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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How to Hard Boil an Egg

...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d4x-nzwztJ0 Eric of Garden Fork, a.k.a. “East Coast Eric” tests two methods of making hard boiled eggs in this video: Instant Pot vs. a steamer basket on a regular old stove top. Watch the video to find out which method works best....

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Fun With Mortises and Tenons

...els of craftsmanship, I haphazardly fixed the table with screws and nails. Making the mortises and tenons took forever even though I was working with power tools–a plunge router to make the mortises and a table saw to cut the tenons. Of course, a great deal of the time in the workshop was spent in idle chatter. My workshop is right on the public sidewalk and serves as a kind of conversational trap for every passing neighbor and dog walker. Kelly s...

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Backyard and Backwards Beekeeping

...Q&A you’ll notice that my desktop computer is installed in our closet thus making my Zoom background a pile of folded sheets. In the talk I give a brief intro to bee biology and then go over the way I keep bees here as taught to me by “backwards” beekeeping guru Kirk Anderson. Beekeeping resources I mention during the talk: Organizations/Websites HoneyLove.org: local non-profit that provides hands-on education and resources for backyard beekeepers...

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Boozing Bees

...conference by Dr. May Berenbaum of Cornell, that I was only able to hear part of, looked at the history of the use of pesticides. Honeybees are a complex organism and their interaction with pesticides can often work in counter-intuitive ways, as Berenbaum showed in a study that proved that even fungicides, thought to be safe, can impact bee colonies. In over a hundred years of tinkering with chemicals and bees we’re still making stupid mistakes....

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