What laundry detergent should I use for greywater applications?

...h allows you to choose whether your wash water will go to the sewer or the garden. If you have one of these, you can do loads with bleach or what-have-you and send that water to the sewage treatment plant. Also, if you are washing diapers, this valve is an absolute necessity. All diaper wash water should go to the sewer. Soil is a great cleanser, but you don’t want to push your luck by depositing fecal matter around your garden. (Addendum here, to...

Read…

It Quacks Like a Duck

...of the line was an old comrade of ours, one of the proprietors of Petaluma Urban Homestead, who we know from Mr. Homegrown Revolution’s post grad school sojourn in the dull city of San Diego. In the ten years since we lost contact it turns out that our lives have taken similar paths, including the appreciation of Xtracycles and poultry. Except that the folks at Petaluma Urban Homestead have had the brilliance of exploring the world of ducks in add...

Read…

Why Urban Farm?

...r total up to four. Such are the cycles of life and death on the new urban homestead. Bryan Welch, who raises livestock and is also the publisher and editor of the always informative Mother Earth News, wrote an editorial in the February issue called “Why I Farm” in which he says, “There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as the liv...

Read…

Vegetable Garden Note Taking

A page from Thomas Jefferson’s garden diary. My worst mistake in the fifteen years we have been gardening here in Los Angeles has been my shoddy note taking. Even though we don’t have frosts to contend with, it still can be tricky to figure out when to plant vegetables. In a lecture I attnded at the National Heirloom Exoposition, Sonoma County gardening guru Wendy Krupnick had a simple suggestion for what to take notes on in your vegetable garden...

Read…

080 Lessons From the Theodore Payne 2016 Garden Tour

...t measures are shortsighted. A blog post we did on the 2016 Theodore Payne Garden tour. Pictures of the gardens on the Theodore Payne tour. The new Hahamongna Cooperative Nursery and Hahamongna Cooperative Nursery Facebook page. If you want 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 D...

Read…