Loquat Season

...ces, the parkway and people’s front yards making them prime candidates for urban foraging i.e. free food. The tree itself has a vaguely tropical appearance with waxy leaves that look like the sort of plastic foliage that used to grace dentist office lobbies back in the 1960s. In short it’s a real tree that looks fake with fruit that nobody seems to care about. The loquat tree invites considerable derision from east coast types. Blogmeister, extrem...

Read…

Councilmen Want to Astroturf Los Angeles and Turn it Into a Big Minigolf Course

...ings and get all the details wrong. Offering homeowners rebates to replace water hungry lawns is a good idea. Letting them use those rebates to put artificial turf in the parkway (see council motion 14-1197–introduced by councilpersons Blumenfield and O’Farrell) is not ecologically responsible. I disagree with a recent editorial in the Los Angeles Times, about giving rebates for artificial turf. It’s time for all of us in this dry Mediterranean cl...

Read…

A New and Improved Self Irrigating Pot System

...on the self irrigating pot (SIP) idea from Larry Hall of Minnesota. Rather than the two bucket system we’ve blogged about in the past (see a roundup of our SIP resources here), Hall uses one long rain gutter to supply water. He’s even got a clever double rain gutter system for growing strawberries that I’m tempted to try on our back patio. I spotted this video on Inside Urban Green always a good source for SIP related news....

Read…

Root Simple Visits Simparch’s Utah Compound

...posting toilet all housed in and around a repurposed WWII era Quonset hut. Water is biked in with specially adapted cargo bikes. Solar power pumps the water up to the tower where it is heated by the sun in a black drum. A solar panel array and batteries provide more than enough power, all day and all night, to run power tools and pump some tunes out on the powerful stereo system. The composting toilet features, what must be the most stunning view...

Read…

The Rag and Bone Man

...top, but in our dry climate here in LA the newspaper can actually prevent water from getting to the soil when it rains. We’re guessing that cotton might work better. 3. Household cleaning–this is obvious, but we do go through quite a few rags with our too few household cleanings, not to mention keeping the bicycle chains clean. 4. Paper making–one traditional method of paper making begins with fermenting cotton rags in water for a few weeks and t...

Read…