Unflipping the Gentrifence

...unds.” This pamphlet is part of the Internet Archive’s Building Technology Heritage Library, an essential resource for anyone interested in historical preservation. I recycled all of the old gentrifence, but had to buy some more lumber to complete the project. To make the oddly shaped pickets, I used a combo of table saw cuts along with a jig for my jigsaw. Making jigs increases speed and safety. I’m not entirely happy with the metal handrail but,...

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Boozing Bees

...tians organize a prize-fight. . . I have never heard of strong drink being used in feeding bees, except in one instance. I remember reading in L’Apiculteur years ago, of an old time beekeeper having fed his bees with bread dipt in honey which had been mixt with a proportion of wine, to cure them of diarrhea early in the spring . . . The beekeeper whose colonies are robbed by other bees, whiskey or no whiskey, can lay the blame on himself, and hims...

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Homegrown Evolution Visits the Los Angeles County Fair

...he 4-H clubs and in comes the corporate sponsors. Taking the place of what used to be livestock competitions was a farm animal exhibition called “Fair View Farms” sponsored by McDonald’s. Do I need to comment on the irony of that bit of branding? Fair View Farms featured bleak panoramas, such as this large pen of pigs with, oddly, a bunch of ordinary roosters pecking around. What happened to all the different animal breeds I remember from the San...

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Saturday Linkages: Mobile Pods, Soil Erosion and Getting Doored by a Porta-Potty

...come Water-Sustainable http://www.kcet.org/news/redefine/rewild/commentary/report-offers-a-way-for-california-to-become-water-sustainable.html … Man on bike strikes porta-potty door; two hurt: http://bit.ly/1pisQdq Could a medicine used to treat gout also save our citrus? http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/wilderness-resources/stories/could-a-medicine-used-to-treat-gout-also-save-our-citrus … For these links and more, follow Root Simple on Twitter:...

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Who Killed the Non-Electric Toaster?

...ind an alternative and remembered seeing non-electric toasters that people used to use back in the 1920s when our house was built. These types of toasters have not died out entirely. Most non-electric toaster designs look like the one above. Some Googling also led us to an innovative looking non-electric toaster called the DeltaToast. Counter-intuitively, all of these simple stove top toasters coast about twice as much as electric toaster, at leas...

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