130 Farm Unfixed with Jessica Rath

In her work artist Jessica Rath examines, as she puts it, “how human containment of the land effects non-human species from the propagation of agricultural plants to the sensoria of bees.” She is on the faculty of the Art Center College of Design and her previous projects include works about apple breeding, co-evolutionary communication between flowering plants and their pollinators and a long term project called Farm Unfixed that we spend most of this conversation discussing. During the podcast Jessica mentions,

You can look at Jessica’s work on her website at jessicarath.com. Sign up for her newsletter to find out about upcoming projects.

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. Closing theme music by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.

129 The Garden Is the Teacher: a Conversation With EagleSong


Our guest on this episode of the podcast is EagleSong Gardener. From her bio: EagleSong is human being, green witch, herbalist and crofter dedicated to deep transformation on an individual and planetary scale. She tends the Spiral Garden at the Pacific Wise Woman Center in Monroe, WA and inspires the Pacific Women’s Herbal Conference on Vashon Island, each fall. During the podcast we discuss:

You can find EagleSong’s website and blog at www.eaglesong-gardener.com.

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. Closing theme music by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable version of this podcast is here.

Baker Creek Invites and Un-invites Cliven Bundy to Speak

A deleted Facebook announcement for Bundy’s appearance.

This week the sedate world of edible gardening saw an unusual burst of controversy not related to either double digging or the use of Miracle Grow. Baker Creek Seeds found themselves at the center of a social medial firestorm after inviting Cliven Bundy to speak at their Spring Planting Festival on May 5th and 6th at their headquarters in Mansfield, Missouri. Bundy is the patriarch of a family at the center of a grazing dispute that led to an armed occupation and standoff with federal law enforcement at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon in 2014. Bundy’s talk was to be about a crookneck variety of watermelon that he grows.

Reaction on social media to the announcement was swift and pointed to Bundy’s politics as well as racist statements in which Bundy suggested that African-Americans would be better off as slaves. A hashtag got started: #BoycottBakerCreek.

After initially defending the invitation, Baker Creek decided to cancel the talk. In a statement on Facebook Baker Creek said, “Although we had seen a few news clippings over the years, we were naively unaware of the controversies surrounding him.” Their equivocal apology concludes with, “We do believe in rights of free speech and letting people be heard, even if we disagree with their ideals. But at this time, due to security and other issues raised by many of you, all parties think it would be better to research the situation, read the information that has been sent to us by customers.[sic]”

Given that an interview of Bundy, posted on Baker Creek’s blog and posted to YouTube, took place at the Nevada Southern Detention Center and noted a “nationally publicized dispute,” it’s hard to believe that they would be unaware of the events that led to his detention (he was released in late 2017 after the judge declared a mistrial in his case). Promoting him as a “living legend of the Old West” and a “lands rights activist” implies a less than neutral endorsement of Bundy’s beliefs and tactics, in my opinion. One is also left to wonder if their apology suggests that they would have gone through with the talk if they had the budget to keep threatened protestors at a distance.

It’s not the first time I’ve witnessed some haphazard curatorial decisions on a Baker Creek event roster. Speakers at their Santa Rosa Heirloom festival, in past years, included many well known experts in gardening and farming but also pseudoscientists such as “Food Babe” Vani Deva Hari and Joseph Mercola. This week’s Bundy kerfuffle leaves me scratching my head about Baker Creek’s ideological commitments and discernment.

For an in-depth dive into the story of the Bundy Family listen to the six part Oregon Public Broadcasting podcast Bundyville.

Lead in Backyard Eggs: Don’t Freak Out But Don’t Ignore the Issue

Image: UC Cooperative Extension.

Back in 2018 UC Davis began a study of heavy metal contamination of eggs from backyard chicken flocks. The study analyzed eggs from 344 California residences using Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry to look for arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury and and nickel.

The overall results for the study show that the main metal to worry about is lead, though some of the samples showed elevated levels of mercury and cadmium that could be a concern. The maximum lead level found was 27.97 ug/egg which is well over the maximum recommended exposure level of 3 ug for children and 12.5 ug for adults. That said, the average was 1.39 ug of lead.

I was eager to participate in this study since we found elevated lead levels in our soil when we did a series of soil tests back in 2011. Thankfully our egg results came in at 1.02 ug, just under the average level in the study. You’d have to eat a lot of eggs as an adult to go beyond the Federal Drug Administration’s maximum recommended lead intake level, though you could bump up against it if a child ate more than three eggs a day.

I’d suggest that if you live in an older urban location, next to a gas station or other industrial site or a recently burned area you may want to get your eggs tested. Odds are that your backyard eggs are safe to eat but, as the study showed, some of the lead results were well over safe levels.

Here’s what UC Cooperative Extension suggests if you have a lead issue,

Once potentially contaminated areas are identified, it is your job to prevent your chickens from coming in contact with those areas! You may choose to completely remove access to these areas or add clean cover material (soil, mulch, etc.) to reduce contact with or ingestion of contaminated soil. If you choose to use cover material, remember to inspect the cover regularly and add/maintain material as needed.

To further prevent ingestion of contaminated soil, provide chickens’ regular feed in feeders, and avoid scattering feed, including scratch grains and food scraps, on bare ground. Also, avoid feeding chickens unwashed garden scraps from these areas.

Consider providing a calcium supplement, which may help to reduce the amount of lead that gets into chickens’ eggs.

While we got a free test out of the study (thank you UC Davis!), you can have your eggs tested for a fee by contacting the California Animal Health and Food Safety (CAHFS) laboratory (phone: 530-752-8700).

Garden Update Part II: The Good the Bad and a Lot of Ugly

My last garden update post might have left the mistaken impression that one can just step out the back door of our humble bungalow into some kind of hipster Versailles. To correct this impression, I took a few more photos over the weekend to show the work that still needs to be done.

The good news is that we had a generous amount of rain as you can see from the photo above. It’s a reminder that Los Angeles has a Mediterranean climate and is not a desert, at least not yet. No need for those sparse cactus and gravel landscapes that the house flippers seem to love.

The bad side of the photo above is that, believe it or not, there’s a path somewhere under all that vegetation. A close look will also reveal a whole lot of baby fennel that, unless something called “weeding” is done, will take over the yard by summer. A greater threat is the asparagus fern (Asparagus aethiopicus) on the right, a vile and invasive plant that is proof of the fallen nature of this vale of tears. The plant in the center is from Annie’s annuals and I can’t remember the name of it. Kelly knows what it’s called but she’s visiting family this week. You get bragging rights if you call it out in the comments.

Part of the reason for the lushness of the yard is that we divert the rainwater from the roof to a pipe that runs 20 feet away from the house and into the center of the yard. We get a lot of rain concentrated in February and March and it’s a whole lot easier to store it in the earth than to try to capture it in a tiny barrel.

Said pipe awkwardly crosses a path, however, something our landscape professional Laramee Haynes will address.

The pipe terminates in a slightly sunken area that was the quarry for our adobe oven. This is where the rain garden will go. Right now it’s a nasturtium farm. Nasturtium is what happens in our yard if you don’t do something else. We also have a generous amount of nettles this year, never a bad thing. And the artichoke in the background loves the rain too.

This shot shows the main problem with the yard. Marie Kondo would not be happy with the garden clutter. Does this pile of junk “spark joy?” Nope.

Some Marie Kondoing needs to happen in this area, on top of some weed wacking and the deployment of my electric leaf blower. There I said it, I have a leaf blower. Yes, a leaf blower is the gardening equivalent of vaping but it does make cleaning up faster. Don’t worry, I leave the leaves in place to enrich the soil. The leaf blower just helps me clear the hardscaping. There’s actually a nice brick patio under the weeds and clutter here.

Ugh, more junk.

Here’s the nice new patio the Haynes landscaping folks built. The adobe oven is under a blue tarp. Blue tarps are the architectural equivalent of a comb over. The oven needs a little roof which, to extend the metaphor would be the architectural equivalent of a decent wig, if such a thing exists. And, man, do we need some outdoor furniture. Thankfully I came up with an idea for some outdoor furniture that I’ll discuss down the road once I run it past the boss.

The chicken coop ain’t looking so good. One of the reasons I’m not going to replace our current flock is so that I’ll have a pretext for tearing down this eyesore. No more ugly. I may re-purpose the funny sign that I “borrowed” from a auto junkyard in Houston. It’s a joke, by the way. Some visitors to our yard seem to think that I actually electrified the coop with 7,000 volts.

Thankfully, most of the work that needs to be done in our backyard is a matter of tidying up and defining some paths. I suspect our landscapers will be able to do most of it in a day or two and I’ll be able to post some after photos. But then they’ll need to tackle the disastrous front yard which will be the subject of another exposé.