What Will Be the New Kale?

Our 2011 crop of spigarello. Since 2011, we’ve been saying that Spigarello is the new kale. Thanks to a tip from the folks at Winnetka Farms, we may need to wait for BroccoLeaf™ to have its fifteen minutes of fame as the new kale. The Salinas, California based Foxy Organic is, quite sensibly, marketing broccoli leaves. Broccoli leaves are indeed edible and tasty. Foxy has the recursive media to prove it, a Facebook photo of someone Instagramming...

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Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Dealing With the Crisis of Overconnection

...who among us actually feels better after an info-crack bender? Published in 2010, William Power’s Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age , is a reasonable, balanced and practical guide to navigating our hyper-connected age (and how ironic it is that the fast pace of technological change makes “BlackBerry” a quaint reference in 2013–the book, however is more relevant than it was in 2010). Powers does...

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How to Organize a Small Workshop

...to go a lot more smoothly. In the past few months I’ve decided to focus on making my tiny workshop both useful and pleasant. The challenge has been that our 1920s garage is tiny–sized for two Model-Ts–and must also accommodate our Honda Fit. At the risk of seeming like I’ve come down from the mountaintop with stone tablets, permit me to share a few things I’ve learned about tiny workshop design: Put everything on wheels. Get some locking wheels at...

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Moonshine

...preferably from a source that will lend itself to a pretty picture on the label — bottle it, and you’re in the vodka business.” As it turns out there is an art to good homemade moonshine — a far cry from the soulless mouthwash Archer-Daniels-Midlands turns out. Here’s some excerpts from an interview of ex-moonshiner John Bowman conducted by the Coal River Folklife Project from “Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia...

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Book Review: The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil

...P it is no steal, either. All forms of the book are available on this here page. The paperback version is (sorta)(sometimes) available at Amazon. A good, free way to get to know Geer’s thinking is to read the archive of his weekly blog, The Archdruid Report. Right now he’s doing something a little different, a series of fictional pieces to illustrate an idea, but you’ll find many of the concepts from The Blood of the Earth in his blog posts, espec...

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