020 Emily Green on the Mow and Blow Landscape Paradigm

...dependent. She blogs at Chance of Rain. Writing in the Los Angeles Times in 2011 Emily says, What would you do if a neighbor came to you and asked, “For 20 minutes every week, may I turn on your vacuum cleaner, smoke detector and garbage disposal and run them all at once?” Holding that thought, consider if the neighbor added, “Ah, may I also blow noxious dust your way for those same 20 minutes?” Imagine that not just one neighbor on the street ask...

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Fruit Tree Update: Flavor Delight Aprium

...r house in 1998.* Thankfully though, we got our act together eventually. In 2011, we put in a call local fruit tree expert Steve Hovfendahl for some suggestions. His advice was based on what would grow in our warm climate as well as fruit tasting results conducted by the Dave Wilson nursery. It’s been over two years since we planted the trees Hovfendahl suggested and they are just beginning to bear fruit. We ordered one too many trees and had to s...

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Creating a Perpetual Garden Journal

...just commit to the lines. I would recommend finding a journal with enough pages to devote a spread of two pages to each week. I have only one page per week and I think the results will be a little cramped. Are my drawings great? Nope. But I’ve decided to embrace my slightly wonky draftsmanship and just roll with it. It’s the act of seeing, after all, that’s more important. Lara Call Gastinger’s Instagram is a great introduction to the perpetual j...

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Are Miniature Books the New Smartphone?

...y. Loeb books are handsome, small and sturdy hardbacks with English on one page and Latin or Greek on the opposite page. Marcellinus is an entertaining Roman historian whose extant books chronicle the tumultuous years around the time of Constantine. So far it’s even more lurid than the updates on our current presidential election I get when I glace at the iPhone. Yes, you can read books on a smartphone, but I still think that the medium of a paper...

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Essential System #9 – Hydration

...tructions for purifying water with iodine or chlorine can be found on this page. Filters, however, do not kill viruses which include hepatitis A., Norwalk virus, and rotavirus and are present when water becomes contaminated by the feces of affected individuals. In other words, bad dookie in the water. To kill viruses you need to use either iodine, bleach or expensive filters which also use iodine or electrostatic charges. Boiling water for at leas...

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