Spam Poetry Sunday

In lieu of our usual picture Sunday, we offer instead a beautiful word picture from our friends the spammers. Our software blocks thousands of these every day, but some get through and we have to hand prune our comment sections: We wish to thannk you yett agai ffor the gorgeous ideas you offered Janet when preparing her own post-graduate research and, most importantly, pertaining to providing masny of the ideas in a blog post. If we had been awar...

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Front Yard Update: Welcome to Crazy Town

...n ongoing experiment. The golden yarrow is the small yellow flower in this picture. Surprise number one is Golden Yarrow (Eriophyllum confertiflorum) which is not a true yarrow at all. This was supposed to be a relatively small plant, maybe one foot high by two feet wide. I planted 3, and they’ve taken over the left side of the slope. Obviously, they like sunny hillsides! But you know, that side of the slope gets some shade, too, and the shade pat...

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Breaking Broodiness in Chickens

This picture is what happens when I forget to take a picture of our broody hens. This past week three of our four hens decided to all get broody at once. And since we have only one nesting box they all crammed into the box as tight as passengers in economy class in what passes for air travel these days. Since it’s August and hot and humid, I began to worry that they would overheat. Then I remembered a trick passed along by a UC David avian veteri...

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Radish Surprise

...it all day, every day. It has become one of the queens of the garden. The picture below is horrible. The radish plant really is quite pretty, the equal of any ornamental flowering shrub–but as bad is the picture is, it gives you some scale. See the bales of our straw bale garden behind it? I think it must be pulling water from there, which accounts for its size and longevity. It’s gone a little past its prime now– a couple of weeks ago the blooms...

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Daikon Radish!

...e Homegrown Evolution compound this winter though, as you can see from the picture above, the artichokes and rosemary in the background are thriving as they always do. Here in Los Angeles, winter is usually the best season for growing things, as perverse as that may sound to folks in the rest of the US. But for us, some combination of bad timing (not getting stuff in early enough), depleted soil and cold temperatures have contributed to a less tha...

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