Satan’s Easter Basket is Filled with Plastic Easter Grass

...round this morning, especially because Echo Park surrounds a lovely little urban lake full of birds. Read on to find out why. 4 Excellent Reasons to Avoid Plastic Easter Grass and use all of your influence to make sure other people avoid it, too: Domestic cats and dogs eat Easter grass and it can cause intestinal obstruction. Cats are particularly attracted to its stringy texture, but dogs might also gobble it up when they raid a kid’s Easter stas...

Read…

Saturday Tweets: Compacted Soil, Bikes and Mirrored Headboards

New research on how to treat compacted urban #soil to help trees thrive https://t.co/tzhvk3pisZ @vtnews pic.twitter.com/x3QwSpKEgS — Thomas Rainer (@ThomasRainerDC) February 24, 2016 The Free Rider myth flipped: Are cyclists actually subsidising car drivers? https://t.co/qQaRd5eubE via @MomentumMag pic.twitter.com/fehEMXKh7B — Darren Davis (@DarrenDavis10) March 25, 2016 11-year-old's LA Times op-ed "My vision of a livable city is one where k...

Read…

Root Simple: 2015 in Review

...p. I’m not optimistic about this but I hope to be proved wrong. Honesty in Urban Homesteading We don’t do nearly enough blogging about the many hair brained notions and failed projects that transpire here at the Root Simple Compound and Labs. We did mange to chronicle a few of our shortcomings, such as our lack of a clothes line (Busted: Drying Racks, Clothes Lines and Cheese Puffs), the train wreck that was our summer garden (Our Disasterous Summ...

Read…

The Great Beekeeping Debate

...untry is a different question than how to keep a few hives in a biodiverse urban area. To be fair, the first question is essential since it’s how we currently keep everyone fed. But much of the advice given to large scale beekeepers does not always apply to small scale backyard beekeepers. The hubris can go both ways. Those of us on the natural beekeeping side can also think we understand the whole better than we do. We can fall into the same redu...

Read…

Saturday Tweets: DIY Kayaks, Maps and Dragon Anatomy

...ican #Architecture Profession for your foresight and contributions to the #urban form in the USA! pic.twitter.com/sGucLhJX4p — Erik Griswold (@erik_griswold) July 30, 2016 Dragon anatomy for beginners. Yes, you did read that correctly.https://t.co/F06Qanht14 pic.twitter.com/FJzwhiQzJK — Medieval Manuscripts (@BLMedieval) July 30, 2016 Good Night Heidelberg, Cod. Pal. Germ. 466 pic.twitter.com/ldauWNgffo — Damien Kempf (@DamienKempf) July 30, 2016...

Read…