Delicious Cauliflower

...And we all have a lonely can of tomato paste on the shelf that needs to be used, don’t we? We’ve been eating it hippie style, over brown rice, but it would be more elegant over an herbed pilaf, or it could be used as a side dish. I suspect it would be good cold, too, but we’ve never had leftovers. Cauliflower in Tomato Sauce (Kharnabit Emforakeh) 1 large head of cauliflower 6-8 tablespoons of oil 2 cloves of garlic, crushed 3 green/spring onions,...

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Filter Fail: How to Cure Internet Addiction

...oing, Twitter, LinkedIn and Root Simple (of course). Not to mention , This used to be called “information overload,” but I prefer the phrase “filter fail” that Douglas Rushkoff introduces in his book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Rushokoff borrows this idea from the writer Clay Shirky). The problem is not that there’s too much information out there. The problem is that we’ve failed to screen out what is irrelevant. It happens to me e...

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The tale of the worm bin celery

...e its mild domestic origins. It didn’t grow fat, moist stalks which can be used to scoop up peanut butter. It grew stringy, dark green stalks which tasted powerfully of celery. It made excellent stock, and chopped into fine pieces, it was good in soup, too. Since I don’t eat much raw celery, this suited me fine. All winter long I used this plant as the basis of my cold-weather cooking–chopped onions, carrots and celery in the bottom of every pot....

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Root Simple’s New CritterCam

.... I’ll share the results on the blog over the next year. The first night I used the camera I pointed it at the grape arbor where I know rats visit. The resulting images, that I strung together into the video above, show at least two rats who set off the camera around 30 times throughout the night between 8:30 PM and 5:30 AM. This is the first year that we’ve got a significant crop off of either of our two grapevines. I think I could have prevented...

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Self-Irrigating Gutter Update

...with potting mix that hangs down into the water filled gutter. For mulch I used re-purposed billboard vinyl scavenged from a dumpster by my neighbor Ray. The SIG works, but there have been a few problems. My strawberries, I believe, have a fungal disease called red stele (Phytophthora fragariae) which came either from the soil that came with the starts or from the planting mix I used. If I want to grow strawberries again I’m going to have to thoro...

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