Reminder: Earthen Oven Workshop This Friday-Sunday at the Root Simple Compound

There’s still a few spots left for the oven workshop with adobe master Kurt Gardella. Here’s the details and registration information: Earthen ovens are inexpensive to build, fun to use, and provide baking environment impossible to recreate in the kitchen.  This May, Kurt Gardella returns to California for three days to teach you how to make your own earthen oven.  Kurt has built dozens of these ovens in New Mexico, and...

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Chicken Coop Deconstructed

Homegrown Neighbor here. I volunteer at a local high school with an agricultural program. Remember that we are in the middle of Los Angeles and agriculture is largely a thing of the past here. This school is one of the last public high schools in the area to have space devoted to an orchard, garden and farm. Right now it is home to a goat, a Vietnamese pot bellied pig, dozens of rabbits and two hens. As can be expected, the program hasn’t...

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Saturday Linkages: Meditation Pods and Zombie Lawn Gnomes

’s Type 3 Diabetes? http:// nyti.ms/TykL5o Bikes Cyclists are safe and courteous, and your disdain for them is grounded in cognitive bias: http:// boingboing.net/2012/09/26/cyc lists-are-safe-and-courteou.html  …    Is It Time for Interbike to Dump Las Vegas? http:// streetsblog.net/2012/09/24/is- it-time-for-interbike-to-dump-las-vegas/#.UGO40NlOI-0.twitter  …  ??? Zombie lawn-gnomes feast on a pink flamingo: http:// boingboing.net/2012/0...

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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...

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Vermicomposting Class

If you live in or around LA, we encourage you to take this unique class that we’re hosting in the Silver Lake area. While it’s pretty easy to get basic information on starting a worm bin, it’s rare to be able to dig deeper, especially with a teacher as knowledgeable as Nancy Klehm. GET YOUR LOOP ON!A workshop on extreme vermicomposting for the city dweller. October 23, 20119am – 1pm $45 includes foraged snacks and tea $2...

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What Are Your Favorite Compost Materials?

...hicken manure from our own chickens alfalfa hay (kinda spendy these days) straw (takes a long time to break down) spent grain from a local brewery vegetable scraps from the farmer’s market Once again I’ve got to build another pile and I’m interested in hearing from readers about compostibles you’ve used. Do you have a good source for stuff to compost? What are some of the things you’ve managed to scavenge? Comments...

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Vertical Vegetables

...ne. The New York Times did some critical reporting on the subject of vertical garden systems in a recent article, “Gardens That Grow on Walls.” For certain plants vertical growing might work. I haven’t tried it, but this DIY vertical succulent garden in Sunset Magazine certainly is striking. But vegetables? Their roots need space and you’d need to do a lot of watering to keep a vertical vegetable wall happy. But growing v...

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The World’s First Lamp

Erik’s link to the orange lamp on Saturday reminded me to post this. This is Project #1 in Making It, and we often open our lectures by building one of these, but I realize I’ve never talked about oil lamps here on the blog. Forgive the somewhat atmospheric photo. What you’re looking at is the simplest thing in the world: an oyster shell filled with olive oil and balanced in a small dish of sand. Three pieces of cotton stri...

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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 nemat...

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The Big To-Do List

iece of taped together paper to come up with our version of Heinlein’s skill set. Most of the subjects on that paper, everything from vegetable gardening to cargo bikes, ended up in the book or in our second book Making It. Now, we don’t expect everyone to master all the things in our books, but it doesn’t hurt to have a cursory knowledge of, say, greywater plumbing or compost pile construction, even if you live in a Manhattan a...

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