Gardening

Q & A with Gardening for Geeks's Christy Wilhelmi: Black Thumbs, Raccoon-Deterrents Why Garden Hoses Are Scary

What is it about Christy Wilhelmi's three-minute tip-of-the-week podcast Gardenerd that makes it feel like essential listening? Is it that it's so short and informative? Or maybe that Wilhelmi's pealing bell voice makes everything garden-related -- even getting rid of pesky powdery mildew -- sound e ... More >>

Watch Ron Finley's TED Talk, South Central's Guerrilla Gardener

Ron Finley is a gardener, but not in the puttering-in-the-backyard kind of way. Rather, the artist and designer refers to himself as a "guerrilla gardener," using the growing of food as a way to try to change the dynamics of his neighborhood: South Central L.A. In a TED talk, given in Long Beach i ... More >>

Fugly Landscaping: The Hedge That Looks Like an Afro

Early on in architecture school, a professor advised me against filling in a half-baked drawing with a row of sycamore trees. Admittedly, I was trying to cover up the unresolved aspects of the design. "Ah trees," he sighed gently, raising one eyebrow, "the architect's eraser."

Michelle Obama's White House Kitchen Garden Book Out Today

Michelle Obama's first book, American Grown: The Story of the White House Kitchen Garden and Gardens Across America, hits the bookstores today. Just in time for summertime gardening, for your kids' summer vacation projects (Cook your own dinner! Build your own compost bin!), and even for a season of ... More >>

Mayita Dinos: Much Ado About Water

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2012 issue. Check out our entire People 2012 issue here. Mayita Dinos' soft hands belie the fact that she's dug through acres of stubborn subsoil on a one-woman crusade to mulch, harrow and hoe as much of Los Angeles as possible. She ... More >>

Post & Beam Launches Gardening Club This Weekend

Looking to get dirty this weekend? Baldwin Hill's Post & Beam is launching the first of its summer series of Gardening Club workshops this weekend with help from horticulturalist Geri Miller and head chef Govind Armstrong. The arrival of spring means that vegetables like basil, peppers, squash, eggp ... More >>

What's In A Rose Name? The Food Hybrid Tea Varietals (Whiskey, Too) Planning Your Own Rose Cocktail Garden

Wander around any formal rose garden with name plaques this time of year (The Huntington, Palisades Park in Santa Monica), and you'll likely bump into several Hollywood celebrity stunners like Marilyn Monroe (a tall apricot flower with "large bloom size," per the official description). In the rose-n ... More >>

The Huntington's Japanese Garden Reopens With a New Teahouse

The Huntington Library's circa 1911 Japanese Garden reopened Wednesday after a nearly $7 million renovation, including the addition of a historic ceremonial teahouse built in Kyoto. The teahouse first arrived in the L.A. area in 1964, when it was installed at the Pasadena Buddhist Temple; In 2010 th ... More >>

Rubus Ursinus: A Guide to the Elusive Pacific Blackberry

With Occupy Gone, City Hall Ponders a Progressive Landscape

The ouster of Occupy L.A. left City Hall Park with dirt where once there was turf. And when ideas started coming in about what should be done to restore the landscape that adorns the symbolic center of the city, the range of opinions was something akin to those within Occupy L.A.: widely varied, ... More >>

Cookbook Review: The Complete Kitchen Garden, Your Weekend Entertainment

​If you already consider yourself an urban homesteader, (legal or otherwise), then the recently released The Complete Kitchen Garden: An Inspired Collection of Garden Designs and 100 Seasonal Recipes by Ellen Ecker Ogden probably is not for you. For the rest of us, this hybrid gardening/cookbo ... More >>

Melrose Elementary Kids Get Their Hands Dirty with Woolly School Gardens and Chef Andrea Cavaliere El Cholo Feeds Teachers Tonight

J. RitzChef Andrea Cavaliere from Cecconi's and schoolyard gardeners in training.​ There must be statistics, somewhere, detailing the amount of chain link fencing in the possession of the Los Angeles Unified School District. It seems entirely possible that the sum of the practical-yet-dreary ... More >>

Looking for Lizards

So how many lizards are there in L.A.?

Orchid Show and Sale

REVENGE OF THE FERNS

Calling All Green Thumbs: Sustainable Sundays and Master Gardening at the Natural History Museum

​ The Natural History Museum isn't just about flora, fauna, and fossils. In an effort to make sense of today's gold mine of environmental information, the museum is bringing back its Sustainable Sundays series, and introducing a brand-new gardening workshop for experts and newbies alike.

INCREDIBLE EDIBLES

What's the Story, Morning Glory?

Sometimes it's late and the cocktails have started to creep up on you and a double-chili-cheese at Tommy's is the thing. But for us, slightly more often, a hard seat and an order of fried morning glory are just what we need after a night of serious drinking. Nobody knows why morning glory is a veget ... More >>

Top 10 Ways to Eat Local in L.A.

So you've read The Omnivore's Dilemma and watched Food, Inc twice, but you still aren't quite sure how to eat local in Los Angeles. The city is covered in exhaust smoke, and it's harder to imagine growing food here then being one of those people who, um, walk. Still for all its metropolitan appearan ... More >>

Inch By Inch: Gathering of Community Gardens at Farmlab This Weekend

If you find yourself considering the current state of your lawn, or questioning how best to garden during a drought, it might be a good idea to head over to the Gathering of Community Gardens conference in downtown LA for some fresh ideas on how to nurture a sustainable garden in the city of Los Ang ... More >>

Flower Power: Bend It, Don’t Break It

Worm Teas and Palisades Potagers: Organic Gardening Classes With John Lyons

John Lyons, the organic gardener and edible landscape designer behind The Woven Garden, offers educational classes to inspire the cabbage farmer within. His 6-week course, "From the Earth Up," covers composting your dinner leftovers, herb garden care, organic pest control, and crop rotation (sans th ... More >>

It's Sustainable L.A. Day at the Downtown Film Festival

Today is Sustainable L.A. day at the L.A. Downtown Film Festival. All afternoon excellent films, photos, and lectures run simultaneously, each picking up where the others left off for a comprehensive perspective on the newest efforts in environmental sustainability. While photographer Rex Bruce's ... More >>

When the Growing Gets Tough: Take a Workshop with Silver Lake Farms' Tara Kolla

Tara Kolla knows gardening can be daunting. Take her case: She works her half-acre backyard and business, Silver Lake Farms, almost entirely by herself. For the past three years, she's been showing beginners the ropes with semi-weekly workshops in her neighborhood. (The next one is Thu., July 30.) A ... More >>

Looking for Jesus at Home Depot: Or, How a Day Laborer Named Tino Ended Up in a Miller Duvall Music Video

The gold teeth didn't hurt

Gardeners of Eden Suddenly Cast Out

Freelance gardeners, house cleaners and car-wash employees are among the first workers hit by the recession. With the economy in accelerating freefall, statistics cannot keep up with their deteriorating plight. Still, the physical absence of such workers from neighborhoods and businesses provides pl ... More >>

Flower Drum Dance

Los Angeles Median Home Value: $380,000

Amazing story in this week's Los Angeles Business Journal, which has been beating the hell out of the Los Angeles Times in reporting on all the billionaires in L.A. who have lost vast sums — including Kirk Kerkorian, Sumner Restore, Eli Broad — or those whose companies have vanished or might get ... More >>

Arranged Marriage: Mixing It Up With Flowers and Art

¡Ask a Mexican! Spanish as a First Language

"What is it with Mexican gardeners? They lop off trees into coat racks, and shear off irises and lilies. It’s all slash and mow and blow."

Prayers, Doughnuts and Booze in the Drive-Thru Lane

Dashboard confidential

Wrap It Up, I'll Take It

Last-minute hostess gift ideas

Fuel to the Fire

A smoldering argument over the causes of the Sawtooth fire. Did the wildflowers do it?

Harry, Dykes and Gays

Bushel of Complaints

Farmers at South Central Community Garden unload on their activist organizers

On Native Ground

Gardening in the asphalt jungle

Brown Dirt Cowboys

Meet Esteban Hills and crew, your gardeners

Paradise Created

Mysterious, private and sensual . . . the backyard in Los Angeles

Re-Germinated

Stripping Lessons

Expert Advice: Flower Power

10 Cents a Life

Inside 'Charlie Kaufman'

The metafictional mayhem in — and behind — Spike Jonze's Adaptation

Flower Power

Idle Plan

South Gate power plant could rise again

Lights Out

Proposed power plant flames out in South Gate

Flower Power Games

The delirious rise and acrimonious dissolution of the Eastside Ladies Garden Auxiliary

Early Morning Sunset Smells

Suzy Beal sniffs the boulevard from downtown to the 405, then gives up.