Saturday Linkages: Mobile Pods, Soil Erosion and Getting Doored by a Porta-Potty

June 14, 2014

...come Water-Sustainable http://www.kcet.org/news/redefine/rewild/commentary/report-offers-a-way-for-california-to-become-water-sustainable.html … Man on bike strikes porta-potty door; two hurt: http://bit.ly/1pisQdq Could a medicine used to treat gout also save our citrus? http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/could-a-medicine-used-to-treat-gout-also-save-our-citrus … For these links and more, follow Root Simple on Twitter:...

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Is Purslane the New Kale?

Mr. Homegrown

June 27, 2014

Food, Foraging, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

29 Comments

...le fame. We planted some this year in our summer vegetable garden and I’ve used it in a lot of salads this week. Purslane is a common weed in North America. We’d love to be able to forage it in the neighborhood but, for some reason, it only tends to appear in unappetizing locations: usually the gutter (I think it needs a bit more water than what falls naturally from the sky here). You can eat the whole plant: stems and leaves. It has a salty and s...

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Root Simple’s New CritterCam

Mr. Homegrown

August 18, 2014

Animals

8 Comments

.... I’ll share the results on the blog over the next year. The first night I used the camera I pointed it at the grape arbor where I know rats visit. The resulting images, that I strung together into the video above, show at least two rats who set off the camera around 30 times throughout the night between 8:30 PM and 5:30 AM. This is the first year that we’ve got a significant crop off of either of our two grapevines. I think I could have prevented...

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How to Make a Bee Skep

Mr. Homegrown

May 10, 2013

Animals, Bees

9 Comments

...ost on how you can build your own. Looks like a fun project. How skeps are used The following series of videos show how skeps are used. Part 6 documents the steps leading up to the honey harvest. It’s a labor intensive process. To get at the honeycomb, skeps are “bounced” over an empty skep to remove the bees. These bees are then combined with weaker hives and overwintered. It’s easy to see, from the hard work and level of skill required, why the...

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How to Size a Breakfast Nook Table

Mr. Homegrown

April 18, 2018

Design

2 Comments

...side. Having set up a new wood shop I set out to make a new table top and used a base that I found in an alley. Rather than that strange hinged mechanism I just used plastic sliders on the bottom of the table to make it easy to move the table back and forth. I chose hard maple and included breadboard ends for a traditional look. Flattening the table top was an excuse to learn how to use hand planes, the bicycle of tools in that they are simple, e...

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