Mistakes

Avoiding Hyperthermia

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Mistakes
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When spending a day baking pizzas at a public event in front of a 1000º F oven in the full Southern California sun remember to drink water and take breaks. Otherwise you will spend the next day in bed with a splitting headache, unable to eat, barely able to drink anything and at the mercy of two young cats.

The first time I pulled off a case of hyperthermia was after a long bike ride. I would not call it fun, nor would I like this to happen when in the backwoods on a long backpacking trip. It also prevents coherent blogging. I’ll be back tomorrow with a plethora of home ec tips . . .

Yet More Urban Homesteading Mistakes

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Mistakes
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My new excuse: I didn’t write it, the kitten did!

Three of my favorite Root Simple compound blunders happened this week.

Yesterday I announced a “Vermincomposting” class. I meant vermicomposting, of course, but I’d point out that it is good to remember that vermin are actually compostable, along with everything biological –including bloggers.

Earlier this week I meant to mention Native Americans  but, due to the lazy application of spell checking software this came out as “Naive Americans”.  Now, as I’m sure most readers of this blog would agree there actually is a class of Naive Americans. Maybe they’ll get around to opening some casinos. Oh, wait, Naive Americans go to casinos, they probably don’t operate them. This mistake reminds me of when the UCLA student newspaper, in a similar spell checking blunder, announced that the orchestra I was in would be playing Beethoven’s “Erotica Symphony”.

Lastly, I stained some cement pavers with iron sulfate and blogged about it. What I forgot to mention is that, the day before, I had accidentally reached for the bag of garden sulfur rather than iron sulfate and carefully brushed all 16 pavers with sulfur. The next day, noticing that nothing had happened, I realized that rather than staining the pavers I had, every so slightly, acidified them.

Time for those much delayed mindfulness exercises.

Urban Homesteading Mistakes: Landscape Fabric

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Mistakes
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Since you all seem to enjoy accounts of our many failures around the Root Simple compound, I thought I’d share what must be one of the worst mistakes I’ve made. It’s a error up in our great chandelier of failures along with buying a 91 year old house on a hill with a bad foundation.

Two words for you: landscape fabric–that plastic stuff sold in rolls at big box stores that allegedly blocks out weeds. Just after we bought our “crack” house I started constructing brick paths and decomposed granite walkways (another mistake we’ll blog about later). I thought it would be good idea to lay down landscape fabric to keep weeds from poking up. So why is landscape fabric a bad idea?

  1. It’s made of plastic.
  2. It rips.
  3. It just plain doesn’t work.

After a few years Bermuda grass will inevitably poke up through it and you’ll end up with what you can see in the photo above. To repeat: landscape fabric doesn’t work and is a waste of money.

My favorite alternative is a very thick (minimum 4-inch, but preferably more) layer of mulch. The added benefit with mulch is that you build soil over time. With landscape fabric you just add another piece of plastic to the landfill. I know some folks swear by cardboard, and in certain situations cardboard is probably OK, but I still prefer, when possible, just piling up the mulch. You get better water penetration with mulch and you don’t have the problem of bits of cardboard floating up to the surface.

So, my two cents: don’t add landscape fabric to your landscape.

Roundin’ up the Summer Urban Homesteading Disasters

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Bread, Food, Gardening, Mistakes, Vegetable Gardening
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Everyday loaf on the left, “charity” loaf on the right.

As we’ve noted in our books, part of the deal with this lifestyle is persevering through the inevitable disasters. Which means it’s time for a regular blog feature, the disaster roundup.  

Loafing Around
I agreed to bake a few baguettes for a charity function this evening. Problem #1 is that I can’t do baguettes in my small oven so I decided to do a shorter batard. Problem #2: for some reason, despite the fact that I measure my ingredients carefully with a digital scale, my dough turned out extra moist. Anticipating that the batards would stick to the peel as I put them in the oven, I decided to make round loaves in proofing baskets instead. Problem #3: the dough stuck to the proofing baskets and I ended up with edible, but aesthetically unappealing, loaves.

Moral: the more important the event the more likely disaster will strike.

Squashed
I’ve blogged about it before, but my attempt to grow winter squash (Marina di Chioggia) ended in disaster. The squash vines took up the majority of one of my few vegetable beds. I got only two squash, one that was consumed by racoons and the other that never fully matured before the vine crapped out. The immature squash was still edible, but bland.

Moral: winter squash just ain’t space efficient. Next year I’ll tuck it around other plants and trees rather than have it hog up space in my intensively planted veggie beds.

Luscious compost tomatoes.

Unintentional Gardening
I built a cold frame this spring so that I could get a head start on propagating my tomato seedlings. So guess which tomatoes did better: the ones I carefully propagated from seed and transplanted to richly amended vegetable beds, or the ones that sprouted randomly in compacted soil? You guessed it, the ones that grew on their own.

Moral: nature knows best when to start seeds and where to plant them than us homo sapiens. Maybe there is something to that permaculture thing . . . 

Our Hameau de la Reine
This summer the garden generally looked like hell. It thrives during our mild winter and spring then gets baked by the merciless Southern California sun at just about the time I start slacking off on my planting duties. Then the New York Times shows up and wants to do a photo spread about a month after stuff has quit blooming. This is when I usually come running in the house to complain to Mrs. Homegrown that the garden, “does not look like Versailles.”

Moral: take a class from someone who knows what they are doing, which is exactly what I’m up to starting next month. I vow that the garden will look like Marie Antoinette’s fake peasant village (the Hameau de la Reine) by next year. Then again, I say that every summer.

Garden Follies
Thinking the garden needed some ornamentation and not wanting to go the garden gnome route, I thought it would be a good idea to cast some Platonic solids in concrete–don’t ask me why–these things, “just come to me.” Mrs. Homegrown (using her Master of Fine Art superpowers) viewed this project with considerable skepticism. I successfully cast a tetrahedron and dodecahedron and stained them with iron sulfate and proudly placed them in the garden. They kinda worked but I have to agree with Mrs. Homegrown’s assessment that the scale is off–they look like the miniature Stonehenge in Spinal Tap.

Moral: trust the MFA in your household even if that MFA was in conceptual art. 

I could go on, but I’ve failed to document all of the disasters. Next, we’ll review what worked.

Winter Squash Disaster

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Gardening, Mistakes, Vegetable Gardening
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Those of you who follow this blog may recall last summer’s “squash baby” fiasco.  This year I planted a few Marina di Chioggia squash plants (technically a pumpkin) in one of my vegetable beds located in a more secure location. Instead of some homo sapien making off with my squash bounty, it looks like the neighborhood raccoons are having a gnocchi party somewhere. All I’ve got to show for three Chioggia plants is one small squash and the one pictured above.

Household animal tracking expert Mrs. Homegrown assures me that the nearby scat pile belongs to some raccoons.

My thoughts after another year under a squash curse: winter squash takes up too much room to devote precious vegetable bed space if, like me, you don’t have a lot of room. In previous years I’ve tucked it in unused corners of the yard and let it sprawl around. That’s what I’ll do next year.