Help! I’ve got Paper Wasps

...beneficial insect. They eat beetle larvae, caterpillars, flies and nectar (making them pollinators). They are your friends in the garden. Right now I have a large colony living in the eave of our front porch right over my favorite chair. I’ve sat in that chair, with my head a mere four feet from my paper wasp buddies, for many hours and have never once been bothered. Biology Like honeybees, paper wasp are social insects. A mated queen lays eggs. B...

Read…

Maggots!

...e and creating room for additional materials. This aeration, combined with making sure to keep the pile moist produced a hot pile that kept the pests away and produced a high quality compost in a relatively short period of time – a few months. You can find instructions on how to build this type of compost system with used pallets on this web site. Other composting systems include the lazy person’s single plastic bin, which you can make out of a ga...

Read…

Can Whole Wheat Solve the Wheat Allergy Problem?

...flours. Ponsford, through his bakery and his classes for amateur bakers, is showing how tasty baked goods can be that are made from real whole wheat flour. But it’s tricky. High extraction whole wheat flours are a lot less uniform than white flours. And they suck up a lot of water when you use them for making bread. As the co-founder of the Los Angeles Bread Bakers I get the gluten sensitivity question a lot which is why I’m interested in hearing...

Read…

Buddy Burner

...se a tin can to hold the wax, and place the can in a saucepan of simmering water. Here we balance the can on a metal cookie cutter to keep it off the bottom of the saucepan. When the wax melts it will liberate bits of old wick. Fish these out first and tuck one or two or three between the cardboard layers to help with lighting the burner. Then pour the hot wax slowly into the can. It will fill up fast, then the wax level will sink as the cardboard...

Read…

085 Rishi Kumar: Abundance in Suburbia

...me the Growing Club, Sarvodaya Farms and the Growing Commons. May 28th greywater workshop. Many thanks to our Patreon subscribers for making this podcast and blog possible. 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 iTunes store and on Stitcher. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcas...

Read…