Defining a Garden’s Purpose

...ush grass and maybe a pool. Some had vegetable gardens, a few chickens and goats. One enterprising person, somewhere between Bakersfield and Fresno, had a walled garden protecting lush marijuana plants. Other than the food gardeners (a small minority even in rural areas) there was little evidence that people ever went into their yards. It confirms what a UCLA anthropology team discovered when they placed cameras in 32 Los Angeles homes to see how...

Read…

Failed Experiment: Bermuda Buttercup or Sour Grass (Oxalis pes-caprae) as Dye

...od beams are always in the fantasy) and a fire in the grate. I’d watch the goats graze in the back yard while I cheerfully sip tea and knit something marvelous out of hand spun angora dyed with Oxalis. (As opposed to the reality of me stumbling around our money pit of house in my exceedingly unnatural and ancient polar fleece robe, desperately searching for a chair to sit on that doesn’t hold a cat, so I can watch the LAPD stalking around the unoc...

Read…

Saturday Linkages: Advent 3/4

...Scottish field is revealed at last How to watch the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter Make a Christmas shadowbox A podcast about Arthur Machen’s weird vision of art Watch Peter Follansbee carve a shallow relief pattern From Instagram to Insistent Goats: Another Life After Social Media Case Study Slavoj Žižek on the “screen new deal” My wife just confessed that for her entire childhood she thought Colonel Sanders’ bow tie was his whole body and now...

Read…

Looking for Urban Farmers

...he West covered, but we are still looking for some folks to profile who: 1. Live in one of the five boroughs of New York City and grow edibles and/or keep livestock. 2. Live in Detroit. We hear rumors of folks keeping herds of goats in Motown! 3. Have photos of your activities. Send us an email or leave a comment if you fit this description, or if you know of someone who does. All efforts, from the modest to the massive, are interesting to us. Tha...

Read…

A White House Vegetable Garden

...out that White House putting green? San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom broke ground this summer on a kitchen garden at city hall. Former mayor “slick” Willie Brown responded lamely, “You start having cows and chickens and goats and other things at Civic Center and I’m not sure it’s a good idea.” We’ll see if the next president, whoever he is, has the courage to plant veggies. I would love to see a goat interrupt a press conference....

Read…