Planting a Mini-Orchard

...e we cut down (even though God Hates Figs!). The advantage with these four trees is that they can survive, once established, should we find ourselves unable to use any water due to the aforementioned bad-ass draught scenarios. Our house sits on a small hill, with the front yard sloping down towards the street. We placed the trees at the top of the slope and made mulch basins like the one illustrated above. The outlet chamber consists of a upside d...

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I See Men as Trees Walking

...Above, the image of a “Vegetable Caterpillar”, an unlucky hybrid between vegetable and insect, from an essay by Lily Pepper on the implications of animal/vegetable hybrids brought about by advances in genetic manipulation. Read this excellent essay in the current issue of Steps Magazine here....

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DIY Christmas Trees

A while ago Erik posted a link to an Instructable on how to make chairs out of scrapwood. William, author of that project, just let us know that he’s done a holiday Intructable on how to make a cute and quick modernist “flat pack” Christmas tree. This sent me into an internet rabbit hole, wherein I procrastinated for a long time by reading about homemade Christmas-tree-like-structures. Two favorites: 1) The Mountain Dew Christmas tree. On one han...

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Home Orchards for Year Round Food Resiliency

...o toast. Growing fruit takes knowledge and effort. Thankfully, we have a great resource in UC Davis’ guide to backyard orchards. My advice: talk to avid gardeners in your area to learn what grows best. Pay attention to irrigation and pruning. Take out under-performing trees. Buy bare root trees to save money. If you don’t have a yard perhaps a school, business or faith institution in your community could be convinced to plant a small orchard. One...

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Two Podcasts You’ve Got to Hear: Thinking Trees and Rewilding

The Oostvaardersplassen, an attempt to rewild a very unwild place in the Netherlands. In case you can’t get enough of our podcasts, let me suggest two other podcast episodes that will definitely be of interest to Root Simple readers and listeners: WNYC’s Radiolab released an episode, From Tree to Shining Tree which features the mind-bending research of Suzanne Simard. Her work shows that the root systems of forests form a sort of neural network,...

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