Admitting Gardening Mistakes

...tractive landscape plan. As Hermann von Pückler-Muskau advises in his 1834 book Hints on Landscape Gardening, I know of nothing more pathetic than when a failed detail is allowed to remain as an eyesore in a completed project, rather than being removed and replaced by a better idea, simply because it has already cost such and such in the first place, and changing it might cost again as much. . . Once changes have been found advisable, though, it i...

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The Best Way to Bake Pizza in a Home Oven

...in those plans. I remembered that Josey Baker had some instructions in his book Josey Baker Bread on how to make pizza in a home oven, so I decided to give it a try. Baker credits this home oven technique to a San Francisco street pizza maverick who goes by the name PizzaHacker. I’m happy to report that it works so well that I wonder why I should bother to spend three hours tending a fire to prep the outdoor oven. Is pizza out of a wood fired oven...

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066 Saving Seeds and Seed Libraries with David King

...ions a few resources including the Organic Seed Alliance and Carol Deppe’s book Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties. David blogs at LA Garden Blog and also can be found at The Learning Garden. If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmail.com. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. A downloadable versi...

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In Praise of Backward Compatibility

The garden of nerdiness has many flowers: comic book nerds, computer nerds, fantasy nerds, sci-fi nerds–too many to list. After fifty years I’ve finally recognized my own personal nerd category. I’m an electromechanical nerd. This tendency manifests in an obsession with old telephones, the ability to thread a 16mm projector, fantasizing about the mimeographed version of Root Simple and spending evenings watching films about old office equipment....

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