Ellen Lewis

Thanks everyone.
I don't really have beds. I don't have areas that have been cleared, and can be cover cropped. I mostly don't have annual weeds, most annuals can't compete here except some grasses, which I'm trying to eradicate by helping the bermuda grass crowd them out, and nasturtiums.
(I do have a neighbor who likes distributing mulch, but he works so fast I don't have the chance to tell him where to put it.) The bermuda grass runs over the mulch and the bulbous weeds grow up through it.
(And now that I have an electric car I have to park in the driveway to charge it, so I have no room to get a chip drop.)
My plants are sort of scattered all over, working from the fence towards the center, which is open for a feeling of space. Maybe it's all one bed. More like scattered guilds. I've kind of worked down from the canopy layer through the shrub layer, and now I'm working on the ground. The area I'm trying to work with is largely the spaces around the woody perennials. I'm attempting to establish herbaceous perennials in the in-between spaces. California and oriental poppy, herbaceous and itoh peonies, angelica, skullcap, artichoke, asparagus, yampah, solomon's seal, sochan, leopard lily, elk clover, strawberry, biscuit root, yerba mansa, valerian, larkspur, western coltsfoot, waterleaf, and so on.
I'd even like some annuals but they just can't compete; the bulbous weeds come up too early and shade them out before they can sprout.
Some of the herbaceous perennials compete just fine, such as dandelion, pipevine, leather root, lemon balm, chilacayote, cow parsnip, comfrey. It's the rest I'm trying to learn how to nurture.
And I guess the question about the arums kind of boils down to whether I want to try to generally eradicate some plants I dislike in the larger area, not only where I'm establishing other plants. I'm trying to increase diversity and naturalize more native plants and edibles. Perhaps I'm decreasing the competitive advantage of the established invasives and diminshing the pool of starts available to come up where I don't want them? I guess that's my hope.

I would like some help thinking about weeding.
I don't have a background growing vegetables, so weeding is not part of my routine. I have a yard full of bermuda grass and other winter-emergent weeds, and usually I sort of carve the weeds back temporarily in order to plant perennials, and then the weeds return.
I have been interplanting perennials among them for years and I think I have reached the point where I need to learn to weed.
Unlike woody perennials which mostly do fine once they're taller than the bermuda grass and oxalis (or at least I don't lose them while finding out whether they like the conditions here), herbacious perennials seem to need me to keep track of them and clear around them so they don't get crowded out. After years of losing specimens I am just beginning to realize this.
But I worry when I clear the ground. Won't it dry out faster? Do the emergent plants need sun or moisture? Do they need other plants to grow upon? I guess I have to start thinking about the needs of individual plants. That's a lot to keep track of. Most of them I have no idea what they need, I'm just trying them out. And I find that the available information is contradictory and largely based in some other climate.
Do I need to mulch everywhere I weed? Obtaining and carrying buckets of mulch is not a pleasant task; I'm getting fragile and slow. I don't do my own composting, the city takes care of it. And chop&drop is a challenge to do without leaving trip hazards.
And what about the areas that don't have specimen plants, just the yard itself? Do I want to try to remove some of the less desireable plants? Sometimes I just want to feel useful while sitting on the ground, without having to think too much, or be careful not to hurt the plants I want.
Right now I'm weeding out the arums. They seem like a reasonable target. There are hundreds rather than thousands, so it's possible to make a dent in them, unlike sour grass or three cornered leek. And I have no use for them. I suspect that even if I sheet mulched for years they'd be right back. But I sit there wondering why I bother. I think the actual answer is to keep my hands busy while sitting in the sun. But it would be nice to think I'm improving my garden also.
In previous years I have put wood chips on most of the yard, which makes digging out the weeds a little complicated. The bermuda grass grows thickly over the wood chips. The bulby things like oxalis and arums grow below the chips. I have to dig through several layers of different textures to get to the actual dirt and roots. I don't regret the wood chips, they are nice and moist and growing so much mycelium. But digging isn't simple.
I leave little dents in the ground that make it uneven to walk on, which is a problem. Between mulching and weeding and planting, my yard is getting more and more bumpy textured. On the one hand that's great, I suspect it's good for water soaking in before it flows to the sidewalk. On the other hand, my friends and I are in our late 70's and are getting a little unsteady on our feet, so my garden is becoming a bit inaccessible.
Have you been at this longer than me? Have you any advice? Or thoughts? Or commiseration?

Last-minute soup, we both have colds and got home close to dinner time.
Put defrosted homemade chicken broth in pot, add leftover rice (rice, quinoa, peanuts) some need-to-be-used creamer potatoes, greens from the yard (alexanders, three-cornered leek, peperomia), tempeh, lactopickled mushrooms. Simmer a bit. Add miso. Pretty weird. (Meant to put in some golpar, make it even weirder, but forgot.) Haven't got accustomed to calibrating amount of peperomia yet. Satisfying.

I am north of you, in the SF area. My white sapote is 15 or 20 years old. I don't water it as much as it would like. It gets full enough sun, in line with my citrus. I have three cultivars grafted onto it, Walton, Vernon, and Santa Cruz. They were grafted onto an in-ground transplanted seedling.
Vernon has been fruiting for about five years. It started slowly and is now giving a few dozen fruit of assorted sizes over the winter. The branches grow up, down, and sideways. They are tasty but not strongly flavored.
Santa Cruz has been fruiting for a couple of years, and the most it has done is two fruits in a year. It's growing slowly. Not much difference in the fruit from Vernon.
Walton has never borne, though I have occasionally seen a few blossoms. It wants to grow straight up. I suspect it doesn't bear because I won't let it get as tall as it would prefer. It's a beautiful tree, and I initially was enjoying letting it get tall, but I am gradually realizing that I want my fruits low enough to pick, so I'm reshaping the tree. I may remove Walton entirely.
I suspect that a wide canopy results from letting it take its natural shape over decades. Of course, you can prune for that, but I see it's not effective with all cultivars.
That enormous tree at the LA arboretum is very much worth seeing. If you have room for a giant shade tree it might be an excellent choice. The fruits I have picked up from the ground below my tree were not ruined.

When you say "in the city", how much land are you talking about?
I live in a fairly dense city, but my neighborhood is still largely either single-family homes or former single-family homes that have been divided up into small apartments. In other words, there are still yards. I have a moderately large yard for the area, at about 6200 square feet, or a seventh of an acre, minus the area of the house.
My son's family are a little overwhelmed with a yard about twice as big in the suburbs, with chickens and trees and veg and play structures, and pets and too much work to do.
As an elderly woman without much traditional gardening experience, I find this is plenty of land for me to steward. There is light pollution and noise pollution and occasional vandalism and fruit theft, but there's also a lot of satisfaction. I prefer working on things that are in poor condition so I can improve them and not worry about my mistakes messing them up.
This house when we bought it was falling apart: roof, floors, windows, doors, electrical system, plumbing, walls, foundation all needed work. Repairing rather than remodeling or tearing it down conserved hundred-year-old materials and much human investment of effort and thought.
The yard was invasive toxic bulbs and ivy and poke and blackberry and trash and broken glass. Now it's a forager's plot with dozens of fruit trees, mushrooms, vegetables, fiber and medicine plants, as well as places to nap and host dinners. I have conserved and brought in woody debris, so the soil gets better and water sinks in. There is always work to do. It's kind of a bonsai food garden. Good thing I like pruning. The weeding is impossible to keep up with. My "zone 5" is a 5 foot diameter thicket in the back corner.
I have been working on a book about my experience here. If anyone wants to read it and comment I'd be thrilled. It's mostly about particular species in my particular climate. Maybe I should broaden its scope.
I'm happy others are thinking about city permaculture also. I am convinced that unless city people have a lived connection to the earth and the sun and the water, all our efforts to "save" our home planet are nothing but an abstraction, with no real conviction, just ineffectual, out-of-context sentimentality.

Some people think the reason the American chestnut succumbed to the blight is that when the passenger pigeon was wiped out, they missed their fertilizer.

Hi folks,
I was trying to make a copper mordant. I soaked a handful of scrap copper in vinegar water. At least, I thought it was scrap copper. Maybe one of the pennies was newer than I thought and so I got some zinc? I sure don't think there was iron. I dunno what else might be in it.
I thought the water would turn blue. It turned rusty brown. So I'm calling it the Messed-up Mystery Mordant, and using it to darken colors.
It stained or you might say dyed my yarn a nice rust orange.
My question is, can I just use it as a dye? Don't bother with a subsequent dye bath, just use it as is, since I like the color? I haven't tried washing it out with soap, but it's been rinsed & seems stable.
Thanks.

OK, now a year later. I'm still eating both batches of lactarius. I prefer the brine pickled ones. The miso pickled ones got slightly alcoholic, and need scraping and/or rinsing.
The mushrooms are popping up again, but not in such large quantity.
So I'm trying again.
This time I boiled then without soaking first, and without salt, and for only five minutes. I removed the stem bases first, and washed the rest of the dirt off after the boil.
They didn't taste fiery or bitter after the boil. Kinda nice, in fact, but so far I'm only fermenting them, not trying them fresh yet.
I am packing this year's harvest on top of a bed of three-cornered leek leaves. They're a weed in my yard and flavor the ferment nicely.

My son was retrieving some char from a yard fireplace-thing fire they had so the kids could roast marshmellos. He had quenched it so it wouldn't all burn to ash, but that's all the intervention he did. It wasn't "for" biochar, but he wants to use the char, since he has it.
Emptying the fireplace after dousing it, he got a slurry of ash and char. I was recommending separating the two. He asked me what harm there would be in putting the ash in the soil or the compost along with the char. I had no answer.
Please advise us.

I freeze them whole.
Then I cut them up into chunks and put them in the blender with milk and vanilla.
They make a great milk shake/smoothie kinda thing.
It's sweet enough that it needs no sugar.
If you pour it into little bowls and let it sit a few hours, the tannins and gels in the persimmon curdle the milk so it becomes kinda like a pudding. You can eat it with a spoon.
Usually mine have no seeds, but you would be able to get the seeds out when you cut them up if necessary.