Kelly's "EDC"

Erik challenged me to post about my EDC. I had to laugh. What I Carry Every Day is my bag. My bag is huge. Isn't an EDC supposed to be worn on the hip or carried in the pocket?

For that matter, isn't this whole EDC thing a boy's game--since womens' clothing is notoriously lacking in pockets? Even my jeans have tighter, shallower pockets than Erik's. (Once Erik put on my jeans by accident and immediately cried in horror, "What happened to my pockets!?!")

And as far as belt mounted hardware goes, most women don't wear a belt, a practical belt, every day of their lives.  Sometimes I ponder the idea of constructing some sort of pocketed belt-like-thing that I could wear on my hips (not a fanny pack), to leave my shoulders unburdened, but it would take some fashion adjustment to wear a utility belt every day.

For now, though, my bag is my EDC. And while it can devolve into a giant pit of flyers, receipts, misplaced business cards, crushed snacks and sometimes even plant matter, I do carry a few items that would be useful in an emergency.

At Erik's challenge, I unpacked my bag for the camera, editing only the garbage.

The laptop (far right) is often in the bag, and was when I unloaded it, so it's in the picture, but I don't consider it an EDC and leave it at home as much as I can. The notebook on top is usually with me, though.

Row 1 (closest to the bag): This row I think of as my true EDC, in that I'd find these things useful in emergencies and unusual situations. All of it, except the phone, lives in a small dedicated pocket.

Left to right: Phone, multi-tool, mini first aid kit, lighter, LED light

Row 2: The items in this row all fit in the red pouch on the left. These are my personal comfort items. I admit I could survive with just the lip balm if I had to.

Left to right: Pouch, lipstick, homemade lip balm (which is also gets used for hand cream and hair control), a small mint tin which carries analgesics of all sorts, comb, flash drive, tampons, and my titanium spork, purchased long ago for backpacking, but which now I use to avoid plastic utensils.

Row 3: Wallet, notebook and pens, keys, ipod (I don't carry it every day, but it was in the bag this day), and my sunglasses.

Erik shakes his head at how much I carry, but typing this up, I'm actually thinking it's not all that bad. I could shed some of it, sure, but the items here are actually all things I use consistently and miss when I don't have them.

Since Erik showed you his, I'll show you mine. This is the Leatherman I carry. It's the Juice S2, and has served me well for several years. I like it better than Erik's model. It feels better in the hand, and never pinches the palm. It's got screwdriver heads, a knife, scissors (which I actually use, believe it or not), can opener, and of course the pliers. This is the tool I use for most small jobs around the house. It's more convenient to use this than trying to find one of our scattered tools.

There's a smaller Juice called the Squirt, and sometimes I wish I had that instead, because of the weight factor. But the Squirt doesn't have a Phillips screwdriver, so that's sort of a deal breaker. If we were organized people and I knew I could find a Phillips screwdriver when I needed one, then I could do with less multi-tool.

What's more interesting to me than fetishizing the EDC is the fetishizing of the emergency backpack, to which I plead guilty. I'll unpack my backpack for you soon.

EDC Part I: Multi-tool and Knife

Photo by Jonas Bergsten

Your "everyday carry" or EDC is whatever you always have on hand--everything from your multi-tool to your cellphone to your credit cards. And, as it turns out, entire websites detail the fetishistic search for the Platonic ideal EDC. I especially like the EDC porn on everyday-carry.com.

In part I of our EDC review I'm going to describe my multi-tool which I've worn on my belt everywhere I go for almost 20 years. Subsequent posts will detail the other things I tote and the complex contents of Mrs. Homegrown's purse.

For years the centerpiece of my EDC was the original Leatherman "Pocket Survival Tool" like the one in the picture above, a gift from Mrs. Homegrown back when I worked in video in the early 90s. Last year I broke the file off of it and finally lost the tool while re-doing our greywater system. I replaced it with the cheapest Leatherman I could find, the Leatherman Kick:

I have to say that I like my old Leatherman better and, thankfully, it turned up again. The Kick works fine but I prefer my old Leatherman's all metal construction, its superior leather belt case and that fact that it's ever so slightly smaller. That old Leatherman also has a tiny flathead screwdriver I find handy. With both, I use the pliers more than any of the other tools.

Now the Leatherman is to the Swiss Army knife what, say, Robert Johnson is to prog rock. One is direct and the other has, well, too many notes. The designers of the original Leatherman tool apparently felt that it's fine to pop open a beer bottle after a hard days work but far too Eurotrashy to uncork a bottle of wine, at least that's what I assume from the lack of a corkscrew. Though I just met someone who carries a tool I didn't know existed, the Leatherman Flair:

The Flair,  Leatherman's obvious attempt to imitate the Swiss Army knife, has a corkscrew, scissors and a fork like thingy. It's been discontinued, though Leatherman still makes similar tools (though without the odd fork--how to skewer that olive?). And, of course, there's Leatherman's gardening, hunting, bicycling and even military and law enforcement multi-tools.

Leatherman is the Budweiser of multi-tools. There's a whole array of other companies that make higher quality products but, alas, we don't sell enough books for me to peruse the finer offerings at our local Ross Cutlery shop. Again, my basic Leatherman seems to have enough tools for most situations.

Of course a multi-tool is just part of one's EDC. On days that I'm removing a beehive from a wall I've taken to carrying a Bushman knife to cut out the comb.

 It's all metal, durable and easy to clean. And the hollow hilt can accept a stick to turn the knife into a spear should you need to "harvest" a feral pig for lunch, let's say. But the Bushman is too bulky and sinister for my EDC, at least in urban areas. I wore it around the house one day, but Mrs. Homegrown said she thought I was acting like a preschooler and, frankly, what do I need a big knife like this for blogging, answering emails and trips to the post office? Plus this sucker is a one way ticket to junk touching and a Mr. Toad's wild ride through the porno scanner should you get within a square mile of an airport or other secure facility. Bushman aside, the right to carry a small multi-tool is, incidentally, one of the reasons I prefer rail to the indignities of flying these days.

Stay tuned for what else is in my EDC, as well as Mrs. Homegrown's EDC musings. Perhaps I'll get around to a full-on EDC centerfold photo like the ones on everyday-carry.com. In the meantime, what's in your EDC? Leave some comments . . .

A special thanks to Phil Noyes (author of an amazing book  Trailer Travel: A Visual History of Mobile America) for introducing me to the concept of EDC.

Vegetable Garden Update: Too Much Salad

It's amazing what you can grow in just a 4 foot by 8 foot area. From top to bottom in the picture above:

Escarole mix: Misticanza Di Indivie E Scarole
Lettuce: Lattuga Quattro Stagioni
Chicory: Cicoria Variegata Di Castelfranco
Dandelion Greens
Swiss Chard: Verde Da Taglio

Approximately half the bed is devoted to salad makings. Combined with another 2 foot by 4 foot area of arugula elsewhere in our yard, we've had a whole lot of salads this winter. Mrs. Homegrown would probably say too many salads. She's also tired of me pointing out, each time I prepare a salad, that it's made with fancy-pants Italian varieties.

But these greens are tasty and eye catching. Not even "Whole Paycheck" carries this stuff--you gotta grow it yourself. I got these seeds from the good folks at Winnetka Farms who run an heirloom seed store. I, pretty much, just call up Craig at Winnetka Farms and ask him what I should plant.

I grow salad greens by sowing the seeds densely in blocks and thinning as we eat. The dandelion greens and chard are started in flats and transplanted as John Jeavons recommends in his book How to Grow More Vegetables. I grow most of these cool season vegetables under a thin row cover material called Agribon-15 to keep out cabbage worms that go after the chard.

Stay tuned for more vegetable gardening updates including a few disasters.

Pimp My Cold Frame

While the climate here in Los Angeles is exceedingly mild--it rarely gets much below freezing--springtime can, some years, be too cold to get good germination of summer vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers. This was the case in 2010 when I was not able to get a single tomato seed to germinate until late May. To head off another seedling crisis I built a simple cold frame.

In order to prevent the cold frame from becoming a solar cooker (it can get over 80°F during the day this time of year) I pimped it out with an Univent Automatic Greenhouse Vent Opener. The Univent uses no electricity. As the temperature gets hotter a small piston thingy forces open the window you attach the Univent too. As the temperature cools in the evening, the Univent closes the window. It was easy to install, though the directions it came with seem to have been translated back and forth between several European languages before materializing into English.

The price on Amazon seems a bit steep at $50. I got mine on sale from Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply, but they no longer seem to carry it back in stock here.

I'm fully aware that my cold frame, with it's plastic cover, would be way too flimsy for places with real weather. Nevertheless, I can imagine the automatic vent opener being useful in many climates.

ETA: Mrs. Homegrown here: I just wanted to add a clarifying note. This cold frame is The Germinator (tm), one of our recent garden improvements. Ordinarily it is covered with wire screen, which lets sun in but keeps critters out. Erik's plan is to swap out the plastic sheeting with the wire screen as needed.

Question for Folks in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle

Our new book will be coming out in the spring, and we're thinking about doing a small book tour up the west coast this May. Stodgy old-fashioned book signings make us miserable--we much prefer to be interactive. We prefer to do talks, panels, workshops and demos. We really like meeting new people and seeing what they're up to. For this reason, we'd love to leave the beaten track for this book tour. We're looking to hook up with like-minded venues/organizations/groups in San Francisco, Portland and Seattle.

If you have any suggestions, let us know. We're pretty sure our publisher will set up a gig for us at the esteemed Powell's. Beyond that, though...we'd welcome any ideas.

ETA: You can make suggestions here in the comments or send us an email: homegrownevolution@sbcglobal.net

Advances in Gardening Series: The Perennial Herb Bed, Patience and Plant Spacing and Breaking Your Own Rules

No, this is not a pile of weeds. Someday it's going to look good.

Mrs. Homegrown here:

One of the big lessons of gardening is patience. One way gardening patience is expressed is in planting perennials: buying leeetle teeny plants and planting them vast distances apart and then waiting with your hands politely folded until they grow to full size. A very common landscaping mistake is to go out and buy a bunch of gallon-sized landscape plants and plant them close together, just so the yard looks good right away. This practice has probably worsened with all those "overnight transformation" type TV shows.

Two things are questionable about this scenario. First, it makes both financial and horticultural sense to plant young, small plants. Small plants are cheaper, they catch up with the gallon-sized perennials in no time at all, and will probably be healthier in the long run.

The second is a question of spacing. Perennial plants used in landscaping tend to be bushy things, plants which will need some room when they grow up. Too often they don't get the space they need and end up looking pathetically smushed together within a couple of years. They can't express their natural shape, and different plants end up intertwined and melded together like conjoined twins, then forcibly sculpted to size in odd box and muffin shapes.

In short, when planting perennials, you have to place them in reference to their full size. And that size always sounds impossibly big, but in fact, it is is true.

My perennial herb bed above does not follow this advice on conservative spacing. You can't see from the picture, but this area (which is about 9' x 6') is planted with a rose geranium, culinary sage, white sage, yarrow, rosemary, lavender, aloe, lots of thyme and a sick native rose which is probably not going to make it. The spacing between the plants is not quite what it should be. Erik looks at it and shakes his head and does that thing with his mouth which means his lordship does not approve. But I'm holding my ground on this one. This is a working herb garden, not a perennial border. I wedged more plants in there than I should have because I fully intend to be harvesting from each of the plants regularly. If I fail to do that, yes, the bed will look too tight.

Right now, crowding ia the last of my problems. Even if the plants aren't quite far enough from each other, they are still small, and there is a heck of a lot of bare dirt between them. Ordinarily I'd recommend to anyone in a similar position to fill in all that empty space with a thick layer of mulch. It represses the weeds, saves water, and makes the area look nice. Again, though, I'm not following my own advice.

See, I feel bad about our recent leveling of the yard. Our bug balance (predator bugs vs. problem bugs), had been really nice for the past few years, but now I fear it's going to be all wonky. Helllllooo aphids! To counterbalance that, I want as many insect friendly plants going as possible in our yard this year. So instead of mulching, the space between the perennials is seeded with all sorts of random stuff. Borage and California poppy and nasturtium are predominant right now, but that will change as the year progresses.

The little perennial herbs are in danger of getting lost under all those boisterous feral flowers. I'll have to make sure they don't get smothered. In the meanwhile, nothing is big yet, which means the weeds are popping up like crazy. I hate weeding. Usually I do everything in power to arrange things so I have no weeds. In this case, though, I'm weeding because I want my flowers. And you know, I don't mind it so much because I know it's for a cause.

Advances in Gardening Series: A Progress Report

Yes, you've seen this before. But Erik looks so bad ass with his sledgehammer, I just had to put it up again.

Some of you may remember that back in November we ripped out most of our back yard, redesigning the layout to maximize our growing space, and accommodate interests we have now that we didn't have when we put in the original plantings.

We've learned from this experience that you should never be afraid to change your garden. Stuff grows back. Too often we get in a rut and are unable to see the potential of our own familiar spaces. Beyond that, we get attached to plants, even if they're doing very little for us or the yard, i.e. : "But that shrub has always been there!" I don't know if we're even attached to the plant itself, but rather to the idea of permanence.

Anyway, our yard looked like it had been bombed flat for a couple of months, but it's starting to green up now, so I thought I'd share a few progress pictures.

One of the features I wanted in the new yard was a rotating bed to produce medicinal herbs and flowers, lots of them, enough to dry and store in bulk. I tore out my old, tangled herb bed and laid out what I call The Fan of Pharmacy.  Here's the area in November, with drip installed and some tiny seedlings in place. Chaos reigns in the background:

Now below  you can see a new pic of the fan from a similar angle. The plants in this rotation are calendula, chamomile and poppy. The calendula and chamomile are just starting to bud and flower. In the left foreground you can see The Trough of Garlic (tm) and to the right, The Germinator (tm), both of which are also part of the redesign. The birdbath has always been part of our yard, but it used to sit somewhere else. In the background you can make out The Screens of Discretion (tm) and two raised vegetable beds. Right now they're mostly full of salad stuff. That's the chicken coop in the rear left. In the dead center is what I call The Hippie Heart (and yes, that's tm'd too.). I'll come back to the heart:

I like the view better from the other direction. In the center foreground you can see twig with a label tied to it. That's one of our brand new fruit trees.:

This below is a pretty uninspired picture of The Hippie Heart, a raised bed which is about 5 feet across, made by simply digging up and mounding earth--and adding some compost and other stuff. This bed came about because we had an open space in the center of our yard, and heaven forbid we have any unused space in our yard!:

The original idea was that we'd just mound up a raised circle, and allow natural pathways to evolve around it, sort of like a roundabout in the center of the yard. But a circle didn't really fit the space. What fit was sort of bean shaped. While working on it, I realized the shape was closer to a heart than a bean. Now, we're cynical big city types, and aren't likely to put large valentines in our yard, but the thing wanted to be a heart and I saw no way to stop it. Besides, I like having a heart in our yard that looks up at the constant helicopter traffic.

I've deemed this bed as my experimental work space. I'm curious about growing plants out of things I have in my cupboard: seeds, spices, etc.  The center of the heart is planted with bulk bin flax. The edges are planted with lentils.  Since I have no idea about the origins of the seed, I'm not sure what it will produce, but it's fun to find out. In the summer, I'm going to switch it out for sesame and cumin and chickpeas.

Next up in Advances in Gardening, what happened to the rest of the herbs.

So I had this dream

Here I am, with the soon-to-be-forgotten worms and a fantastic class of Waldorf kids

Mrs. Homegrown here:

So last night I had this dream that I was sitting at a kitchen table with someone (don't know who it was) and I noticed something that looked like a dried out worm coiled on the edge of one of the dishes. I pointed it out to this other person, and she reached out and crushed it with her fingertip. It crumbled to pieces on the tabletop. I laughed and said, "I sure hope that's not one of my worms!" She laughed, too, and mischievously blew the crumbs in my direction.

And thus does one's subconscious work. I woke with a start, remembering that, after showing off my worms to class of visiting school kids, I'd left the bin out on the back porch for a night, and day, and half of another night. Usually the worms live in the kitchen. I jumped out of bed and brought them back in.

The problem with worms is that they're so darn quiet.

The worms are fine. They're tough, and our weather is mild. But I was a little worried about them  because they are house-worms, acclimated to room temperature, and I'd left them out in the open, on concrete, and in a shallow bin.

See, worms can take care of themselves just fine if given the room and resources they need to cool themselves down, warm themselves up, and regulate their moisture. However, when they're in a shallow little bin, they just don't have much latitude for adjustment. It's our responsibility as worm keepers to regulate their environment.

Luckily for us and our forgotten worms, even though it was unseasonably warm yesterday,  the sun is low on the horizon, so our back porch wasn't baking in the western sun, like it does most of the year. Otherwise, the worms, being unable to hide deep in the soil, might have steam cooked in the bin during that long, forgotten day. 

Of course, worms can be kept outdoors in all but the most extreme temperatures, but their bins need to be sited correctly--kept in nice shady spots, protected from the rain, and elevated from cold-conducting cement surfaces. (Maybe some of you folks who live in snow country could chime in on what you do with your worms when it's freezing out?)

Bare Root Fruit Tree Season is Here!

Yet another Internet "un-boxing." This time fruit trees.

Our bare root fruit tree order just arrived from Bay Laurel Nursery. We ordered:

• Tropic Snow Peach on Nemaguard rootstock
• Panamint Nectarine on Citation rootstock
• CoffeeCake (Nishimura Wase) Persimmon
• Saijo Persimmon (pollinator for CoffeeCake)
• Flavor Finale Pluot on Myrobalan 29C rootstock
• Santa Rosa Plum on Citation rootstock (pollinator for the Flavor Finale Pluot)
• Flavor Delight Aprium on Citation rootstock

The plan is to follow the Dave Wilson nursery's backyard orchard culture guidelines which we blogged about in detail here. In short, you plant trees close together and prune the hell out of them to keep them small and manageable. We also used Dave Wilson's handy fruit and nut harvest date chart to, as much as possible, assure that we have some kind of fruit ready to eat during most of the year. All of the varieties we chose have low chill hour requirements since we live in USDA zone 10.

No Caffeine, No Migraines

Image courtesy of I Can Haz Cheezburger

Mrs. Homegrown here:

A while back I posted about my coffee addiction and search for coffee alternatives. Again, thank you so much for all of your suggestions--I've enjoyed them.

As nothing is more tedious than listening to other people rattle on about their health concerns, I'm going to try not to belabor this post. All I have is a simple message, and that is if you are a chronic migraine sufferer, you may want to consider cutting caffeine from your daily diet.

Of course this is hard to do, as most migraineurs live in an intimate tango with caffeine. All I have to say is that I've had migraines all my life, and they were becoming more frequent. My first impulse was to attribute them to other causes, but my gut told me to try caffeine. I tapered off caffeine over the course of a month, then went totally clean for a couple of weeks, after which I assumed I was "clean." (That's when I wrote that last post--in retrospect I'm amused by its cheery outlook. I was about to get slammed with true withdrawal)

You see, the headaches did not stop. They actually got worse. I wondered if my theory was wrong. And, of course, I really wanted caffeine whenever my head started hurting. That craving told me perhaps I was still in withdrawal. So I persevered, for perhaps two months of total abstinence and complete misery, and then the headaches stopped. Just stopped. It was like magic.

The lesson here is that it takes a long time for your body to adjust to the lack of caffeine, so you've got to be patient.

Since then, I've allowed a little caffeine back in my life. It seems important for me to not take it in the morning, because that's where the habit is most strong, but I will have green tea or iced tea or decaf in the afternoon sometimes, and I get away with it. However, it is a slippery slope. While traveling this Christmas I got cocky and started playing with fire--drinking the straight java--and I ended up with my first migraine in a long time. That just served to confirm my theory. Overall, I'd say my migraines have been reduced by 80 or 90 percent.

Everyone is different, and migraines are a complex phenomena. This may not work for you, but it has worked well for me, so I just had to put it out there. As much as I loved my coffee, it wasn't worth the pain.

Poo Salon and Urban Forage Classes with Nancy Klehm

Our good friend Nancy Klehm is coming to town for a visit. We've invited her to be a guest lecturer at our "Academy of Home Economics" and she's agreed to teach a couple of classes. If you live in the LA area, this is a chance not to be missed.

First, who is Nancy?

Nancy Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and managed a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria. 

More information on Nancy can be found at her website, here: http://www.spontaneousvegetation.net/

Class #1:

Poo Salon
Friday, February 18th, 2011
7-9pm, Echo Park, $15

Have you heard about the concept of humanure composting? It's the practice of composting human waste. It's practical, easy, green as can be, and totally off the grid. Better still, all the cool people are doing it. Whether you're interested in a viable emergency toilet, dream of living off the grid or are considering a revolutionary urban lifestyle, you'll want to know these techniques. Nancy, a world class humanure expert, describes this class as part philosophical discussion, part problem solving session, part introduction to the technology of composting.
• Foraged snacks provided. BYOB to share.

SOLD OUT. But you can put yourself on a waiting list for a possible second session by sending an email with "Poo Salon waiting list" in the subject line to: homegrownevolution@sbcglobal.net

Class #2

Urbanforage with Nancy Klehm (aka Weedeater)
Sunday, February 27th
2-4:30 pm, Echo Park, $25

Learn about the plants that share this city with us!

Urbanforage is an informally guided walk through the spontaneous and cultivated vegetation of the urbanscape. Along the walk, we learn to identify plants, hear their botanical histories and stories of their use by cultural use by animals and humans and share antidotes of specific experiences with these plants.

This walk will start with sharing an herbal beverage and end with a simple herbal food shared over discussion of the experiences and questions generated by the walk.

SOLD OUT. But you can put yourself on a waiting list for a possible second session by sending an email with "forage waiting list" in the subject line to: homegrownevolution@sbcglobal.net

Los Angeles Fruit Tree Pruning Workshops

Homegrown Neighbor here:

Growing fruit trees has obvious rewards. You can eat the fruit at its peak, straight off of the tree, full of flavor, aromatic and juicy. And the sight of an apple, peach or other deciduous tree in bloom is an ephemeral yet breathtakingly beautiful sight. But many of these trees will not bear good fruit without proper pruning. Good pruning encourages stronger limbs able to hold heavy fruits, prevents limb breakage, improves air circulation and light penetration and overall makes for a more attractive tree. Improper pruning or sheer neglect can mean weak, spindly limbs, a chaotic looking, ugly tree and puny fruits.

But how do you know what to cut? I'll be teaching two workshops this weekend for the locals. The first is this Saturday, January 15th at The Learning Garden in Venice. The workshop will run from 11 am-12:30 pm and there is a suggested donation of $25. The Learning Garden is at the southeast corner of Walgrove Avenue and Venice Blvd.

Then on Sunday, the 16th at Milagro Allegro Community Garden in Highland Park at 1pm as part of their 'Organic Sundays' series I'm teaching another one.

And for those of you who aren't local, the Homegrown Evolution team is going to work on some web based stuff for you. I'm going to teach Mr. Homegrown how to prune (in exchange for help baking bread, which I'm terrible at) and we will take photos for a blog post explaining the basics of fruit tree pruning.

Help save our oaks

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Sometimes I hate this city. And county. Tonight I learned two things: the first, that the city thinks it would be a great idea to create a parking area for idling buses in the center of one of our most vibrant pedestrian zones; the second, that the county plans to allow the Dept. of Water and Power County Department of Public Works to level a gorgeous oak grove this Wednesday, Jan. 12th to make a dumping area for flood debris. The first is just silly, the second is tragic. We've destroyed so much of our native landscape that what remains is incredibly valuable and irreplaceable. The thought of leveling 100 year old oaks for such a wasteful, temporary use makes me want to cry.

If you'd like to help, consider the following:

--It's late notice, but there's a protest tomorrow: 9:00 a.m. on Tuesday, January 11th at 500 West Temple in Los Angeles. 

--Sign a petition

--Send a message to 5th District Supervisor Michael Antonovich, and while you're at it drop a note to the whole LA County Board of Supervisors.

--Get updates on this situation from our friends at LA Creek Freak or in Facebook.

Thanks for your help.

The Great Cellphone Debate

The one that worked--with bail bond ad!

Kelly and I share a cellphone, and I'm always trying to think of ways to ditch it, if just to have one less bill every month. I often deliberately leave it at home when out of the house. I hate being interrupted by it and I dislike the social awkwardness of public phone conversations. Not that many people call our cellphone anyways as we don't give out the phone number much. When I need to text someone (them young folks!) I use my laptop and Google Voice.

Yesterday, on a bike errand sans cellphone, I found myself in a situation where I needed to call home to get some information. Five payphones later, I finally found one that worked. Payphones have been in decline for years, of course, with the advent of cellphone service. Kind of a shame since I wonder if cellphone networks will work in an emergency. And what about people too poor to afford a cellphone?

Now, I don't want this to turn into a anti-technology rant. I recognize that many people have to carry cellphones because of job and/or family obligations. And they certainly are convenient when it comes to things like finding someone at an airport, not to mention all the features of those smart phones (our phone ain't "smart," so others must think of me as crazy when I'm surprised at what you can do with one of those iPhone thingies).

But I wonder if we need a time out to consider the unintended consequences of cellphones. Are cellphones creating a generation of less independent children, always tethered to parents and civilization? Is all that RF radiation good for us? Then there's the Miss Manners questions: all that texting at the dinner table, at parties, at school, in houses of worship.

At the same time I'm intrigued with developing some of the how-to content of this blog into a phone-friendly format. It's not like cellphones are going to go away. Maybe it's better to work with the technology.

Leave some comments! How do you all negotiate cellphone usage with a non-consumerist lifestyle? What positive things come from cellphones? If you're cellphone free, why and how do you manage?

The Kingdom of Bolinas

In Ernest Callenbach's 1975 novel Ecotopia, Northern California, Oregon and Washington break away from the union to form their own highly groovy utopia. What Callenbach predicted may never have happened on such a big scale, but the small town of Bolinas, CA sure feels like it broke off from the rest of the country. Callenbach, in fact, featured Bolinas in the prequel to Ecotopia, Ecotopia Emerging.

Bolinas residents, famously, remove the turnoff signs on the highway on a regular basis, giving the town an independent vibe. One of the first things you see on approaching Bolinas is a series of picturesque organic farms, including Gospel Flat Farm which runs an honor stand along the road. When we visited they had some nice looking beets:

And a quirky mobile facility:

Bolinas also has a free store:

With its own unique signage:

And a multi-denominational alter thingy on the main drag:

With yet more creative signage:

The list of former residents reads like a who's who of American art and poetry. It's easy to see why. Bolinas has natural beauty, a good set of small businesses and all that fresh produce. It's also the home of my favorite bloggers, publisher and author Lloyd Kahn. 

Kind of hard to find myself back in Los Angeles, the most un-Bolinas of cities!

Why My Poultry Waterer Kept Breaking

This is not a handle! How not to carry a poultry waterer.

After breaking two poultry waterers I finally figured out what I was doing wrong. Thanks to instructions that came with my third waterer I learned not to carry it by the outer handle. After filling the waterer you carry it with the inner handle as seen below:

The inner handle.

Using the outer handle with the waterer full puts stress on the metal and ultimately breaks the vacuum.

Our backyard "egganomics" took a hit--gotta account for those three waterers now!

A Favorite Tool: Canning Funnel

I heart my funnel

Mrs. Homegrown here:

If you are a home canner, you probably already have one of these and know how useful they are. If you don't can, you might never have seen one before. I hadn't before we started canning--and I don't know how I lived so long without one. See, a canning funnel is just a wide mouthed funnel made to fit the mouths of canning jars. It allows you to quickly and efficiently ladle up hot food from the stove top into the jars. If you're canning without one, heaven help you! Go get one! 

Even if you don't can, you still need one. If, like me, you're buying more dried goods and bulk foods, or drying herbs and vegetables, you probably use a lot of jars. Canning jars are an easy, efficient way to store food--far better than a cabinet full of random bags and boxes.You can see what you have and exactly how much you have. They line up in attractive rows. They're also moth safe, if you're using proper canning lids. I'm always transferring something or another into a jar--a bag of beans, a batch of dried mint, fresh yogurt--whatever. The canning funnel makes this a snap. Before I had one, I was either winging it and spilling a lot, or fashioning funnels out of newspaper. Life is just to short to chase beans around the kitchen. I use this thing every day.

Here's a hint: If you have one of those little mesh tea strainers made to fit in the top of a tea pot (they always sell them in Asian markets), you'll find it fits perfectly both into the funnel and into the mouth of a quart jar. Using one with your funnel, you can strain off tea, oil infusions, vinegar, etc. with no fuss or muss.

Garden Bench Ideas

I've been contemplating building a garden bench for our backyard so whenever I see a nice one I take a picture. The first example (above) resides in a nursery in Bolinas, California. Looks like one end is the ubiquitous cinder block and the other a pre-cast concrete pier. Add some driftwood (there's a lot of it in Bolinas) and you've got a bench.

This arts n' craftsy bench is in the San Francisco Botanical Garden in Golden Gate Park. If I want to recreate this I'd have to pull out the router to do the fancy lettering. Would be kind of funny to offer naming rights to objects in our backyard, though.

Also in the Arboretum, this massive stone bench. Kinda hard to get those heavy stones up the steps to our house. It's beautiful, but if I recreated it poorly I'd have an object that recalls the tiny Stonehenge gag in This is Spinal Tap. The amusing back story to many of the stones in the San Francisco Arboretum is that they came from a Medieval Spanish monastery that William Randolph Hearst bought and had disassembled, crated and shipped to California at great expense. A couple of fires destroyed the crates and markings and years of acrimonious debate on where to put Hearst's monastery ended with many of the stones getting distributed around the park as benches and walls. Most went to the construction of a new abbey near Sacramento.

Really nice stonework here--a bench midway up a staircase on the Lands End trail overlooking the entrance to the bay. It's the most beautiful place on the planet with a nice bench to enjoy the view. 

A bench at the Preston Winery, home of that olive oil I blogged about yesterday.

I don't 'think a short bench like any of these would work in our backyard. At home I'm either running around or completely horizontal. Perhaps some kind of lounge chair might work better or a really long bench with some cushions.Will have to consult with the boss . . .

The Making of a Great Olive Oil

Kelly admires the olives

Thanks to our good friend Dale Benson, Kelly and I got to see how a really high quality olive oil is made. Dale knows Matt Norelli, the wine and olive oil maker at Preston Vineyards of Dry Creek, an organic family farm near Healdsburg in Northern California. Matt was nice enough to let us watch the complicated olive oil machinery in action.

First the freshly picked olives go into a big hopper (above). They are then crushed and churned (below).

After the churning process (called malaxation) the pulpy olive mass goes into a high speed centrifuge:

Matt (left) Dale (right) with the centrifuge

At the end of all this machinery the oil pours out of a spigot and into a steel drum:

We all had the great privilege of tasting the freshly squeezed oil. I won't soon forget that heavenly flavor. Matt told us that it takes around a ton of olives to make 25 to 30 gallons of oil. The olives come from a thousand trees that are tucked around the vineyards.

If you're ever in Northern California the Preston Vineyard is well worth a visit. We got to taste a Barbera wine that they make--quite amazing. They also bake a delicious sourdough bread, keep a flock of laying hens and sell cured olives. And the scenery? Let's just say it was difficult to come back to gritty Los Angeles.

Preston Vineyards website with visiting hours and map.

Lou Preston's olive curing recipe (scroll down towards the bottom of the page).