Maggots!

...like dead leaves, sawdust and dry grass. Nitrogen materials include fruit, vegetable scraps and coffee grounds. The type of pile you construct depends upon the materials you have available to compost. Becky had lots of grass and leaves on a fairly large piece of property and the three pile system seemed the best to deal with a large amount of materials. We purchased our bin from the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation which hosts informative...

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Beans 101 (Return of Bean Friday!)

...k to that later.) Stock stuff ready for the pot Note I’m leaving the stock vegetables in big chunks because I intend to take them out later. I want my final product to be plain beans, not vegetable bean soup. Leaving the pieces big makes them easy to fish out at the end. The herbs are tied in a bundle with a piece of string for the same reason. The added benefit of this is that you don’t have to chop or peel to getting this together. Note I didn’t...

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Allium ursinum

...bears and wild boar. People can eat em’ too, with both the bulb and leaves making a tasty addition to a number of dishes (see a detailed report on Allium ursinum in the Plants for a Future website). Favoring semi-shade, Allium ursinum thrives in moist, acidic soil–forest conditions, in other words. In short, not appropriate for our climate in Los Angeles, but folks in the northwest might consider planting some. Like all members of the Allium speci...

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Best veggies to cook in a solar oven

...arrots, Brussels sprouts, zucchini) I’m a big fan of roasting and sauteing vegetables, and only like a few vegetables in their steamed form. Brussels sprouts and cauliflower before cooking The same after. Not a failure, exactly, but just …bland and wet, as steamed vegetables always taste to me. Note the color of the cauliflower. That is not oven-browning, but rather the slight discoloration that some vegetables pick up in the solar oven. The color...

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Bee Idle

...where we spent the day filming the first two instalments of our new online gardening course for eco-idlers. The principle is low effort, high productivity. Alys is a brilliant instructor and I wish I’d consulted her before I started growing vegetables and herbs. It would have saved me a lot of pain . . . We’re also organising an event with Alys for the Chelsea Fringe Festival. Her idea is that we create a Plant Cemetery at the Idler Academy, a res...

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