Mud Baron

Last year I traveled to Washington DC for the People's Garden Summit. Nothing odd in that: school bureaucrat on a trip to the nation's capitol to meet with federal bureaucrat and talk about "bureaucrat things." I was going on behalf of my school groups and the National Gardening Association, a great group that gets kids all across the country outside and in the garden. Great right? But what makes this unusual is that the second leg of my flight from Philly to DC - canceled.

Photo via Facebook It's our ever-active City Council President, Eric Garcetti, getting down and dirty this morning for all us Angelenos on an inspection of the city's now rain-taxed sewer system. This is Garcetti's way of kicking off his Shorty Awards campaign for excellence in social media on the subject of--gasp!--politics. You can give him a nomination via Twitter and see that LA defeats the equally Tweet-a-licious, snow shovel-wielding Newark, NJ Mayor Cory Booker....

It could be my laziness, my deeper interest in the distracting end-products of “Cocktail Gardening” and its logical basil-infused cocktail hour or the simple fact that almost no major or minor home garden seed companies advertise Genetically Modified Organism products, but I haven’t been able to find any GMO products in the local garden center aisles. I’ve really, really tried.

Even the tomatoes are smiling! Photo by the Hand of Gardener/LAist LAist's own Green Thumb is here to help you get into gardening...So, as he says: "Get down on your knees and start planting." Speaking with garden conspirators in the Bay Area this week I discovered it was “hot” this short, spring. Damn, winter is gone. Hello summer. It turns out that 72 degrees counts as hot in Berkeley. I guess Alice Waters can...

Los Angeles is cold. It's too cold for this Midwestern escapee's comfort even if it is Christmas. Humbug. Yes, God gave us Jesus and a really great climate in SoCal, so it's not supposed to freeze. We don't really freeze that much, but Jesus and a frost show up once or twice. It happens; my Yahoo Weather report says expect the low 30's. It says Buffalo. It says Dayton. Every year I tell myself to...