The Hugelkultur Question

...ecided to post the hugelkultur question to the Garden Professor’s Facebook page. One of those horticulture professors, Linda Chalker-Scott is someone who I seek out when writing a magazine article. A civil discussion ensued on that Facebook page, proving that Facebook is good for something other than angry political screeds and cat videos. A summary of some of the points made: There is no peer reviewed research on hugelkultur. The concept seems to...

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Breaking News

...foreground of the picture above–laid her first egg–that is, our very first homestead egg. Go Stewpot! Of course this event would happen when Mr. Homestead is out of town & in possession of the camera. The lay site was a difficult to access cranny behind the coop. It may not have been photograph-able anyway, but I will report that the egg was deposited quite attractively in a shallow bowl of yellow and brown leaves. I got it while it was still warm...

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Getting Out

...n prepare called Getting Out, Your Guide to Leaving America. We completely understand the sentiment of wanting to get the hell out of this proto-fascist banana republic we live in and we endorse this book for those who don’t want to hunker down and do the homestead thing. SurviveLA even has a former colleague in Chanai India who got out of the US several years ago and now has an interesting job and his own ultra low-cost homestead. Despite the all...

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Saturday Tweets: Architectural Screw-Ups, Road Diets and Pet Dragons

A page of architectural screw-ups https://t.co/o31OCzt5h8 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) January 20, 2018 Go ahead tell me again why road diets are so bad for LA https://t.co/ZlBMWkX9nA pic.twitter.com/siVYC8yZH1 — Alissa Walker (@awalkerinLA) January 15, 2018 New #DIY video on how to make maple syrup with file cabinet evaproator #maplesyrup https://t.co/MJfr3wv5jM — Eric Rochow (@GardenForkTV) January 15, 2018 Delightful site curates New York Times...

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Tolkien and Trees

...65 To the Houghton Mifflin Co. , 1955 : I am (obviously) much in love with plants and above all trees, and always have been; and I find human maltreatment of them as hard to bear as some find ill-treatment of animals. #83 From a letter to Christopher Tolkien, 6 October 1944: It is not the not-man (e.g. weather) nor man, (even at a bad level), but the man-made that is ultimately daunting and insupportable. If a ragnarök would bum all the slums and...

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