Catch The Happy Bug

At Home-Grown Food Network we are aware of the good effects of growing your own food in your own backyard. But here’s a new reason to get out there and get down and dirty. Dr Chris Lowry, a researcher in the United Kingdom, recently published a paper in which he reported that he has [...]

In the Zone

Even those of us who long for the buzz of city life crave the mental rest afforded by access to nature. Everyone needs a space “where you can walk and sit and feel alone with nature,” notes gardening legend Rosemary Verey.
The closer nature is to us the better it is. That’s why having [...]

Our Wabi-Sabi Gate

 
Wabi-sabi represents the imperfect, the impermanent, the incomplete. It derives from the concept of impermanence and constant flux in Zen philosophy.
For example, a tea cup that has some cracks is Wabi-sabi, an old sculpture is Wabi-sabi, and a garden with eroded rocks and furrows representing the continuous flux of time, wind and rain [...]

Catching Rainwater

Brenda Barnes, February 22, 2008
I read a lecture by Bill Mollison, the inventor of Permaculture, saying in the desert there is an average rainfall of ten inches a year, which means it doesn’t rain for two years and then in the third year it rains 30 inches. That’s how they figure the average of [...]

Kids are welcome in Home-Grown Food Network

Home-Grown Food Network has a mission to promote discussion of food growing at home. We don’t care what age the food growers are. We want to give all age groups an opportunity to share their experiences with us and through us.
So, when a boy offers his seven year old perspective on gardening, we [...]

Zen and the Art of Garden Maintenance

According to estimates, almost 85% of manufactured products quickly become waste.
However, as some of our Zen friends point out, nature uses materials wisely, and sometimes one structure may be recycled two or three times. A shell harbors the animal that made it, then might be reclaimed by another animal (such as a hermit crab). [...]

Do you have a Wabi-Sabi tomato patch?

Peace of mind doing yard work produces smiling happy gardeners.
The Japanese Zen design philosophy of Wabi-Sabi is perfectly suited for giving gardeners peace of mind, and at Home-Grown Food Network we are carrying out some experiments to prove this. Our experimental house is an expression of the Wabi-Sabi philosophy of design. In our project [...]

Be enlightened, take a nap!

I wonder why gardening, even passive exposure to living plants or flowers, helps to improve health outcomes of anyone recovering from serious illness. Do the plants communicate health with us? A discussion arose following the publication in 1993 of The Celestine Prophecy, about talking to plants. Did it, people began to ask, [...]

Ultra-Low Cost Housing

Blog: What Demonstrating Ultra-Low Cost Housing Can Mean, Part I
Brenda Barnes, February 4, 2008
For the last 16 years, my husband Peter and I have been getting closer and closer to demonstrating how people can build really nice, big, comfortable, beautiful houses for less than $20,000. For the last three, we have been remodeling [...]

Growing Tomatoes in the Desert

Our charity promotes edible landscaping, ultra low cost owner-produced housing, and use of renewable energy. For the past three years, we have been experimenting with all of these at our mobile home in Desert Hot Springs. We bought it for $7,500 in December of 2004, and have spent next to nothing but our [...]