The Strange World of Artificial Plants

...on of what permacultural context in which these plastic plants would be an appropriate design solution. I couldn’t answer my own question. More plastic and less living things in our lives is probably not a good idea. But I am willing to consider a very limited use of artificial turf–neighbor Anne Hars once showed me Home Depot’s astonishing selection of fake grass–some that even has fake dead grass mixed in for realism. Perhaps in some ironic post...

Read…

What’s Your Personal Food Policy?

...chizophrenic food policies, I thought the Thanksgiving holiday would be an appropriate moment to define my own personal food policy. But as I started to write down my personal food policy I discovered so many contradictions and exceptions that I just stopped. My own personal food policy, when considered honestly, was almost as tangled as the USDA’s. Yes, sometimes we manage to grow all of our greens, but other times bugs/bad soil/forgetfulness in...

Read…

Steve Solomon’s Soil and Health e-Library

...h as Sir Albert Howard, J.I. Rodale and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. The “Homesteading” part of the library contains tomes dating from the 1700s (William Ellis’ The Country Housewife’s Family Companion), all the way to the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s (Gene Logsdon’s Getting Food From Water: A guide to Backyard Aquaculture). So go load up those e-readers. Or maybe print them out in case we have a revolution....

Read…

The Manzanita Miracle, or, why you should love native plants if you live in a dry climate

...the other is “Los Angeles is a desert, so I’m planting cactus.” Neither is appropriate. In Los Angeles, a lawn needs about 50 inches of water a year to stay green–and it usually gets twice that much–up to 100 inches. Compare that to manzanita’s 4 inches. Cactus doesn’t need much water, true, but we are not a desert–yet. We are in the process of desertification, yes, which is not a good thing. At the end of this road, we don’t end up in a dreamy Ge...

Read…