Bare Root Fruit Tree Season is Here!

Yet another Internet “un-boxing.” This time fruit trees. Our bare root fruit tree order just arrived from Bay Laurel Nursery. We ordered: Tropic Snow Peach on Nemaguard rootstock Panamint Nectarine on Citation rootstock CoffeeCake (Nishimura Wase) Persimmon Saijo Persimmon (pollinator for CoffeeCake) Flavor Finale Pluot on Myrobalan 29C rootstock Santa Rosa Plum on Citation rootstock (pollinator for the Flavor Finale Pluot...

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The Survivor

We interrupt this dull series of articles about rainwater harvesting for important breaking news at our urban homestead–the development of the SurviveLA signature cocktail–the Survivor. For a long time we’ve cursed the previous owners of our compound for their useless, inedible landscaping. One of the plants they left us that we’ve lived with for all these years is an ornamental pomegranate tree (Punica granatum) that, wh...

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How to Make a Mosaic Stepping Stone

...the little tile pieces against the sticky side of the contact paper–face down, or “good side” down.  The sticky paper holds them in place. When you’re finished sticking all the tiles down, it’s time to mix up some concrete. I used one part Portland cement to three parts builder’s sand. I poured my concrete into the mold and used some chicken wire as reinforcement. I just cut the wire into a rough square that...

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Film Industry Blocks Bike Lanes, City of LA Doesn’t Care

Film industry trucks block bike lanes all the time here in Los Angeles, particularly along busy and fast moving Sunset Boulevard. Shutting down a bike lane on Sunset forces cyclists to merge into traffic that is sometimes going as fast as 50 miles an hour. It’s a tragedy waiting to happen. Not much room between a fast moving bus and a film industry truck. As to the legality of blocking a bike lane I don’t have a good answe...

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Water Conservation

“the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life — we went soft, we lost our edge.”-Frank Herbert Dune SurviveLA was planning on discussing rainwater collection today, but we realized that we would be getting ahead of ourselves without first discussing what we call BOC, or boring old conservation. So before delving into greywater and rainwater harvesting it’s time to assess where yo...

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Saturday Linkages: Can Gardens, BOLs and Attack Geese

...p:// korduroy.tv/shows/surf-suf ficient/diy-surfboard-bike-rack  … 80ft Tube Made From VHS Tape http://www. dudecraft.com/2012/08/80ft-t ube-made-from-vhs-tape.html  … Prepping Developing Raw Land into a Homestead or BOL Over Time | The Survival Podcast http:// bit.ly/NoacJJ Beekeeping Bees in a Paris park: http://www. backwardsbeekeepers.com/2012/08/viewer -mail-bees-in-paris-park.html  … Yow! Apple granted patent for location-based camera pho...

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Build Your Own Furniture

We live in a 4 by 8 world. This is why we can’t get all that excited about things like geodesic domes, straw bale and rammed earth houses. All of these innovative architectural ideas may have great potential, but when it comes time to buy supplies at the lumber yard, the overly creative builder will soon realize the difficulty of utopian designs in a world of 4 by 8 sheets of plywood and drywall. That geodesic shape is hip, but what do you...

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All Haste Is of the Devil: Carl Jung as Homesteader

...y no means increase the contentment or happiness of people on the whole. Mostly, they are deceptive sweetenings of existence, like speedier communications which unpleasantly accelerate the tempo of life and leave us with less time than ever before. Omnis festinatio ex parte diaboli est—all haste is of the devil, as the old masters used to say. Text from Jung’s highly engaging autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. These are JungR...

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How to Keep Squirrels and Birds From Eating Your Fruit

Photo by Noel Ramos. Got a tip from Noel Ramos a.k.a. Florida Green Man on how to deal with those pesky squirrels and birds in your fruit orchard. Noel says: I use those clear plastic fruit containers that are used for packing strawberries and grapes. I personally don’t buy fruit in these containers but I asked some neighbors and friends to save them for me and in a short time amassed a large collection. They snap shut over most fruit like...

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