Search Results for: label/soil/page/20/2011/04/making-it

719 results

A Prickly Harvest

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Gardening
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...itional irrigation, needs no pesticides or fertilizers, tolerates terrible soil and produces useful food. It’s the perfect plant for the lives of folks too busy to tend fussy non-native plants. On the first anniversary of Homegrown Revolution, formerly known as SurviveLA, and a year after our last prickly pear fruit harvest season, we can now announce why, ironically, we’ve been too busy to keep up with our vegetable beds–next spring the good folk...

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The #700 Bookshelf

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Design
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...art. The #700 bookcase as seen in the 1909 catalog. My latest project was making a copy of Gustav Stickley’s #700 bookshelf, originally manufactured in 1904. The $30 price in the 1909 catalog would be around $900 today, not cheap considering that a good salary at that time was between $2,000 and $5,000 a year. In my cranky opinion the pre-WWI Arts and Crafts era marks the pinnacle of American design. It’s all downhill from this point. The #700 bo...

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More on How to Make Clear Ice

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Food
...amper English has done my work for me and carefully tested every clear ice making method and documented the results in painstaking detail on his entertaining and enlightening blog Alcademics. The winning method he suggests is the one I wrote about: freezing ice in a cooler (also known as “directional freezing”). The distilled water and hot water methods don’t work, according to English. I also learned that the enigmatic David Rees (author of a boo...

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Hoshigaki Season!

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Food, Food Preservation
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...of red and yellow leaves that comes elsewhere. In our house we believe in making hoshigaki in the fall with persimmons from either the market or, better yet, a neighbor or friend rather than chugging those pumpkin spice lattes. We’ve got a row of seven store bought persimmons hanging in a south facing window and plans to start more. Here’s what they look like when completed. If you’ve never tried making hoshigaki, a kind of transcendent dried fru...

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What You Can Do to Make Our Streets Safer

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Transportation
13 Comments
...street where 5 people have died and 34 have been seriously injured between 2009 and 2017), he responded with this terse and arrogant Tweet: Between Frazier’s death and my own councilman’s intemperate tweeting, I’ve been too angry to write or work on the podcast this week. The week’s bad news (an acquaintance of mine also broke 11 ribs in a bike vs. car crash) brought up bad memories of the bike and pedestrian advocacy that I was a part of years a...

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