Are Pallets Safe to Reuse?

Now you know. Pallet parts have names. As a fan and proponent of reusing pallets in building projects, such as chicken coops and compost containers, I’m often asked if I think they are safe to use given that shippers and manufacturers fumigate them with pesticides. In the United States quarantine regulations require that pallets be treated with methyl bromide, a pesticide being phased out due to its adverse effects on the ozone la...

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New Health Food Trends at the Natural Products Food Expo West

This weekend I attended, for or the second year in a row, the Natural Products Expo West. At this massive convention, health food, natural supplement and cosmetic concerns pitch their products to retailers. And, again this year, I did a lot of intemperate sampling. For the sake of you, our dear readers, I ate every known power bar, sports beverage and processed soy/hemp/chia meat substitute so you won’t have to. It was the human equivalen...

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L’hamd markad – Preserved Salted Lemons

One of the big problems with citrus trees is that you get a whole lot of fruit all at one time. There are two ways to deal with this–share the harvest and/or preserve it. Homegrown Revolution has done both this week by mooching some lemons off of a friend’s tree and preserving them by making one of the essential ingredients of Moroccan food, L’hamd markad or preserved salted lemons. L’hamd markad is easy to make. HereR...

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Mud for the People! Building an Adobe Garden Wall

of the workshop, but pieced together what Kurt and Ben went over. One of the first steps is to determine the clay/sand content of your soil and to do that you do a jar test. When you mix some soil with water in a jar and let it sit, the clay settles on top, the silt below that, and the sand on bottom. You can measure the sample and determine percentages. At the workshop, held in the high desert town of Landers, CA the sand and clay were source...

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Greywater Workshops in Los Angeles

eywater, common types of systems, what products to use, and take a tour of several existing systems. We will also be creating a mock-up of a laundry-to-landscape greywater system with all the parts and tools needed to install it. Greywater System Maintenance: Advanced Workshop When: Friday October 14, 2011 – 1:00pm – 5:00pmWhere: LA Eco Village 117 Bimini Pl Los Angeles CA 90004Cost: Sliding scale $25-50Register hereSimple greywater s...

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More on our gardening disasters

We need to put the heart back into our garden. (Our Heart of Flax from way back in 2011) I thought I’d chime in on the subject of this year’s garden failures. Before I do, I’d like to thank you all for your kind advice and commiseration that you left on Erik’s post. First, I will agree that it really, truly has been a terrible year in the garden. Sometimes Erik gets a little melodramatic when it comes to the crop failure...

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Upcoming Classes: Edible Gardening and Vermicomposting

ting Arborist and Ecological Landscape Designer Darren Butler will be teaching two classes at the Root Simple compound starting next month. I’m currently taking a class from Darren right now at the Huntington and to say it’s amazing is an understatement. If you’re interested in taking either of these two classes email Darren at [email protected] Will be great to meet you all! Sign up soon as room is limited. GROW LA VICTORY GARD...

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Vermicomposting Class

If you live in or around LA, we encourage you to take this unique class that we’re hosting in the Silver Lake area. While it’s pretty easy to get basic information on starting a worm bin, it’s rare to be able to dig deeper, especially with a teacher as knowledgeable as Nancy Klehm. GET YOUR LOOP ON!A workshop on extreme vermicomposting for the city dweller. October 23, 20119am – 1pm $45 includes foraged snacks and tea $2...

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Moonshine

...ome legal fermentation experiments, but we can’t help but feel envious of some comrades of ours in France we visited a few years ago who recounted how their families used to ferment the excess fruit in the yard and take it to a licenced farmer to distill into the French version of moonshine, eau de vie. Here in the states it’s illegal to distill anything yourself but perfectly o.k., as a recent article in the Wall Street Journal point...

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Plum Lemon Tomato Power’s Heirloom Tomato

...sh gardening efforts, we somehow mislaid the names of the tomatoes we planted making our reporting efforts incomplete. We do know the name of the wondrous plum lemon tomato pictured above, well worth planting again next year. It’s a meaty, sweet, yellow tomato delicious both fresh and dried. Allegedly the seeds for this tomato originally came from an elderly seed seller in a bird market in eastern Moscow which the Russian police have since...

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