Make Your Own Landscape Lighting

There’s two kinds of 12 volt landscape lighting: cheap, ugly and flimsy or expensive and durable. You can find the cheap stuff at the big retailers and the expensive stuff at specialty retailers that cater to professionals. I’ve always been dissatisfied with the cheap stuff but I’m also unhappy with the pro lighting, which tends to have a overly sleek Dwell Magazine type vibe.

We had some unused Moroccan style lamps laying around and I figured out that I could wire them into our existing 12 volt system by implanting them with some G4 light sockets and G4 LED bulbs that I picked up on Amazon. It was a simple project to install the socket and seal up the top of these two lamps with some silicon caulk. I hung the lamps in our pomegranate tree and wired them into the system which is set on a timer to turn on at sunset and go off a few hours later.

I placed these lights to help illuminate the treacherous and irregular 1920s staircase leading up to the house. I also have a few pro style downlights along the stairs and another light hanging over the entrance arbor.

The entrance arbor light was a 12 volt path light that I turned into a hanging light.

In general I like to keep outdoor lighting to a minimum as it’s not good for insects and birds. I use outdoor lights only where necessary, in this case to prevent staircase accidents, and I run them only during the hours they are likely to be needed. We need to embrace the night not try to hold it back.

That said, I’m happy with this DIY effort and plan on making some more lights with some of the metal cutting skills I’ve picked up doing inlay work on a bed project. More on that in a future post when I get that bed done.

The Rain Got Real

Our home city of Los Angeles is in the news for a series of heavy hitting winter storms. While we’re on high ground and in no danger of flooding, our under-framed old house made ominous creaking sounds throughout the night.

Reliably, the Cosanti wind chimes on the front porch start clanging before the approaching storm.

I checked on our rain garden late last night (excuses for the bad photo) and the water level was the highest I’ve ever seen it. The rain garden gets all the water from one half of our roof which I calculate to have been about 1,500 gallons of water in the last 24 hours.

To briefly get back to the Žižek book I rambled about last week, I was reminded of Lacan’s notion of the “Real”, that which is unrepresentatible, unthinkable. Subjects such as our own deaths and climate change fall into the category of the Real. The incomprehensibility, the challenge of forming symbols or language around climate change and the hard choices we face in the future are why it is so difficult to understand and discuss this issue. Five inches of rain in one night in Los Angeles ain’t normal. It calls for a response outside of our current symbolic system. Welcome to the New Real.

Of Purple Prose and Re-Enchantment

I lieu of links this week, here’s a conversation between three of my favorite writers, Richard Seymour, China Mieville, and David Bentley Hart. Topics include “dandy” prose, materialism and metaphysics, non-human intelligence, and if you stick it out to the end, a moving plea to re-enchant the world.

It’s a long conversation and technical in places, but well worth a close listening.

Thanks to Daniel Saunders for the tip.

Chicken of the Woods 2022

September in Southern California brings heat waves, fires and smog. The one ray of light is the appearance of chicken of the woods mushrooms (Laetiporus gilbertsonii is the species we have here) a delicious and easy to identify fungus whose favorite host in our neighborhood is the carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua).

One needs to set realistic expectations when it comes to finding edible mushrooms in our dry climate. To take a walk and simply enjoy the sight of fruiting mushrooms should be enough but, being human, FOMO and greed inevitably set in. Anything humans like to eat will be popular with all manner of non-human species. That and our dry climate make this place not exactly a Mecca for edible mushrooms.

This year a freak rain caused mold growth on the chicken of the woods that I harvested from my friend Lee’s backyard tree. There were also tiny mushrooms growing on the mushrooms (!). You have to hand it to nature to evolve a decomposing mushroom to decompose the decomposer.

Better luck next year, I suppose.

See last year’s post for more information on Laetiporus gilbertsonii.

Growing Pink Oyster Mushrooms

Since this winter I’ve been experimenting with growing edible mushrooms both indoors and outdoors. Recently, I joined forces with a few other interested folks to attempt a technique called PF Tek that we learned about in a class taught by Peter McCoy. We grew oyster mushrooms, the Angelyne of fungi.

Growing oyster mushrooms is a four step process:

  1. Harvest spores or clone tissue and grow out in a petri dish. This must be done in a sterile environment, usually with a laminar flow hood. I have not tried this yet and it’s the most difficult part of growing mushrooms. Thankfully you can skip this step by purchasing liquid culture online.
  2. Take your liquid culture and inoculate grain, in mason jars, sterilized in a pressure canner. Someone in our little growing group purchased the liquid culture for around $10 for a syringe that was more than enough to inoculate 14 pint jars .
  3. When the grain in the jars is fully colonized, you use it to inoculate bags of straw that have been pasteurized in hot water. I think we ended up with something like 16 small bags of straw divided between our group.
  4. Keep the bags inoculated in step 3 in a humid environment with some indirect light and wait for them to fruit.

This all sounds a lot harder than it actually was. Oyster mushrooms have a reputation for easily out-competing molds that can tank other mushrooms. The culture we used in step 2 aggressively colonized the grain (we used sorghum bird seed called milo) as well as the straw. If anything the problem I had is that it went faster than I expected. Once the jars are colonized you have to move the grain to straw. Nature has a tendency not to care about human schedules.

Hot Pink Results
Some observations from this last experiment. We chose pink oyster mushrooms because they tolerate heat and will grow well at this time of year here in sunny and hot Southern California. I can report that, despite what some have told me, pink oyster mushrooms are delicious and do, in fact, have a vague ham or bacon flavor. While they lose their vibrant pink color when you heat them, they are still a colorful yellow hue after cooking.

So far I’ve grown pearl, blue and pink oyster mushrooms. My favorite for flavor and texture was the pearl oyster but the other two are a very close second. I’m going to grow pink oyster mushrooms again soon and like that you can grow them here in the summer.

I need to improve step 4. The difficulty with getting mushrooms to fruit is that they benefit from humidity and oxygen–you can’t just put them in a bag with no ventilation. While I’ve grown mushrooms outside without any kind of humidity control, I think I’d get bigger mushrooms with some kind of fruiting chamber. A lot of people make what’s called a Martha, named after a Martha Stewart mini greenhouse. I’m of two minds about this kind of thing. I’d like slightly better results but also like to avoid gadgets and plastic. But with three successful growing experiments, I’m leaning towards the Martha.

I might try growing pink oyster mushrooms on the oak sawdust I generate in my woodshop. I grew blue oyster on sawdust and I found it easier to work with than the straw. Straw has to be shredded and I found it hard to pre-moisten and pasteurize. With the sawdust I just poured boiling water over it in a tote and let it cool overnight. But I’ve also heard some say that oyster mushrooms grow better on straw. I guess I need to do a side by side experiment and find out.

While it was handy to have an outdoor area to shred the straw, one of the things I like about growing mushrooms is that you can do it in an apartment. I’ll also add that it was fun to do it with a group of friends. We got together to do the pressure canner step together and I was able to use my backyard to shred straw for the folks who didn’t have outdoor space.