Least Favorite Plant: Unkown

This is my first contribution to a regular feature here on Root Simple: the Least Favorite Plant. For me it’s a tie for least favorite between Manroot (I’m sure my adversarial obsession with this plant will compel a future post) and this tree that I have yet to identify (please help in the comments if you know what it is). [update: The Root Simple Community has correctly identified the tree as Osage Orange or Bois d'Arc. Thanks e...

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Dookie in the Tomatoes

...eggs–bad idea. I count myself very fortunate to have a bit of land to grow some tomatoes and feel sorry for those who don’t have this luxury. I wish more journalists would spin this story as a reason to build more community gardens and allow apartment dwellers to grow some food on the roof. It leaves me eating that big juicy roma tomato, pictured above, with all the smugness of a Prius driver in the HOV lane....

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Upcoming Classes: Edible Gardening and Vermicomposting

...gning and running a closed-loop vermicomposting project in Chicago  that used 100’s of thousands of worms to digest 10’s of thousands of  pounds of food and paper waste to create healthy soil. She started The  Ground Rules, a community soil building center in North Philadelphia and  developed and ran a two year collective human waste recovery project  Humble Pile Chicago. She is the on-going bio-instigator of soil systems  at C.L.U.I.’s South Bas...

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La Alternativa

...Gálvez is that she is a strong proponent of urban gardening, maximizing every available space for food, a contrast to Martha Stewart’s useless pesticide and fertilizer drenched flower gardens. See the the film Power of Community How Cuba Survived Peak Oil for more on Cuba’s inventive urban gardening. While we hope that the US does not face a Cuban style economic crisis, we at SurviveLA believe that it’s time for la alternativa...

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Be Idle

Homegrown Revolution attended a talk at the Eco-Village by Cecile Andrews, author of Slow is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre and Circle of Simplicity: Return to the Good Life. Part of the Urban Homesteadin’ thing involves simplifying one’s life, but we just can’t get behind the all the deprivation and mortification that often goes with American’s puritanical approach to the new simplicity....

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Support AB 1616 To Make Bake Sales Legal in California

...ill finally allow people in California to legally sell bread [and other "non-hazardous" food such as honey, jams and jellies] they bake at home! The Los Angeles Bread Bakers helped draft the legislation and will be organizing community support for it over the next few months. If all goes well, the bill will be signed into law by the governor by the end of the summer. But, of course, it will take a lot of work to make sure this happens, including...

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Polyculture

Here at SurviveLA we are experimenting with something called polyculture in the the garden. We read about it first in the worthy permaculture guide, Gaia’s Garden, by Toby Hemenway. Polyculture is the practice of planting a community of interrelated, interdependent plants, mimicking in your garden (in our case a raised vegetable bed) the complex relationships that are found between plants in nature. In the case of food crops, a polycultu...

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Sandor Katz to Speak in Los Angeles

“Fermentation fetishist” Sandor Katz will be leading a hands on workshop here in Los Angeles on Wednesday September 19, from 7-10pm at: Community Hall of Holy Nativity Church6700 West 83rd, Westchester/LA 90045$25 prepaid, $30 at the door – supports the ongoing work of the Environmental Change-Makers Autographed copies of The Art of Fermentation available for $25 Space is limited — Reserve your spot now!  Your check hold...

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