Saturday Linkages: Cat Houses, Office Gyms, Cooking in Compost and More . . .

A cat house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Makin’ Gourmet meal cooked in compost: http://www.7dvt.com/2012earthiest-roast … The Fixer’s Manifesto http://manifesto.sugru.com Short film about Safecast, the hackerspace-created, crowdsource radioactivity monitoring project http://boingboing.net/2012/11/21/short-film-about-safecast-the.html … Vintage Cat House Designed by the Office of Frank Lloyd Wright – http://www.moderncat.net/2012/11/09/vintage-c...

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Book Review: The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil

Phoebe says that despite her midnight coat and lambent eyes, she has nothing whatsoever to do with magic. Or peak oil. And for the record, she also scorns Halloween. What do magic and peak oil have to do with one another? Quite a lot, actually, if you believe the author, John Michael Greer. And if you read The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil you’ll probably come to agree with him, because in this book, as in all of his writing,...

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Tracking the Mood of the Gardener

Swiss chard from the winter of 2010 A Root Simple reader I ran into this weekend took issue with my assertion that fall is the best time to start a vegetable garden in Southern California. Thinking about it some more I think she may have a point. Some of you may have noticed that we have a new feature on the blog–if you click on an individual blog post you’ll see a list of related posts at the bottom. Looking at some of those older posts showed t...

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Nature Fest this Weekend!

...one in collaboration with the Ecology Center, on container gardening, rainwater harvesting, bicycle basics, backyard chickens and food preservation. They’ll be priced to fly out of those boxes in my garage! I’ll also be doing a coffee demo at 1pm on both Saturday and Sunday and dispensing free advice in the booth for the entirety of the festival. Please drop by and hang out. And dig the book racks I built out of scrap plywood! See you this weekend...

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Thank You Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County!

...of Los Angeles County. They were nice enough to invite Root Simple to do a coffee roasting demo and gave us booth space during Nature Fest this past weekend. They were also very compassionate and understanding when I had to leave early on Sunday when my elderly mom was, unexpectedly, hospitalized. If you’re a local please consider joining the Museum as a member and sign up to find out about the many programs they put on. They are doing amazing wor...

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