Whole Grain Baking Class With Craig Ponsford

...geles November 19 and 20th. Registration is on the LA Bread Baker’s meetup page. Here’s more info on the class: Join award-winning baker Craig Ponsford in a six-hour hands-on exploration of baking with whole grain flour made from California wheat. Craig’s demonstrations will feature four of the following: English Muffins, Cinnamon Morning Buns, Vegetable Croissants, Pretzels, and Challah, among others. This class will repeat on the 20th. Craig Pon...

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Nomadic Furniture

...shelves, lamps made from milk jugs, hexagonal dining sets as well as a two page hymn to the waterbed (ok, not sure about that thoughtstyling). The subtitle of the book sums it up, “how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds, inflates, knocks down, stacks, or is disposable and can be recycled.” You can see more of their work thanks to a recent retrospective of their work in Vienna. My favorite project in the book is the series o...

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Vegetable Garden Note Taking

A page from Thomas Jefferson’s garden diary. My worst mistake in the fifteen years we have been gardening here in Los Angeles has been my shoddy note taking. Even though we don’t have frosts to contend with, it still can be tricky to figure out when to plant vegetables. In a lecture I attnded at the National Heirloom Exoposition, Sonoma County gardening guru Wendy Krupnick had a simple suggestion for what to take notes on in your vegetable garden...

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How To Stop Powdery Mildew

...begin with some condensed advice from UC Davis’ Integrated Pest Management page: Preventative measures: grow resistant varieties find a sunnier spot for the vegetable garden back off on nitrogen Non-chemical approaches sprinkle plants with water mid morning–add soap for more effectiveness remove infected leaves promptly and dispose of them Fungicides: apply horticultural oil, neem oil or jojoba oil if the temperature is under 90° F. Do not apply a...

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How to Search for Science-Based Gardening Advice

Agricola’s search page. In the course of writing our books and this blog we’ve had to deal with a lot of thorny gardening questions such as the effectiveness of double digging, the toxicity of persimmons, compost tea, lasagna gardening and how to mulch to name just a few. While the internet is an amazing tool, the number of conflicting commercial interests, biases and crazy talk in the eGardening world can make it difficult to, as Mark Twain put...

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