Author William Powers to Speak in Los Angeles

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I had the great pleasure of hearing William Powers speak about his book 12 by 12 a few years ago. He’s returning to Los Angeles for a book talk and signing at Skylight Books on Saturday October 3rd at 5 pm. Powers is a very thoughtful, honest and engaging speaker. Living simply in the big city is, obviously, a subject close to our hearts.  From the book description:

New Slow City
Living Simply in the World’s Fastest City

Burned-out after years of doing development and conservation work around the world, William Powers spent a season in a 12-foot-by-12-foot cabin off the grid in North Carolina. Could he live a similarly minimalist way in the belly of the go-go beast — New York City? To find out, Powers and his wife jettisoned 80 percent of their stuff, left their 2,000-square-foot Queens townhouse, and moved into a 350-square-foot “micro apartment” in Greenwich Village. Downshifting to a 20-hour workweek, Powers explores the viability of Slow Food and Slow Money, technology fasts and urban sanctuaries, rooftop gardening and beekeeping. Discovering a colorful cast of New Yorkers attempting to resist the culture of Total Work, Powers offers an inspiring exploration for anyone trying to make urban life more people- and planet-friendly.

Skylight Books (a big supporter of our two books, by the way) is located at:
1818 N Vermont Ave
Los Angeles, CA

A conflicting event will prevent us from being there, but please tell Powers and the folks at Skylight that Root Simple sent you.

A Pedal Powered Lathe

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I’ve blogged many times now about the incredibly useful and free 3D visualization program Sketchup (and had John Zapf on to talk about it on the podcast). A few avid woodworkers used the program to help build a wooden, bicycle powered lathe for a school in the Dominican Republic town of Punta Cana. They built the lathe so that kids at the school could make their own baseball bats.

You can find out more about the project on the Sketchup blog.

061 National Heirloom Expo Report

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This week we go to the Santa Rosa Fairgrounds in Northern California to the National Heirloom Exposition. The three day Expo is run by the folks behind Baker Creek Seeds and features speakers, a huge hall of heirloom fruits and vegetables, vendors, livestock, a biodynamic pavilion and live music. I’ve attended each year for five years in a row. This year I took my portable recording equipment and on this episode of the podcast you’ll hear interviews with root vegetable expert Grant Brians, Sir Cobalot, Sustainable Santa (yes you heard that right) and we’ll conclude with a discussion about the California Grange. During the show we mention:

If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.

Our Disastrous Summer Garden

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I’m struggling this morning for metaphors to describe our summer vegetable and fruit garden: Napoleon at Waterloo, the Hindenburg disaster, being locked in a cell with a recording of “Achy Breaky Heart” in a continuous loop. In short, growing edibles this year was an unmitigated disaster. Here’s a few of the things that happened:

  • We planted a bed of basil seeds and got lambsquarters (Chenopodium album) instead. Yes, I know lambsquarters are edible, but I was looking forward to the basil.
  • Our Swiss Chard, usually a good performer, was stunted and anemic. It seemed incapable of growing past 8 inches.
  • Our tomatoes grew well, produced a fair amount of fruit and then abruptly dried up and croaked.
  • We planted zucchini too late and it got a bad case of powdery mildew.
  • The raccoons figured out how to bust through the bird netting that was supposed to keep them out of the vegetable beds. They completely obliterated two out of four vegetable beds.
  • With the exception of our pomegranate tree, every last peach, apple, persimmon and most of our figs were harvested by squirrels and raccoons.
  • The Nectaplum, Santa Rosa plum and nectarine trees did not produce a single fruit due, I think, to a lack of chill hours caused by climate change.
  • Drought, of course, made everything worse. We had to water our already alkaline soil with alkaline water. Only the native plants and what we call the Biblical plants seem happy (e.g. the fig and the pomegranate).
  • The drought and an extreme heat wave pushed everything in the garden to the edge–and a few over the edge: in the last month we abruptly lost some garden stalwarts, including a rosemary bush and a culinary sage.

Despite all these disasters, I came back from the Heirloom Expo with some ideas:

  • Spend a little less time on Facebook and a little more time in the garden.
  • Come up with better raccoon fortifications.
  • Take out stone fruit that isn’t performing (Kelly has wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve dragged my heels).
  • Take better notes.
  • Improve soil and restart a composting project.
  • Come up with small metal cages to enclose fruit (I have a notion that involves 3D printing–more on this later).

How did your garden do this summer?

Heirloom Expo in Photos

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I highly recommend making the trip next year to Santa Rosa to see the National Heirloom Exposition put on by the folks at Baker Creek Seeds.  The centerpiece of the expo is the massive display of hundreds of different varieties of squash, melons, tomatoes and other edibles. It’s inspiring and frustrating all at once since, unless you have your own garden, you’ll never see such diversity at the supermarket. I came back with the will to improve our dismal vegetable gardening efforts and with a bunch of interviews you’ll hear on our podcast this week. For those of you who didn’t make it this year, here’s some of what you missed:

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