Tag: Gardening
Urban Gardening
My favorite place to be this time of year is sitting in the middle of my future vegetables. A cat usually wanders up and plops in my lap and I pull up some weeds that have emerged after the last big rain, but mostly I sit and stare at the wide leaves of the eggplant […]
Kneel Before Sod
Let’s be honest: Talking about lawns is not the most exciting thing in the world. Plenty of ink has been spilled about the costs and consequences of America’s obsessions with our yards, ranging from suburbanization and sprawl through the environmental effects of incessant fertilizing and watering. But this is not a polemic about xeriscaping. This […]
Montgomery’s Tropical Revelation
In 2001, after I’d just moved to Los Angeles, my brother came out to visit me from New Mexico. Since he loves the zoo, we decided to take a day trip to the San Diego Zoo. I’m not much for zoos, but that place is amazing. After spending the whole day gawking at captive animals […]
The Casual Midtown Garden
When we moved to Montgomery almost six years ago, our back yard pretty much put the “wild” in Cloverdale-Idlewild. It was clear that several generations of homeowners had been content to let the beds around the perimeter become overrun with highly invasive plants, massive thistles and a canopy of vines. We’ve been working for years […]
Tomato Pruning: Apparently Not a New Concept
Editor’s Note: Few things are as prototypically quite as Southern as growing your own tomatoes. Texas songwriter Guy Clark even wrote a great song about it. As such, we gladly welcome MML’s newest writer, Sarah Churchman. Growing tomatoes was nothing new for me when I officially started doing so last year. I had watched my […]
Getting Dirty
There is something about spring that makes even a city girl want to dig in the dirt. I grew up in the country, and we grew most of our own vegetables, freezing and canning them for winter. When my husband and I moved to Midtown, we moved into a house with a ton of beautiful […]
Know Your Invasive Plants
It’s the end of August. It’s too hot to garden. That’s an established fact for humans and plants alike. Anything you plant now is probably going to die anyway, and you’ll just get all hot out there in the sun, so why bother? This fatalism doesn’t have to be permanent. In the evenings, you can […]
Neighborhood Heroes
One of my fellow agents on July 4th sent me a copy of the Declaration of Independence, which I had not read in a long, long time. And apparently I had never before read — really read — the final sentence: And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection […]
Gardening Failure: Could Be Chemical
A lot of people give up on gardening. Maybe you don’t like the outdoors. Maybe you think it’s hot out there, or are afraid of a few mosquito bites. Or maybe it creeps you out that there are living things crawling around in the dirt. Or maybe you just honestly prefer food that has been […]
The Drought Continues
Yesterday, I visited the home of new clients. The couple moved to Montgomery from Albuquerque, New Mexico a while back and recently decided to construct a swimming pool in their back yard. My father was from New Mexico, and we had much to talk about. The newly excavated pool space and the resulting mounds of […]
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