Saturday Linkages: Now With Catagories (and Skateboarding Goats)

...es/vxakE     Cookin’ Pickled Beets with Orange and Coriander. Excellent on a sandwich with goat cheese and pesto. http:// fb.me/1HJYF63ww via @nwedible Gardenin’ Growing chayote: Bury one fruit, get an epic plant http://www. latimes.com/features/home/ la-lh-chayote-planting-20120806,0,5571772.story  …   Small-garden ideas from Thomas Rainer | Garden Rant http:// gardenrant.com/2012/08/thomas -rainer-small-garden-ideas.html  …  ...

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How To Manage a Compost Pile Using Temperature

...1;all you do is take the temperature once a day with a compost thermometer and write down the result on a calendar. The graph above is the result that I got from a pile made out of horse bedding, chicken manure from our hens, plant materials, straw and brew waste from a local brewery. The red area on the chart is the thermophilic temperature range (135° -160° Fahrenheit). The dip you see at day 15 is the one time I turned the pile so that I could...

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How To Design a Garden Step IV: Clues to Care

...a long ways to keeping the neighbors happy. Dr. Susan J. Mulley, a landscape architecture professor at Cal Poly Pomona is doing some interesting research on how people react to alternative forms of landscaping such as native plants and urban vegetable gardens. She’s doing opinion polls using Photoshopped mock-ups of residential, academic and commercial landscapes with food crops, native plantings and more conventional landscaping. The conc...

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Genetically Modified Oranges Coming to a Store Near You

...ral system with far less international and interstate shipment of goods is less vulnerable. It’s too late to deal with HLB this way, but perhaps we can head off other catastrophes. In the end, more of us will have to to plant our own vegetable gardens and run small farms. A last, ironic tidbit in that Reuter’s story–for a disease whose spread was facilitated by globalization–some of the labor intensive research necessary t...

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Los Angeles Bread Bakers Blog

Just a short time after planting–a field of wheat sprouts in Los Angeles County. The Los Angeles Bread Bakers, that I helped co-found along with Mark Stambler and Teresa Sitz, now has a blog: losangelesbreadbakers.blogspot.com. A big thanks to Saul Alpert-Abrams for putting it together and to Paul Morgan for blogging! Paul has been writing about the wheat we helped plant at Maggie’s Farm in Agoura Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles on t...

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Bike Winter

To our two wheeled brothers and sisters, Bike Winter is upon us! Two weeks of proof that you don’t need a Hummer to get around our ugly town. We want to draw your attention to one ride in particular that Homegrown Revolution will be participating in, the Tour de Crap. Join us on February 9th as we take a tour of the Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant. Learn where your business goes! Details on the Bike Winter website....

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The grape that ate the world

grapefail or grapewin? We’ve posted about our grape problems before. Pierce’s disease makes it hard to grow grapes in SoCal. We’ve been trying to get resistant varieties to grow on our patio arbor (aka The Masculinity Pavillion) with no success. Our most recent planting attempts are stunted and unhappy, meaning that once again we’re experiencing A Summer Without Shade. While our “resistant” varietie...

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The Cat Poop Portal: Litter Box Composting, Installment #1

...rdinary composting is that we’ll let this compost rest for two years before we spread it, to be sure the bad beasties die off. And in case they aren’t gone, we won’t spread the finished compost around edible plants. No, this is not orthodox practice. It is not considered “safe” to compost pet waste–all the standard advice tells you not to– but we’re doing it anyway, because we trust time and bacteri...

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Vegetable Garden Update: Too Much Salad

...8221; carries this stuff–you gotta grow it yourself. I got these seeds from the good folks at Winnetka Farms who run an heirloom seed store. I, pretty much, just call up Craig at Winnetka Farms and ask him what I should plant. I grow salad greens by sowing the seeds densely in blocks and thinning as we eat. The dandelion greens and chard are started in flats and transplanted as John Jeavons recommends in his book How to Grow More Vegetable...

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