Our New Open Floor Plan

...ared them a “death trap.” Then the good natured Will Wallus of the Weekend Homestead came on the podcast to gently defend open floor plans. Naturally, I’m spending this month making our house, gasp, more open. Let me explain. When I installed the floor in the living room in the aughts I discovered an opening that used to exist between our living room and what we use as our bedroom. Back in 1920 this house was a one bedroom with a kind of sitting r...

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118 Eric of Garden Fork on Old Houses, Queen Bees and Ramps

...ow Eric mentions: His live question and answer session Will of the Weekend Homestead New York City water tower video Raising queen bees Better Bee Pacific Ready Cut catalog New York Times article on the over harvesting of ramps Growing your own ramps Eric’s cornpone disaster If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to [email protected]. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTun...

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Build a Ghetto Solar Cooker

Using crap we had laying around the homestead, SurviveLA fashioned a solar cooker based on plans from Backwoods Home Magazine, the Dwell of the Ted Kaczynski set. We just substituted an old cooler for the cardboard boxes, and we finished it off by using one of Los Angeles’ ubiquitous abandoned car tires as a cradle to keep the cooker oriented towards the sun. It ain’t pretty but it works. In our first test we reached 160º inside the oven, but we...

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019 Garden Nerd Christy Wilhelmi

On the podcast this week we review different approaches to backyard vegetable gardening with “Gardenerd” Christy Wilhelmi of Gardenerd.com. Christy is also the author of Gardening for Geeks and has a podcast, The Gardenerds Tip of the Week. During the show we discuss: Biodynamics Biointensive/French Intensive Alan Chadwick’s Garden at UC Santa Cruz John Jeavons Double digging vs. no-till A documentary about Ruth Stout Breaking up soil with permac...

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