Community Garden at Holy Nativity
Seeding the new forest garden
A forest garden is a garden of perennial plants that produce food. It is often designed to look “forest-like,” with trees forming a canopy above, and smaller plants creating a “forest floor” effect underneath. As part of the Westchester Community…
Cactus juice preservative for the cob oven
I’m “cooking up” a batch of Opuntia juice preservative. It is a traditional weather coating used on adobe and cob structures. We will be adding it to the final coat on the Westchester Community Oven when we re-surface it next…
Test firing news from the Westchester Community Oven
Last night a small team tried cooking food in The Westchester Community Oven.
Summer Solstice Open House – Jun 20
Want to learn about all the fun stuff that goes on at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity, and the Holy Nativity campus? On Saturday, June 20, there will be a Summer Solstice Open House across the entire campus. It will…
Adobe Brick-making Success!
This past Saturday, we had LOTS of fun making adobe bricks at the Community Garden. Kids, both small and tall, got to experience squishy-squashy mud. It is so tactile and cool and smooth, and once you start, you just can’t…
Root knot nematodes
Yesterday in the Community Garden, we discovered that we are experiencing an attack of Root Knot Nematodes. The beets we pulled up had failure to thrive, failed to form a beet root, and had tons of tumor-like growths on the hair…
The cob oven at RootSimple homestead
Mr Homegrown of RootSimple shared this video of their construction process. He is part of the team, advising us as we plan how to build the cob oven at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity.
Building a Food Forest garden – cover crops
We’re designing a Food Forest garden, to be built later this spring. We’ll be tearing out asphalt, cleansing and rejeuvenating the soil, and recrafting the space as a community gathering area with a cob bread oven and food forest. Today…
Crop rotations in So. Calif: When to change seasons
It’s autumn in Southern California. Or is it? The weather has changed. Wait, it’s changed back again… Contrary to what East Coast people say, Southern California does have its seasons. But there’s rarely a clear “cutoff” date. Add climate-change-driven Weather…