feel having a variety of organic cut flowers to bring in the house or share is another good use of our growing space. I create all sorts of floral arrangements, depending on what is in season. One of my favorite flowers for arrangements is Alstromeria. I like that they last a long time after being picked, come in a variety of pretty colors, and are a bit drought tolerant. However,…