Home and Garden Roundup for Week of 6/16/2008 - Garden Plants and Gardening Forum

lspichkin · 06-18-2008, 10:25 AM

A weekly roundup of the top stories from the Home & Garden sections of leading newspapers around the country.

The Los Angeles Times Home & Garden: How do his veggies grow? The no-dig way

Quote:

"PAT MARFISI carries bales of alfalfa hay and straw into the center aisle of his Hollywood Hills vegetable garden and begins tearing off pieces of the stuff. He doesn't have any animals to feed, just his "no-dig" landscape: raised beds using lasagna-like layers of fodder, bone and blood meal and compost -- and remarkably little water.

Now that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has declared a statewide drought, Marfisi's 300-square-foot patch seems more relevant than ever. It's his personal horticultural laboratory for a low-water, sustainable technique he learned working on organic farms in Australia last year.

Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

Find out how to start your own no dig garden.

The Miami Herald Gardening: You grow, Girl! Organic farm gains national attention.

Quote:

South Florida's most celebrated organic farmer started out here 24 years ago as a fertilizer and chemical sales rep.

It wasn't so much a change of philosophy as the gear-shifting experience of motherhood that set Gabriele Marewski on a new path.

RONNA GRADUS/MIAMI HERALD STAFF

The Seattle Post Intelligencer NW Gardens: Edibles: Help the garden through a dreary June

Quote:

It's the second week of a June that will be long remembered for nasty, cold weather, and nary a bean has been planted in my garden. Ditto for cukes, melons and squashes. And though they're still looking healthy, the corn, peppers and tomatoes I transplanted several weeks ago haven't set any records for speedy growth.

Where's global warming now that we need it? Seems like all the climatological bad guys have made the Northwest their convergent zone. Judging from the complaints I hear from local gardeners, I'd guess my garden is about like theirs. So what's to be the fate of food gardens in this damp, chilly growing season?

The Austin American-Statesman: Jill Nokes' book 'Yard Art and Handmade Places' showcases unusual gardens.

Quote:

Traveling along a noisy stretch of U.S. 183 South, drivers sometimes pull into Marian Reyes' driveway and ask to pray. Her gardens, which spill out from her front yard over to the family towing business next door, are lovingly filled with religious figures and cherub statues, as well as more light-hearted touches, such as the radiator fans that have been painted to look like flowers and tractor tires turned into planters. It is a place of calm along the increasingly busy highway.

Kelly West AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The New York Times: The Forest Premeditated: Illusions of Wildness in a Botanical Garden

Quote:

Spend some time at the New York Botanical Garden and the entire idea of a garden, let alone a “botanical garden,” starts to become even more strange. Is the garden a small part of nature, a set of organisms and plants replicating in miniature the vitality of their larger host? Yes, sure, but it is we, not nature, who create the garden, who give it its character within its man-made borders, and then labor to order it according to rules we establish. A garden is as much about the human world as the natural one.

Librado Romero/The New York Times

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