Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

...rtment grow some herbs in a pot on your windowsill. If you’re a dilettante appropriate technology blogger with limited time for gardening and a long list of chores, a straw bale and a bag of urea might be the best way to keep the kitchen knee deep in pesto. If you’d like to try straw bale gardening see Washington Statue University’s instructions. Michael Tortorello also wrote a great article about straw bale gardening, “Grasping at Straw” for the...

Read…

Roundup

...unately there are alternatives. First of all we are mulching much more than we used to. Newspaper topped with leaves and twigs seems to work great, and the newspaper takes much longer than one might expect to break down. While not appropriate for our dry climate and incendiary native plants, it’s possible in wetter climes to burn weeds with a propane tool such as these. Ultimately, SurviveLA has replaced Roundup with a zen expression, “If you see...

Read…

Cybernetics: A Fatal Flaw

...r by Machines of Loving Grace. Last week I wrote about an archive of 1970s appropriate technology publications called Rain. I still contend that there is much to be reclaimed from this movement but it’s also healthy to look at what went wrong. A provocative and controversial book I just finished, Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet makes note of what may have been the fatal flaw in the movement: cybernetics, the dream...

Read…

Homegrown Evolution Food Review: Backpacker’s Pantry Huevos Rancheros

...is product has an impressive shelf life and ease of preparation, making it appropriate for emergency food supplies, we’ve had better freeze dried entrees. Our fellow campers had the same reaction to the visual look of the cooked and re-hydrated product: dog vomit. The taste wasn’t all that bad, but it had the overly salty and questionably seasoned feeling of almost all dehydrated foods. Imagine eating just the seasoning packet from a bowl of ramen...

Read…

Saturday Linkages: Murder Hornet Halloween

...terdämmerung,” in a Detroit Parking Garage I close with a quote that seems appropriate both for Halloween and for the political crises we’re in. It’s from one of my favorite books, Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative? and builds off of Marx’s love of a snarky vampire metaphor: The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the livi...

Read…