The Virtues of Gerard’s Herbal

...rnets, Archive.org, hosts a copy of John Gerard’s 16th century bestselling foraging manual, The Herball, or, Generall Historie of Plantes. I’ve embeddified it as an alternative to spending an evening staring at the Netflix browse menu or as an opportunity for workplace dinkering. Here’s how the University of Virginia describes it, Gerard was superintendent of the gardens of William Cecil, advisor to Queen Elizabeth. Gerard was one of the most resp...

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Help! Small birds are eating us out of house and home!

...owers and white sage gone to seed. Perhaps we should have left it at that? ( I suspect we’re not going to win any permaculture awards for our feeder.) Bird people, help! What are your thoughts on feeders? Is it okay to leave the feeder empty sometimes? Does that encourage foraging, or is it just not very nice to be random about the filling? Is there a cheaper alternative to Nyjer ™ seed that finches like? Perhaps something that doesn’t come from A...

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047 Done is Better Than Perfect

...view we discuss: Raised beds Hoop houses Crawl space vents for hoop houses Foraging for garlic mustard Bread Earth and Fire ebook Decluttering Beekeeping Honeybeesuite.com Mite treatment Keeping bees in the winter Mudsongs.org That Flow Hive thingy Bears! Birdhouses No-knead bread in a slow cooker Slow cooking and pressure cooking What to do with pallets If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send...

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When Mushrooms Attack

...With the news that Amazon is flooded with dangerous, AI generated mushroom foraging books, this seems like the perfect time for this blog to point towards the Japanese kid’s show Ultraman Taro, specifically episode 31, “Danger! The Poisonous Mushroom of Lies”. The episode opens with a giant, ambulatory mushroom, named Mushra, destroying a Japanese city. Ultraman Taro, a sort of size-shifting superhero, defeats the monster but not without a release...

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