Take a Summer Viking Break

...ng or canning. This means it’s the perfect time for a Viking break. Back in 2010 Norweigian oil tycoon Sigurd Aase funded the construction of a brand new badass Viking longship, the Draken Harald Hårfagre. It’s the first Viking longship with its own website and gift store. The ship made it to the U.S., a reminder that Columbus wasn’t the first European to make that particular journey. Please kick back this weekend and take your own Viking break. I...

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The Future is Biomorphic

...lish. We can be especially thankful that the washing machine for people on page 179 of The Futurist never caught on. That said, the point is not always to predict the future. Architects, artists and designers push the envelope of consensus reality to spark a dialog. Architect Glen Small, one of the founders of SCI-Arc and the subject of an entertaining documentary, “My Father, the Genius” is one such provocateur whose thoughtstylings appear in The...

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Vegetable Gardening Workshops at the Natural History Museum

...Master Gardener Florence Nishida will be teaching a four part vegetable gardening class starting in March. Florence is a great teacher and there are a number of discounted spaces for people in zip codes surrounding the Natural History Museum. To sign up for the class go to the museum’s event page or call 213 763-3349. Act soon as it’s sure to sell out....

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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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Bees will love your Coyote Brush Hedge

...st at the Curbstone Valley Farm blog with lots of pictures. And here’s its page at Theodore Payne Foundation.) What I didn’t realize until our recent garden tour at the Natural History Museum, though, is that coyote brush makes a perfectly lovely hedge if it’s pruned up right. I’d never even thought about it. Most of the talk one hears about coyote brush is that it is sort of ho-hum in appearance but can be used to provide a background to the more...

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