Apartment Parking Lot Gardening in East Hollywood

...start a garden even if you don’t own a house and how an otherwise useless urban space can be put to good use. R.J. says: I wanted to be able to give my granddaughter the experience of gardening while she was growing up but as both my daughter and I live in apartments, and have no space for gardens I needed to come up with a solution . So based on the “Square Foot Gardening Book by Mel Bartholomew I built two 5 ft. x 1 ft. square foot garden boxes...

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Toggler Snaptoggle® Heavy-Duty Toggle Bolts

...screen TV so large that you have to strap it to the top of the car. Urban homesteady types would never do this as we prefer to spend our evenings spinning wool while reading Cicero to each other, of course. But let’s just say (again, hypothetically), that you want to mount that flat screen TV to the wall so that the cats can’t knock it over. This is where the Toggler Snaptoggle® bolts come in. To use them you drill a 1/2″ hole and insert the meta...

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Saturday Tweets: Danes and Their Garbage, Big Food and #BlackCatAppreciationDay

...Wow! Cali to create the first farm-to-table community (7.4 acres w/ 540 houses): http://t.co/dHLqQ1MzhR @greenprophet pic.twitter.com/p1wRkDK355 — Danielle Nierenberg (@DaniNierenberg) August 20, 2015 Cool 3d printed chess set/succulent planter: http://t.co/FZzuclENbs — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 20, 2015 Why we don't trust Wikipedia, and only use them for straightforward info: http://t.co/ODbYhLjoet — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 1...

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Rubber Sidewalks Rescue Trees

...s. Trees are something we just need more of here in Southern California. I used to work at an urban forestry non-profit, TreePeople. So I am familiar with the challenges of the tree/sidewalk interface. I have fielded calls from people frantically trying to save trees that are being ripped out because they are lifting the sidewalk. I have also received calls from people eager to remove trees for the same reason. Sadly, I have also heard from people...

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The Homegrown Mailbox: How and Where Do I Get My Soil Tested?

...garden in my side yard and it just occurred to me that it is where people used to park their cars. I’m concerned about Oil or other pollutants from the cars that might still be in the soil. Any experience with this? Can I test without it costing an arm and leg? J.R., Los Angeles A: See my updated response here. [Note update at bottom of this post!] There’s basically two groups of things to test for: contaminants and soil nutrient levels. There ar...

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