Make Mag

...gation system in your vegetable garden. Eric Muhs tells you how to collect rainwater to use for flushing your toilet (very clever!). Celine Rich-Darley tells you how to vermicompost in your apartment. Michael Perdriel explains how to make an off-grid laundry machine. Limor Fried and Phillip Torrone hook up a electricity monitor to a computer to twitter their energy usage. You’ll have to buy a copy or subscribe online to see all this wonderfullness...

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Decomposed Granite as Mulch: A very bad idea

...anite (DG) used as a mulch. Put some plastic landscape fabric down (blocks rainwater in our climate, fyi) and top that plastic with DG. They then punch some holes in the DG/plastic and pop in succulents and maybe a rosemary bush or two. By the time the yard becomes a sad, desertified tangle of unhappy succulents and crabgrass, the flippers are long gone. I’ve got a big issue with DG as mulch. In order for DG to look good, it’s got to be compacted...

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Self-Irrigating Gutter Update

...barrel. Unfortunately the lower gutter leaked around 50 gallons of stored rainwater down into the garage below (our house is on a hill and the garage is at street level). To prevent this problem in the future I put a manual irrigation timer on the barrel so that if there is a leak, I won’t lose all the water at once. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEeCgGAbvwk If I were to do this project again, I’d also use a refinement that Larry Hall just poste...

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Los Angeles Bread Bakers Blog

...o with planting wheat. We got no crop last year due to either birds or not harvesting the wheat soon enough. We’re hoping for better luck this year. Thanks largely to Mark Stambler, California has a cottage food law and Paul is also posting videos of a presentation that took place this weekend on how to get a cottage food permit in Los Angeles. And if you’re in Southern California and interested in learning about bread baking and meeting other bre...

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024 Water, Wilding our Gardens and Sewing

...to discuss a recent talk I gave to a bunch of Master Gardeners about water harvesting and encouraging wildness in our gardens. On the second part of the podcast Kelly discusses the process of learning how to sew. During the first part of the podcast Erik mentions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoJ0OHWl3b8 Jacques de Vaucanson’s 1739 mechanical pooping duck A University of California study, Hedgerows enhance beneficial insects on farms in Califor...

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