What’s Buried in Your Backyard?

...e’s a handy page for dating bottles, scans of antique bottle catalogs, and page after page of bottle types. My unintended archaeological efforts have yielded no Spanish doubloons, viking graves or Anasazi ruins, but I have found lots of glassware, mostly broken milk bottles. I’ve also discovered what I think are cheap perfume bottles like the one above. If you know what this bottle contained please leave a comment. I suspect perfume, because this...

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080 Lessons From the Theodore Payne 2016 Garden Tour

...his episode of the podcast Kelly and I share the lessons we learned from a native garden tour put on by the Theodore Payne Foundation. During the podcast we discuss: a provocative white paper by two UC horticulturalists on why some residential drought 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 Coopera...

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Is Facebook Useful?

...book wants me to pay to promote posts. So instead I mostly use my personal page to promote stuff with limited success. But, worst of all, Facebook has distracted me from responding to comments on this blog and, instead, focusing on comment threads on Facebook. It may be futile, but it’s time to fight back. What I’ve resolved to do I’m not going to give up on Facebook just yet. I can’t really. As authors we have to use it to promote our work and ev...

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So Cal Alert: Polyphagus Shot Hole Borer

...treating our own trees to prevent further loss. We don’t want to lose our native trees to this. We don’t want to see this disease spread to the rest of the country. Polyphagus means “eats everything” and accordingly this beetle doesn’t seem all that picky about which trees it infests. The following list (via UC Riverside’s Eskalen Labs) of know hosts keeps growing: Known Suitable Reproductive Host Trees: 1. Box elder (Acer negundo)* 2. Big leaf m...

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