Disconnect to Reconnect: Ditching the “Flushie” for a Composting Toilet

Image from the Wikimedia Commons We’re lucky to have another guest post by Nancy Klehm (see a nice interview with her on foraging here). Nancy visits us at the Root Simple compound at least once a year. What follows is an account of a plumbing misadventure she had on her last visit.  To give you some context, ever since we’ve remodeled our bathroom and switched to a low-flow toilet we’ve had periodic backups. We think...

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Eat This City

From the Sky Full of Bacon podcast, a video on Chicago urban foragers Art Jackson and Nance Klehm: Sky Full of Bacon 07: Eat This City from Michael Gebert on Vimeo. Be sure to check Nancy’s website Spontaneous Vegetation for information on her projects and upcoming foraging classes in the spring....

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Does the scent of compost make bees angry?

...s at this time of year, when honeybee numbers are at their peak and pollen and nectar sources are getting scarce (summer is hot and dry in Los Angeles and not much is blooming). If you don’t have a hive, I doubt random, foraging worker bees would go after you if you are just turning compost in your yard. But if you’ve got a compost pile and are thinking about installing a hive–or vice versa–I’d seriously consider kee...

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Revised and Expanded

...table gardening, poultry, DIY cleaning products and beer making — all outlined with a sense of play and fun. “—Whole Life Times “… a delightfully readable and very useful guide to front and back-yard vegetable gardening, food foraging, food preserving, chicken keeping, and other useful skills for anyone interested in taking a more active role in growing and preparing the food they eat.”—Boingboing.net Thanks to all of you who have already bought...

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Trapping bees out of a kitchen vent

...xperience I’ve learned valuable lessons. Last week I started my first solo “trap-out.” In a trap-out you make a one way exit for bees that are somewhere they aren’t wanted, in this case a kitchen vent. Foraging bees leave the hive but can’t come back in. Next to the one way exit you place a “nuc” box (a cardboard box that holds five frames) that contains open brood comb, cells with eggs and larvae, from a...

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Forager and Humanurist Nancy Klehm in Los Angeles

Nancy Klehm is coming to Los Angeles for two exciting events–one on foraging and the other on humanure: Edible Urbanforage Walk Saturday February 16 4 to 6 pm. February, is the ideal time to forage Los Angeles! Nance Klehm will be leading this urbanforage. On this walk, we will learn to identify edible and medicinal plants, hear their botanical histories and stories of their use and share tastes of what we find. The urbanforage will start...

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Moving Bees Out of a Meter Box

...he moral of the story? Wherever the queen is, the rest of the bees will follow. Within minutes worker bees began fanning the entrance to their new home to alert the others to head into the nuc box. I took a long break to give foraging workers in the field a chance to join their queen in her new home. After the sun went down, I plugged up the entrance to the nuc box and taped it up carefully as the bees were to travel with me in a hatchback (not t...

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Loquat Season

For some mysterious reason our corner of Los Angeles has an abundance of loquat trees (Eriobotrya japonica) that, at this time of year, produce prodigious amounts of fruit that mostly goes to waste. Many of these trees live in public spaces, the parkway and people’s front yards making them prime candidates for urban foraging i.e. free food. The tree itself has a vaguely tropical appearance with waxy leaves that look like the sort of plasti...

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