Apartment Therapy: gardening

San Francisco's Curbside Composting Program

You know all the jokes about San Francisco being "crunchy" and full of hippies? Well, this tidbit won't help squelch those rumors; we have a curbside composting program as part of our movement to g...

How to Grow Your Own Vegetable Garden

This video over at monkeysee is the type of step-by-step instruction we need for our garden......

Unintentional Edible Lawn

So let's say you want to get rid of your lawn, but you don't have the time or energy to totally rip it up and start an edible landscape? What if you just neglected it? Stopped watering it? Essentia...

Too Much Mulch?

Mulch much? The Washington Post featured a story on the overuse of mulch in the U.S. Apparently, Americans now use about 40 million cubic yards of it a year (estimated by the Mulch and Soil Counc...

How To: Save Your Local Bees

If you have a yard, and you aren't deathly allergic to bees, there are a number of things you can do to help them out. Because bees are having a hard time these days and need a little TLC. First, y...

Organic Cricket Poop Fertilizer

All this talk about gardening ... well, those plants aren't going to grow on their own. They need some food -- some fertilizer. We really like Terracycle (it's worm poop), and they seem to be the h...

Ginkgo Organic Gardens in Chicago

When gardening season rolls around in Chicago, we tend to get a little restless. We curse our north-facing kitchen windows and shaded deck, where many a plant has gone to die, and half-heartedly brows...

Survey: How Does Your Garden Grow?

Because it's garden month across most of the AT sites, we're thinking a lot about plants, and flowers, and veggies. As we've said before, we'd like to garden, but we don't have any yard to speak of....

Blogging the San Francisco Chronicle: Grass or Turf?

Astroturf and other synthetic alternatives to grass are getting a green makeover. Whereas fake grass was once pitched as a way to save maintenance costs, now it's touted as a way to reduce carbon emi...

How To: Start a No-Dig Garden

We think, for the most part, that lawns are overrated. They take too much water and maintenance. On the other hand, we think organic fruits and veggies rock. And, although we have no yard, we've de...

Food Map Containers: Portable Vegetable Gardening

Since summer is just around the corner, we're looking at patio and deck options for apartment dwellers. Food Map Containers are big enough for an edible garden, and their caster stands make them eas...

Blogging CNN: Urban Homesteaders in Pasadena, CA

If you had a little 2-bedroom bungalow (completely paid off) on 1/10th of an acre in Pasadena, CA, what would you do with it? How about turning it into your livelihood -- a fully operational urban ...

If You Grow Just One Thing This Spring... Plant Arugula

We were at the greengrocer a couple months ago, slightly nonplussed because we couldn't find arugula yet. The girl at the counter told us that she just grows it herself; even through the winter, she ...

GardenWatch: It Begins

Behold our glorious garden. Well, it's not so glorious yet, but with a bit of help from our readers and some hard work on our behalf, we're pretty sure we can turn it around. The main problem right ...

Gardening Questions for Jennifer: How Can I Plant a Variety of Herbs and Vegetables in a Container Garden?

We asked for gardening questions for kitchen gardening expert Jennifer Bartley. Here's an answer to two of your questions. Susmita asks: I have always had a brown thumb, but I would like to grow so...

Rainwater Downspout Redistributor

Maybe a rain tank is just a little too intense for you, but you do want to find a way to make the most of your local rainfall? (We're just wishing we had a little rainfall!)...

Modular Green Roofs

Over the weekend, we met a young couple that owns a Chicago greystone. As they've put money into restoring and repairing their building, they've been trying to go green when budget allows. One of th...

The Lemon Bonus

We've been helping a friend with a project for the past few weeks, and yesterday we received a great gift: the lemon bonus. That's lifetime rights to walk by and pluck a few organic lemons from her t...

How to Start a Green Roof Garden

Garden-lovers without backyards, go vertical! Such is the cry of a Park Slope resident who recently showed a crowd of New Yorkers (including yours truly) how to start a green roof garden. Since star...

Look! Korean Grass

A few blocks up from where we live is this lawn. The grass looks like it’s been attacked by a bunch of moles…but it hasn’t. (We know. We made our friend stop the car once when we were drunk a...

City Gardening: How Do You Deal With the Mess?

One of the biggest difficulties of city gardening is the mess of getting started. When you're gardening in pots and containers you need to fill them up, turn the earth, water it and plant seeds or sma...

Gardening Questions for Jennifer: Little Light and No Outdoor Space - What Can I Grow?

We asked you last week for your gardening questions for our friend and kitchen gardening expert Jennifer Bartley. Here's the first question - one that we've heard frequently from many of you! This is ...

Green Obsession: Lavender

OK, so maybe it's more of a purple-ish obsession? Regardless, lavender is in bloom in Berkeley and we can't get enough of it. It's beautiful, but not in the way other conventional flowers are beaut...

Dwell on Design: Glass as Groundcover

Ouch! We're not sure how excited we'd be to walk across this stuff barefoot; but, with shoes, it was cool. Our favorite part of Dwell on Design was probably the small outdoor showcase. From DWR's mi...

Push Lawn Mowers from Green Living

Our teeny patch of grass is finally showing signs of life (this is our very first yard and we couldn't be more excited that spring is here). While we've never given much thought to mowing, our new rea...