Our new front yard, part 2: theory

...ch makes working on it real fun.) That might be one reason why the idea of making it into an orchard had so much appeal. When garden design books bother to address hillside gardens, they always feature much bigger hills than ours, and these hills feature expensive hardscaping, like artfully arranged imported boulders, fancy staircases which sweep along the contour of the hill, or dazzling water features. Nobody designs in 15 foot wide spaces stuff...

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Maintaining a Worm Bin

...f scraps here and there, but mostly the texture of the contents looks like soil or coffee grounds. Or maybe fudge, if it’s more wet and compact. Fudge is a less than ideal environment for worms. In the picture at the top you’ll see my most recent working side. There’s a lot going on in there still, some big food pockets, wood shavings everywhere, but the texture is becoming too black and dense overall. Compost worms like a little air, a little “wi...

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Satan’s Easter Basket is Filled with Plastic Easter Grass

...al grass. I think animals may have gotten into the garbage cans overnight, making it all worse, but clearly a lot of that trash, especially the Easter grass and Silly String, was probably on the ground when the picnickers left. One lonely, overburdened city maintenance guy was already raking up the garbage, but it was a Sisyphean task, and I doubt he’ll be so fine tuned as to focus on the Easter grass, but the Easter grass may be the most problema...

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Saturday Tweets: Ascension K-Mart Choppers

.../t.co/pD7DgDfXAw — Martha Lauren (@NQRW) May 4, 2019 When Brussels started making its main boulevards car-free, people complained the plan was just displacing pollution to areas with cars. So city leaders pedestrianized even more major streets. https://t.co/v6HMuX0zt5 — Alissa Walker (@awalkerinLA) May 4, 2019 pic.twitter.com/H5Ba4nXBNG — Cursed Architecture (@CursedArchitect) May 3, 2019 How do machine metaphors shape our understanding of reality...

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A Sasquatch in the Garden?

...al note of all the objects I’ve dug up while gardening over the years. The soil surrounding our house has mostly thrown up broken milk bottles from the days of the milkman. I’ve also found a lot of what I think are perfume bottles. Mostly though my shovel hits chunks of long buried concrete. Then I curse. But this week, while we’ve been working on version 5.3 of our difficult to garden steep front slope, I uncovered the strangest object I’ve ever...

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