Salted Spruce Tips and Pine Infused Garlic Salt

...at is to say, herbed salt or salted herb? The best approach is to simply start with less salt and see how it goes, because you can always add more. Feline assistance in making the pine garlic salt. A Tale of Two Salts To give you some concrete examples, I made two small batches of salt today. I often make herbed salt in tiny batches that get used up quickly, because I like to experiment. The first one I made was with spruce tips. These are the fre...

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It’s safe to comment again

...service. Our intrepid webmaster put out the fire a couple of days back by making it hard to comment We’ve had no spam at all as a result. That is good. But no one is happy with the draconian commenting protocols. So we’re trying something new. Now, commenting is back to our usual system, but we’re closing down comments on older posts. We have a library of 2,522 posts on Root Simple as of today–crazy, huh?– and that’s a whole lot of territory for...

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Does Compost Tea Work?

...epticism. Thankfully, I can now point towards the eXtension.org webinar on making and using compost teas that I’ve embedded above. I’ll oversimplify things a bit with a few of my own bullet points inspired by what Dr. Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, Associate Professor of Sustainable and Organic Agriculture at Washington State University and Catherine Crosby, a Ph.D. candidate in Soil Science at Washington State University had to say in the webinar. Due to...

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Black Friday Book Suggestions

...with lots of pictures, step by step instructions and detailed reference charts. They’re pretty intense in their obsession with detail–a world away from your usual lightweight “10 Quick n’ Easy Projects” type of books. They strike me as books for a craftsperson ready to take that next step toward making these products as a home business. Malle and Schmickl are scientists–stern Austrian scientists, no less– and they are all about consistency and pr...

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Is Facebook Useful?

...vorite Facebook posts are by friends who post stuff that they are actually making or doing rather than linking to click bait articles. Curate my “friends.” I don’t mean that I’m going to unfollow everyone that I don’t agree with. One of the things I like about Facebook is hearing from people outside my own liberal, Los Angeles milieu. But I’m going to unfollow “friends” who only post finger pointing click bait rather than their own opinions. I wil...

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