Genetically-Engineered Organism Secretes Diesel

Image © Joule Unlimited, Inc.

It sounds like science fiction but according to an article by Jay Lindsay of the Associated Press, A Massachusetts company has a patent on a genetically modified organism that secretes diesel fuel from water, sun and CO2 inputs. Here's an excerpt:

Joule claims, for instance, that its cyanobacterium can produce 15,000 gallons of diesel fuel per acre annually, over four times more than the most efficient algal process for making fuel. And they say they can do it at $30 a barrel.

Normally I am opposed to genetically modified plants but this would appear to be a contained situation. Would it be a good thing for the planet if we had unlimited diesel fuel? I would guess that the CO2 would be net neutral whatever escapes the exhaust pipe would have had to have gone into the fuel initially - right?

Mass. company making diesel with sun, water, CO2

I'm curious what other people think about this.

Urban Homesteading Trademark Dispute Update

The Dervaes institute did not respond to the letter from the Electronic Frontier Foundation (more on that letter in an earlier post). We are consulting counsel regarding options. Thanks all for your support.

Bees: Shown to the Children

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Homegrown Neighbor lent us this beautiful little book. The author is Ellison Hawks (what a name!) and dates to 1912. This book is part of a series of books for kids on various natural history topics, all titled the same way (i.e. X: Shown to the Children). I'd love to see the whole collection.

Every time I read an old children's book, I'm struck by the sophistication of the language and themes presented, and wonder why this has been lost, and then try not to despair for civilization. Take this passage about intruders to the hive, from the chapter called Workers in the City (in the book, the hive is conceptualized as a bee city). It's poetic and morbid and violent fascinating--all things I would have loved as a child:

Sometimes a mouse or a snail enters the hive, and then indeed there is great excitement. Imagine a great elephant-like creature, thirty or forty feet high, with a tail thirty feet long, to come walking into one of our cities, and you will have some idea what it seems like to the bees when a mouse is foolish enough to poke its head in the hive! But the bees are not frightened; the guards are promptly called out, and the poor mouse is soon put to death by hundreds of stings. Having made sure that the intruder is quite dead, the bees leave his body to the scavengers, who are confronted with the problem of disposing of it. If it were left it would cause disease and pestilence throughout the city, and it is too big and heavy for them to move. It is true that they might bite it into tiny pieces and thus carry it outside the hive, but this would take too much of the bees' valuable time. A better plan is thought of, and the body is soon covered over with a thin coating of wax. It is thus embalmed in a beautiful white tomb, which is made perfectly air tight. If the tomb is near to the door, and interferes with the passing in and out of the workers, tunnels are cut through it. Sometimes when we look inside a hive, we may see two or three of these little mounts of was, and we may be sure that each one is the grave of some intruder who had no right to be there.

Granted, I believe foreign bodies in the hive, such as mouse corpses, are actually covered with propolis, not wax, but I'm not going to hold it against the authors. First, I'm not sure if I'm right or not, and at any rate, the idea is the same, and very well described.

There's so much good to say about this book. It's illustrated with early photos, line drawings, and pretty full color illustrations. In somewhat more than 100 pages it covers bee anatomy, behavior, the process of collecting nectar, hive society, beekeeping basics and even includes a chapter on "The Ancients" which addresses the apparently long-lasting ancient supposition that bees are born from the rotting bodies of oxen (?!?). I'm wondering if that was more of a symbolic conceit, because surely the ancients were no dummies and could tell the difference between blowflies and bees. But it makes for colorful reading, and again, as a child, I would have been entranced. Even if I couldn't understand half the words.

Turns out this book is hard to find in the US because it's an UK title. There's only one Amazon listing, and it's $23, and a couple more expensive at Alibris, but lots of UK listings for less. We may have to begin direct negotiations with Homegrown Neighbor for this copy.

UPDATE: A reader wrote in to tell us the whole book is available online, for free, at the Hathi Trust Digital Library. So if you want you can jump over there and page through it. I'd checked Google books, and it's not there. I'm glad to learn of Hathi. They've got three other books in the series, too, btw.

Build a Worm Tower

Host: Leonnie Shanahan. More info: www.ecofilms.com.au

Mrs. Homegrown here:

One of our commenters on the compost debate, Nick H., offered up a link to a great video about worm towers, so we thought we'd share. A worm tower is a wide (at least 50cm dia.) pipe sunk halfway into the ground, with access holes on the lower half to allow the worms to come and go. Food and bedding is dropped in the top, which is kept capped.

We happen to have worm & compost expert Nancy Klehm staying with us this weekend, and she explained to us that this particular technology makes a lot of sense for hot, dry climates (note the video comes from Australia), because it's sunken and it allows the worms to distribute themselves in the cool soil during the day. Conversely, I can imagine this wouldn't be such a great thing in rainy climates as it could easily flood.

A Taste of Honey - Story from the BBC

Gentle readers,

Mrs. Homegrown here. When we renamed our blog Root Simple we were making a commitment to build a better blog. We don't have the change all mapped out yet--we're letting it evolve organically (how else?) but one thing we've known for a long time, and that is that we wanted to partner with Eric Thomason and Julia Posey from Ramshackle Solid. We've long admired their aesthetics, the grace with which they live simply, and the way they're raising their boys: free and bold.

Don't worry, Ramshackle Solid fans: they will continue to document their adventures on that blog, just as always. Here at Root Simple they're going to liven up our game, dropping by with opinions, ideas and information that you probably wouldn't get from me and Erik, making Root Simple a more interesting place. At the same time, Erik and I will continue to blog as we always have.

So give them a big welcome! And now, on with Eric's first post, about one of my favorite subjects, the healing power of honey:

photo credit: edibleoffice via creative commons lisc.

The other night, Wednesday Feb 9th to be exact, while suffering a bout of sleeplessness, I had the great good fortune to hear this very interesting 27 min. audio story: A Taste of Honey (BBC)

It's a very informative news piece starting with the history of mankind's honey consumption and cultivation, discussing small scale vs. large commercial apiaries, colony collapse and ending with new breakthrough medicinal application of honey for aliments ranging from types of cancer to drug resistant staff infections.

One type of honey in particular, manuka honey, has very effective antimicrobial properties due to an additional compound found only in some wild manuka (leptospermum scoparium) in New Zealand.

Here's a statement from the Summer Glow Apiaries website:

In laboratory studies honey with high UMF activity (over UMF10) has been found to be effective against a wide range of bacteria including the very resistant helicobacter pylori (this bacteria causes most stomach ulcers), the wound-infecting bacteria staphylococcus aureus and escherichia coli, streptococcus pyogenes (causes sore throats).

If you don't have the time to listen or prefer to read, much of the health benefits being explored are discussed here in this BBC print piece from 2004: Harnessing Honey's Healing Power

BBC MP3: A Taste of Honey (BBC)

Why not plant some Calendula?

Calendula glows like the sun.

Mrs. Homegrown here, leaving the composting controversy behind...

One of my favorite plants in the garden is Calendula officinalis, aka pot marigold. It should not be mistaken for common marigold, or Mexican marigold, both of which are in the genus Tagetes. Tagetes marigolds are popularly used in companion planting (to ward off bugs in the garden), and for combating nemadtodes in the soil. Calendula is for helping people.

I grow Calendula in order to make lotions, balms and salves. I'm a firm believer in its healing power, my belief based on the happy response by family and friends who use my salves. Calendula is anti-inflammatory and antiseptic. It soothes, heals and helps regenerate skin. You'll find Calendula extract as an ingredient in expensive beauty products, but you can make your own Calendula salve for pennies. I'm going to come back to how to do that in a later post, but first, I want to talk about planting Calendula so you can get some going in your own yard (or on your balcony) this spring.

Compost Rebuttal

Kelly's secret compost pile.

I found out via a blog post last week that Kelly had secretly constructed a compost pile to deal with a surplus of kitchen scraps. She knew I'd be unhappy with this due to my anal retentive approach to composting.

So why am I unhappy with this pile? The reason is simple: it's too small and will never generate enough heat to:

• Kill weed seeds.
• Kill human and plant pathogens.
• Kill root nematodes.

Don't just believe me, listen to soil scientist Dr. Elaine Ingham in this youtube video:



Ingham's work is controversial, but I believe time will prove her ideas correct. To grow fussy plants like vegetables we need to introduce beneficial microorganisms and fungi into the soil via well made compost. To make that compost we need to monitor the pile's temperature carefully (it should be between 55ºC and 65ºC for at least three days according to Ingham). The pile also needs oxygen, provided by introducing loose materials like straw and through periodic turning. A compost pile needs water too. It's not difficult to achieve the conditions Ingham specifies. You just need enough mass combined with the use of a compost thermometer to figure out when to turn the pile. 

O.K., so now I'm headed out into the garden to combine that tiny and ugly tire pile to the new pile I'm building.

For more information on Ingham's work read, Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web, Revised Edition by Jeff Lowenfels and Wayne Lewis.

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Just rebutting the rebuttal. I don't disagree with anything Erik says above, and Ingham's work is fascinating.  But to be clear about my post, the "sooper seekrit" pile was not about producing compost, it was about disposing of waste. Indeed, such a small pile does not have the mass to heat up enough to burn off nasties or to decompose very quickly, but it suited my needs at the time. Homemade compost is a wonderous thing. It's vital to organic gardening, and moreover it's really satisfying to take the waste products from your kitchen and garden and make them into something which will build your soil. You get to keep all that wealth close at hand. However, if you don't want or need compost for your garden, but you don't want to send green scraps to the landfill, you can return it to the earth in more casual ways, like the sooper seekrit pile.

The Chihuahua Menace

Gardeners face many threats: drought, flood, frost and the occassional plague of locusts. But no force of nature is more terrible and awe inspiring than a determined Chihuahua.

Our neighbors Anne and Bill sent us this shocking footage of one of these creatures ravaging their pea bed. Note how the Chihuahua seems to draw other creatures into its destructive vortex. Even a cat is inspired, against all natural law, to nibble on peas. This is called The Facilitator Amplification Effect.

Viewer discretion is advised.

Urban Homesteading

UPDATE:

Our super lawyer, Corynne McSherry, Intellectual Property Director of the EFF,  has a blog post up on the EFF site: Riding the Fences of the “Urban Homestead”: Trademark Complaints and Misinformation Lead to Improper Takedowns summarizing the situation and the important issues at hand--issues that affect all of us. That post also has links to a letter she sent to the Dervaes Institute on our behalf.

***

This has been such a big flap I suspect most of our readers know this by now, but for those of you who haven't heard the news, the Dervaes Institute (the operators of the popular website, Path to Freedom) have trademarked the terms urban homestead and urban homesteading, and in the last week or so, have started to enforce their trademarks. Follow this link to Boing Boing for a concise summary of what's been going on. (ETA 2/23: This two part article at Agrariana seems currently to be the most complete summary available. ETA 3/2: They have a round-up of most writing to date at Seasons in the Soil)

We've landed in the middle of all this because in 2008 we wrote a book titled The Urban Homestead. Because they apparently believe this title infringes on their trademark, the Dervaes Institute has interfered with our ability, and the ability of our publisher, Process Media, to promote the book. We are by no means the only people affected by their actions, but we can only speak for ourselves.

We want to take this moment to tell you how grateful for all the the kind and super-supportive comments, emails and conversations we've had over this last week. It's hard to describe, but we've received so much love from you all that it's been like being bundled in a warm blanket. We've been busy, and we've been taking this seriously, but we haven't been worried or stressed. Thank you for all your positive energy.

It's also been wonderful to see how this has all served as a galvanizing action to bring the homesteading community together. We admire how the Take Back Urban Home-steading(s) page on Facebook stepped into the gap and created a place for people to gather. Today it's hosting a day of action, in which its members (nearly 4000 strong!) are all posting about their own urban homesteads. Check it out if you can. Join in if you can.

But back to business.

The one thing we didn't know last week was who was going to help us fight for our rights, because unfortunately it seems legal action is necessary. We've had good news.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has stepped forward to represent us and our publisher, Process Media. We couldn't be happier.

Who is the EFF?  They are a leading civil liberty group dedicated to protecting freedom and privacy in the digital domain. They're the guys and gals on the white horses. When you read about something idiotic going on and you say to yourself, "Someone has to do something about that!" -- more often than not, the EFF is that someone.

Just check out this page on their awesome work, and you'll know why we are honored, amazed and thrilled that they've taken us on.

We've had many people ask us how they can help. Right now, the very best thing you can do is send a few dollars to the EFF as a gesture of appreciation. Two-thirds of the EFF's budget comes from donations, so your donations will help them shoulder the costs of taking us on--not to mention all their other excellent work.

Again, thank you so much for your support. We love you all.

Look To Mother Nature

While this clip is about the economy, I often think about it in relation to our burgeoning urban homesteading movement. Whenever I'm asked why we are engaged in the disparate activities chronicled on this blog, I point to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of one of my favorite books, The Black Swan.  In this clip he talks about how nature isn't centralized. Nothing in nature is "too big to fail." Nature depends on built in redundancy. It's adaptable, flexible, built to withstand shocks--Taleb's term for this is robustness.

He's talking about reforming financial systems, but we apply the same ideas when considering our overly centralized food system. All of us who grow a little food, bake, brew, keep small stock and bees--what have you--are part of the solution. By building community ties and practical knowledge we're creating a robust food production and distribution able to withstand shocks.

This is reason enough to do it, but as you all know, it's a whole lot of fun, too.

Just another reason why urban homesteading rocks.

Molto bene!

Mallo2011, a reader in Italy, just commented on our how to build a self watering container post. We're so pleased to hear that he's happy with his SWC, that we thought we'd move his comment and the pic of his new baby here for you all to see:

Hi from Italy
this is just to thank you for your easy tutorial for a DIY self-watering container.
Actually, at least in my Town, those containers are way too much expensive to buy!

Your SWC looks fantastic Mallo! Congratulations, and happy growing!

How to clean a stained coffee cup

This is what it looked like fresh out the dishwasher. Ugh!

The sink post reminded me about this quick and easy tip. If you've got a stained coffee mug, baking soda will take that gunk right off.  Just sprinkle some baking soda in the mug, then wipe down the inside with a damp rag or sponge. The stain will give in on the first pass.

As I described in the sink post, the trick here is to keep the mug on the dry side, because baking soda scrubs best when only slightly damp. Your sponge or rag should be damp, but the mug shouldn't have water in it.

Just a swipe with the magic powder does it.

I don't like housework, but this sort of cleaning makes me happy.

My Sooper Seekrit Compost Pile

Welcome to the Lucy and Ricky show!

As some of you know, Erik is a complete and utter compost wonk. A heavy book about the science of decomposition is pleasure reading for him. He has a really, really big thermometer and knows how to use it.

We've kept a compost pile for years and years, but only in the last two years has it become an obsession for him. One of his more recent projects has been to make an gigantic bin in our back yard. This is the sort of bin you could use to dispose of bodies. He became so persnickety about the proper usage of the Wonder Bin that I was afraid to take scraps out there. Emptying the compost pail became his duty.

Then, one day, something went wrong in compost nirvana. You'd have to ask him for the details of his crisis, but the upshot was that he didn't want anything new to go in the bin.

"But...but..." I said, pointing at the full compost pail on the counter.

"I'll deal with it," he said.

One day passed, and the next. He put a big mixing bowl on the counter next to the overflowing pail and started throwing his scraps in there. Flies gathered. 10 lbs of rotting scraps on the counter bothers Erik not a whit.

Of course the notion of putting it all in the trash never crossed our minds. At this point, it's unthinkable, like driving around without a seat belt.

"This can't go on," I said, when a second mixing bowl of scraps joined the first, and the fruit flies started passing out party fliers to the whole neighborhood.

Happy Fornicalia!

Oven at Pompeii, photo by Camster2

Today (or roundabouts) the ancient Romans celebrated the festival of Fornicalia in tribute to Fornax, the goddess of the hearth and baking. And, yes indeed, it's where we get the word "fornicate" -- for reasons that aren't entirely clear. It's either because prostitutes used to operate out of bread oven-shaped basements in Rome, or because the "bun in the oven" euphemism is a very old one.

I'm celebrating Fornicalia by reading a book by Jeffrey Hamelman Bread: A Baker's Book of Techniques and Recipes that Mark Stambler, a gifted baker in my neighborhood, introduced me to recently. I'll review the book in length later once I master the recipes. Until that time, Kelly will be hearing the good old fashioned Anglo-Saxon euphemism for "fornicate" coming out of the kitchen as I  battle with my proofing issues.

So, happy Fornicalia! Go warm up your oven and bake something.

I like my chamomile stressed

This poor, abused little seedling is flowering like crazy.

Mrs. Homegrown here:

I made a mistake--I predicted a while ago that this would happen, and here it is. When we remodeled the yard and I set aside space for The Phan of Pharmacy (tm) my goal was to maximize the production of herbs and flowers.  I prepped the ground in the fan like a fine flower or veg bed: double dug and richly amended. It was only after I planted my chamomile starts in it that I realized the soil was way too rich for chamomile. Not that it wouldn't grow, but it wouldn't grow the way I wanted it to grow.

See, chamomile is a tough, scrappy plant. In our dry climate, it pops up with the winter rains, and lives a fast, hard life, like a beautiful young self-destructive celebrity. It shoots up overnight and throws off blossoms like crazy, its one goal being to spread seed before it dies.

In the past, I've harvested chamomile from volunteer plants in my yard. I never planted or tended them, but one or two would get about knee high, and from those one or two plants I'd gather all the flowers I needed by remembering to pick a handful every time I went in the back yard. The thing about chamomile is the more you pick, the more it produces.

But I was greedy--and somewhat lazy, as usual. I thought, why be out there every day milking some scrappy chamomile plant, when you could plant a chamomile crop and harvest a ton of flowers in just a couple of days? So I planted I don't know how many plants--20, maybe? More? The chamomile thrived in the rich, fertile soil, putting all it's energy into making lots of feathery green foliage--not flowers. My entire chamomile crop is presently netting me less flowers than one or two abused volunteers would. That sad little plant in the top picture may have to become my harvest plant.

Uh, very pretty. But where are the flowers?

The lesson here is to know your plant, and to pay attention when you're prepping your garden. I amended that soil on auto-pilot, when I could have left one fan wedge un-turned and un-amended and the chamomile would have flowered all the better for it. To be clear, this isn't necessarily the case for other herbs and flowers. The calendula I planted in the fan is doing very well, producing huge, hearty blooms. All I'm saying is that you can't generalize.

My next step is to withhold water from the chamomile and try to stress it into flower production. Of course, we're heading into another rainy period, so it will be a while before that chamomile is feeling any stress at all.

Our ladies are also well practiced in stressing chamomile

Oops! Sorry!

Thank you for your kind comments, but condolences are not necessary. Chickenzilla passed a few years back.

See, I'm cleaning up the labels or tags on our old posts so that we can have a more effective search system, and somehow I republished 3 old posts as new posts, including one about the sad death of Homegrown Neighbor's friendly rescued chicken, Chickenzilla. The other two were on figs and bike fashion, respectively. I've just taken all those posts down, but those of you reading this on a feed will probably still see them, and I'm sorry about that.

Zhengyalov Hats

A Zhengyalov hat (sometimes transliterated as "Jengyalov hat" is an Armenian flat bread stuffed with a surprising set of mostly foraged fillings which, according to this website, include, "spring onions, green garlic, coriander (lat. coriandrum), nettle (lat. urtica), chickweed (lat. cerastium), sorrel, capsella, mint and a special herb called either [sic] carmantyuc (kndzmdzuk)." It's apparently a popular dish during lent and originates from the Karabakh region.

Our neighbors at Tularosa Farms dropped off two Zhengyalov hats that they found at a local Armenian market. They were quite delicious, though to eat one straight off the fire, as in the video above, must be a real treat.

I wish I could find a recipe in English. Leave a comment if you find one on the interwebs or in a cookbook. In the meantime, I'm just going to watch that video over and over.

More information on Zhengyalov hats and the cuisine of the Karabakh region here.

Cleaning the Sink with Baking Soda and Lemons

  

Our sink, freshly cleaned and so darn photogenic!
This is because you can't see all the clutter just out of view.

 

A little green cleaning review here. It is possible to keep a sink white and shiny without bleach or other toxic cleansers. I took pictures this week while I was cleaning to prove it.

Below is our grungy sink. A photo can't quite capture that particularly scuzzy quality a dirty sink has, that gunky bacterial record of all the dishes and greasy pans that have sat in it over the week. In the lower right corner you can see my homemade scrubby--just a few of those red plastic net bags that fruits and veg are sometimes sold in, wadded up and tied into a yellow one.

The more usual state of our sink. That is, minus the piles of dishes.

Step one: baking soda scrub

A few quick things about baking soda:

• Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is an inexpensive, non-toxic, mild abrasive. You can use it safely on enamel, stainless and fiberglass sinks. 

• While you can find baking soda in the baking aisle of most stores, search it out in bulk, both for savings and because you'll go through quite a lot of it. We buy it in huge boxes or bags at our local restaurant supply chain. I expect it would also come in bulk at grocery warehouse stores.

• Make a shaker for it out of a jar with holes punched in the lid,  repurpose some other shaker, or buy a sugar shaker from a restuarant supply place. I'd used an old jar for several years before seeing a metal sugar shaker at an Asian market for all of $1.99 and decided to splurge. You can see it in the windowsill of the top picture. You know, it was totally worth the $1.99.

Using baking soda:

• The trick to using it effectively is to not use it in a very wet environment. Baking soda dissolves quickly in water, unlike some scouring cleansers. Don't try to use it in standing water, or even with a very wet sponge.  For it to work well, it has to be on the dry side. If my sink is wet, I'll run a towel over it to get most of the water out before scrubbing.

• Use a generous amount of baking soda. 

• See the lumps and clumps forming in front of my scrubby in the picture below? You can actually see the line between dirty and clean, and the lumps of barely damp baking soda that are picking up the dirt. In my experience, if you're not producing these sort of lumps, deep cleaning isn't going to happen. Look for these lumps. They only happen when a) you use enough baking soda, and b) when the cleaning surface is just damp. Not too wet, not bone dry.

These are the magic clumps. I like to imagine myself a snowplow.

Why Did We Change Our Name?

The answer is simple. To those of you who have ever tried to find an available url, you know. It's tough. Everything is taken. When I began this blog on a whim one afternoon in 2006, I registered "survivela.com." Our first publisher, correctly, thought that was too Los Angeles-centric and asked that we make it more universal so that we could expand our readership. Thus began the second painful search for an unused URL, followed by a third painful search due to a comedy of errors too tedious to describe.

Rootsimple.com is here to stay. I like it a lot better than "Homegrown Evolution." It's easier to remember and I dig the symbolism.

"Everything changes and nothing remains still .... and ... you cannot step twice into the same stream." as Hereclitus says. The publishing and blogging world is getting a bit crowded in the "urban homesteading" category. It's time to expand the conversation and explore some new home ec related topics. We don't want to become stale. Having a new book coming out later this spring, Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, also makes for a good moment to update our website.

Incidentally, for those of you trying to find an unused URL, I discovered that you can just add the word "burrito" and you've got yourself a website. So go ahead and register rootsimpleburrito.com before someone else does.

Technical Issues

We've switched our URL. Welcome to Root Simple! Let us know if you're having any issues reading this blog.

We're Changing

You might recall that several months ago we said we were going to do a website redesign. Well, we're finally getting around to it. Over this weekend we're going to be monkeying with things, so if you check in, you might encounter strangeness. When it's all done, we're going to have a new name and a new look.

"Don't let the perfect get in the way of the good" is a favorite saying around here, frequently repeated because we so frequently forget it. We'd planned to make lots of changes to this blog and lay them out with a big "Ta Da!" But that didn't turn out to be practical. As you'll soon see, this redesign is pretty minor. It's just the first step of what will be a slow evolution that we'll undergo through tiny tweaks and additions as we figure things out. And really, that's the best way to change.

"What kind of changes?" you ask? Well, those ideas are still developing, but our overarching goal is to offer our readers more: more posts, more resources, more information, more voices. 

This weekend, though, all we're doing is changing our background to white, adding some navigation tabs, and changing our name. What's our new name? Like the lady in the picture above, we're going to keep our secret under wraps--at least until tomorrow.

Bringing Blossoms Inside

It's such a simple thing to do, and so beautiful. If you're trimming your fruit trees while they're in bud, as they are now here in SoCal, keep all those twigs and bring them indoors. Stubby little ones can go in jam jars. Long thin whips in a vase make for instant elegance. They'll keep blooming for a while. For me, no store-bought cut flower can compare.

The Vertical Gardens of Los Angeles

Photo by Anne Hars

Like Emily Green of the Los Angeles Times I'm a vertical garden skeptic, especially in a dry climate. That being said, artist and master gardener Anne Hars and I found a successful, though unintentional, vertical garden in our neighborhood while walking her dogs yesterday. The plant you see above is growing through a drainage hole (the level of the ground behind the wall is where you see the plant growing). Makes me wonder if this particular design could be done on purpose, given the appropriate context. The plants, in this hypothetical drainage hole garden, could act as biofilters, absorbing excess nutrients and toxins. Slap a trademark on it, form a non-profit and Bob's your uncle.

Extra points to the person who can i.d. the common weed growing through that drainage hole:

Maybe Anne and I will go back, cross out the gang tags and spray paint the scientific name of the plant once one of you identifies it for us.

Mrs. Homegrown in Ladies Home Journal

It's official. Mrs. Homegrown is an "extreme housewife" according to this month's issue of Ladies Home Journal.

Dumpster Herb Score

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Scored big at Trader Joes yesterday. Love a good dumpster find, almost as much as finding good feral fruit.  It looks like they were clearing out their plants and flowers for Valentines Day, because out by the cardboard piles we found a grocery cart heaped full of wilted flowers and random potted mums. (Joes really needs to start a composting program, don't you think?)

We sorted through the cart and found four potted herbs, only slightly distressed. One was a lemon balm, which I've wanted for some time. The others, I admit, I don't really need (because I already have them), and don't have any space for--but I'll squeeze them in somehow. In this way, I'm like a crazy cat woman.

ETA: This morning two complimentary bits of information came in regarding TJ's and composting. The first came in an email from our friend Anne, a Master Gardener. She tells us that: "Master gardeners encourages gardeners to arrange pick up times with TJ's for plants. They will tell you when they are putting out the plants so you can get them. Lots of mg's do this and bring them to various garden projects all around LA county."

So that's cool. And then in the comments there's an anon comment from a TJs employee explaining the issues around composting for the stores, and giving some dumpster diving tips!

Weedeater Street Medicine in Los Angeles

Painting by Kelly Pope

A brief reminder that our friend Nancy Klehm is coming to Los Angeles to give a series of classes. In addition to the Poo Salon, she'll be teaching the following:


Weedeater Street Medicine in Los Angeles
February 19th+ 20th,10am – 5pm, $165 for two days; $90 a day

Learn to prepare and use the vast amount of medicinal plants that grow in the street and city lots. We will be exploring the cultivated and the wild plants of our surroundings that are readily available for the making of place based medicines. Each day will be rich with hands-on gathering and preparations, tastings and samplings and grounded with an urbanforage walk. A light foraged lunch and teas will be provided.

Day One
Introduction to basic herbal energetics and actions that includes a two hour urban forage walk. Preparations of medicines used externally: poultices, linaments and salves.

Day Two
Introduction to Plant Spirit Medicine that includes a two hour urban forage walk. Preparations of medicines used internally: infusions, tinctures and flower essences.

$50 holds your space. Registration deadline February 14.
Paypal account: nettlesting@yahoo.com

Teaching locations and a short materials list will be given with registration. Questions? nettlesting@yahoo.com
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Ikea Hack: Ancient Greek Couch

Call me pretentious and crazy. When it came time to replace our dog-damaged living room couch I decided to recreate an ancient Greek/Roman couch using scavenged and inexpensive materials. A broken child's bed, some cheap table legs from Home Depot and an Ikea cushion make for a quick and easy project.

If I were to make two more of these couches and a low table I'd have the complete ancient dining room or "triclinion." What could I do with a triclinion? Glad you asked. At the triclinion, guests reclined on  couches in a specific seating order. Woman and men ate separately. You brought your own humanure potty with you which also served as a projectile when philosophical arguments got out of hand. And the ancient Greeks even had professional party crashers with colorful nicknames such as, "the lobster."

  

Reviews on my couch are mixed. Mrs. Homegrown deems it uncomfortable unless laying horizontal. And the historical recreation on the cheap aesthetic runs the risk of devolving into the horrors of the modern day toga party such as the one below:

Photo by Keithusc

Nevertheless, it's a great couch from which to make pronouncements, blog posts and "thoughtstylings" from. And it's well past time to host that homesteading symposium!

Sun Bleaching Really, Really Works

Line drying in the sun is a time honored means of brightening whites. But I had never guessed how effective it can be.

I have a pair of white bath towels which developed mysterious, spreading yellow stains all over them, stains which I could not remove no matter what I tried (Borax, oxygen bleaches, stain removers), and which I may have actually worsened by a final, desperate flirtation with chlorine bleach a few years ago.

The towels were in good condition otherwise, but I wouldn't hang them in the bathroom because-- seriously--they made us look incontinent. I downgraded them to "slop towel" status, and didn't think about them much again, until lately, when I was considering getting rid of them, to save room. But how to do that? I have too many rags, Goodwill wouldn't want them, and throwing them in a landfill would be beyond the pale. I pondered composting them as an experiment, but figured they'd need to be shredded.

Finally, I decided to hang them off the side of our porch for a couple weeks (in good weather, of course!), just to see what happened. Day and night, I just left them there. Turned them whenever I thought about it, then forgot about them entirely.

Today I pulled them off the porch, and they look a whole lot better. I'm shocked they're not counter-stained by diesel particulate. There are a few intractable stains from their days as slop towels, but 95% of that nasty yellow splotching is gone. They will be rotated back into bathroom use.

Mr. Sun, I'm impressed.

Max Liebermann, The Bleaching Ground, 1882, Wallraff-Richartz Museum

Sun was once the primary way women used to keep their whites white--urine and lye were other less pleasant alternatives, as well applying bluing to counteract yellow. All of these may have been combined with sun exposure. Villages had designated, communal areas for spreading out laundry. Do an image search for "bleaching ground" and you'll find lots of old paintings on the subject. Linen manufacturers also used to bleach linen in the sun, so you might find pics of huge operations as well as ordinary laundresses.

• Some nice factoids on old fashioned laundry techniques can be found here, at Old and Interesting.

• I've read that to rid yourself of perspiration stains on white shirts you can mix lemon juice and water--maybe at a 50/50 ratio? Soak perspiration stains in that and then lay shirts out in the sun to bleach. I've not tried that myself, since Erik and I have totally given up on wearing white.

A Bustle In Your Hedgerow

Coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis) photo by Art Shapiro

I've always been suspicious of some of the popular companion planting advice of the sort dispensed in old books like Carrots Love Tomatoes. From what I understand research just hasn't proven a lot of the relationships these sorts of books tout. What makes intuitive sense to me, however, is that biodiversity in in a garden can create habitat for beneficial insects and birds that can help keep our edibles free of pests. For thousands of years in Northern Europe that biodiversity was maintained through the use of hedgerows.

Now, thanks to a study conducted by UC Santa Cruz researchers Tara Pisani Gareau and Carol Shennan, we've got some solid advice on what sorts of plants can create habitat for beneficials. The study, "Can Hedgerows Attract Beneficial Insects and Improve Pest Control? A Study of Hedgerows on Central Coast Farms" looks at a set of specific plants used in hedgerows in California: common yarrow (Achillea millefolium), coyote brush (Baccharis pilularis), California lilac (Ceanothus griseus and C. ‘Ray Hartman’), perennial buckwheat (Eriogonum giganteum), toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia), and coffeeberry (Rhamnus californica).

In their conclusion Gareau and Shennan note,

Planting a diversity of plants that have different floral architectures should increase the likelihood of conserving a diverse community of insect natural enemies. Coyote brush and yarrow would be especially important foundational plants in hedgerows. In addition . . . combining hedgerows with in-field floral plantings (in strips or randomly throughout) may increase the dispersal of small-bodied insect natural enemies through the fields.

Scott Kleinrock, who is in charge of the new Ranch project at the Huntington, tipped me off to this research and is making use of a lot of California natives to create the urban residential equivalent of a hedgerow. In short, a hedgerow in our yards and urban spaces means making sure to include lots of natives and flowering plants that can provide habitat for the types of critters we want. Hopefully this important research will be duplicated in other regions and climates with different sets of plants.

Now, I've got to get me some Baccharis pilularis!


ETA: Apologies for being California-centric here, but we don't know of any research studies on native plant hedgerows in other places. However, be sure to check out this Mother Earth News article about living fences, which we've posted about before.

ETA 2: From our comments: check out the region-specific guidelines for plants which support pollinating insects, put together by the good folks at the Xerces Society.

My mental glitch: hay vs. straw

Photo by David Shankbone

Mrs. Homegrown here:

So I went to the feed store to get some stuff for the chickens and at the counter I made a mistake. When the clerk said, "Anything else?" I said, "Oh yes. One bale of hay, please."  She rang me up. The bill seemed more than usual, but being in my usual fog, I didn't pay that much attention. The heavy lifting guys bring the hay bale to my car. It's green and fragrant...it's....HAY.

I meant straw.

This is not my fault. I'm a city kid. I was not taught the difference between straw and hay as a wee child, and as an adult, while I've learned the difference via the school of hard knocks, somewhere deep in my brain hay and straw remain synonyms. This problem shows no sign of going away.

I also persistently call my ipod my Walkman. This is even worse, because it shows my age. It's like I've become one of those middle aged people who in my youth called the stereo "the hi-fi".

*

Homegrown Evolution readers are all savvy folks, and know this already, but in case some poor soul is cast on this shore by Google, this is the difference between hay and straw:

Hay refers to grasses or legume plants cut down fresh and baled for animal feed. Hay bales are usually greener than straw bales, the plant material finer. Hay smells really nice, too. You would not want to use this stuff as mulch, or you'd end up sprouting a yard full of alfalfa or whatever. It's also more expensive than straw, about three times as much, depending on the grass type. No one would use hay as bedding.

Straw is the dried stalks of cereal plants, like wheat. It's a by-product of harvest. If any seeds remain on the stalks, it's by accident. Therefore, straw is nutritionally void, and is not animal feed. However, that lack of seeds makes it a fine mulch, and an inexpensive bedding material. We line our chicken coop with it, and recommend it for weed suppression projects.