Tag : gardens

…the name for ‘the old Transylvanian tradition of the whole village getting together to do a job, usually building a house but can be other things as well’ which I learned from a landscape architect friend here in Budapest, perfectly describes the collective frenzied focused gardening activity on day 1 of 2 planting Edible Estates ..

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…to plant a visible kitchen garden in Wekerletelep (or Wekerle Estate, the early 20th century planned utopian Garden City inspired Budapest community actually engineered for residents to grow their own food and where tomorrow we will start planting Edible Estate #12 – which has just received a significant grant from the Graham Foundation and is ..

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…was the order of the day as we prepare for a weekend planting of Edible Estates #12: Budapest in Wekerletelep – so I sketched away the morning on garden diagrams and plans in preparation for an evening meeting with the family at their home, and then spent the afternoon at an organic (an unusual and ..

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…or Romneya coulteri, or fried-egg flower, are the towering white petaled and yellow native Californians whose drama is greeting visitors to the Theodore Payne Foundation right now (the place I can’t get enough of, and where I have returned today for some native grape vines, currants, sages, and such) – which of course leads to ..

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…has been on my mind since I first noticed some of those pods plumping up a few weeks ago, and this afternoon I have the gumption to hunt them all down one by one,  then to a stump in the shade to shell, and finally to the kitchen where they go into the the big ..

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…is the beautifully warm-colored soft-textured stone that comes up with almost every shovel and trowel on my hill, which I covered my roof with as it was coming up from the ground in my early gardening days here – and these days re-working the land I first worked a decade ago, I’m making new terraced ..

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…from a wild climbing rose bush (which has surprisingly thrived as a neglected castaway – who knows how it got there – in a hidden overgrown corner of the garden where it is scrambling over some chain link and sending out runners) are drying on a favored Richard Bresnehan pottery plate, sending out good smells, ..

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…is so much greener than just 6 weeks ago, when dry dirt ruled over a newly terraced landscape of meager seedlings – but today the wildflowers have taken recognizable form – like lupine, poppy, and clarkia – the succulents are taking root, and I’m starting to eye the strawberry blossoms and munch on the greens ..

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…are taking their time popping up their heads above the soil on the roof that I carefully prepared for them, after planting a few weeks ago – a combination of the Rainbow and Shady mixtures of native California wildflowers seeds from Theodore Payne, my local non-edible plant mecca….. Rainbow Mix: Clarkia amoena, (Farewell-to-Spring) Clarkia unguiculata, ..

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…here was a crazy out of control mess that I first established when I moved into the house 11 years – featuring a lawn, of all things, plus some experiments that didn’t quite work out (like the thirsty kiwi vines which lasted only a couple of years) that slowly evolved into a messed up combination ..

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