Make a Rain Barrel

...nnection is another reason I like Chenkin’s design. It’s important to keep rainwater away from your foundation especially when, like us, you live on a hill. The picture at top shows our barrel installed with the overflow pipe connected to a pipe that runs down to the street. Los Angeles’ building code required us to run our rainwater out to the street, where it helps wash pollution into the LA River and the ocean (see creekfreak for more on LA’s p...

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What does the loving landscape look like?

...shamelessly screen grabbed a still from a nice short video about Brad and rainwater harvesting, called Free Water, by Andrew Brown. I will share this video again later in this series, and we’ll talk more about Brad, too. In the meanwhile, though the images are not of best quality, look at the lushness of this landscape. This was all done at low cost with basic materials, working smart instead of working hard. This all grew out of nothing. Believe...

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Saturday Linkages: Gourds, Cats and Cider Bread

...EWS http://www.motherearthnews.com/homesteading-and-livestock/6-methods-of-harvesting-rainwater-ze0z1404zjhar.aspx … Are probiotics helping you? | Food Matters, Scientific American Blog Network http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/food-matters/2014/04/29/are-probiotics-helping-you/?WT.mc_id=SA_sharetool_Twitter … Photos, Videos: Up Close With The Kitties At NYC’s Cat Cafe http://gothamist.com/2014/04/23/nyc_cat_cafe_photos_video.php … Corro Kitty D...

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Polyculture

...w in the fall. So you see, the secret is in choosing plants with staggered harvesting times, so they don’t come in all at once, overwhelming you and competing with each other for space, and also in choosing plants that are not all from the same families, so they don’t compete for the same nutrients. The beans in the polyculture above help replenish the nitrogen in the soil that the other plants drain out. Very clever. With little effort compared t...

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