Helping the Bees with Science in your Backyard

September 7, 2008

...ees due to colony collapse disorder. In a fascinating and well written new book, A Spring Without Bees, author Michael Schacker explains the details of colony collapse disorder and the media’s poor job of covering it (hint: it ain’t cellphones, moving bees around or a bee rapture). Schacker blames the bee decline on two pesticides: GAUCHO, manufactured by Bayer Crop Science and Fipronil, manufactured by BASF. You can read more about Schacker’s eff...

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Tuesday Morning Fruit Linkages

Mr. Homegrown

September 2, 2008

Gardening

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We’ve been reading Adam Leith Gollner’s entertaining book The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession and Gollner mentions a number of intreguing internet resources, perfect for a little post holiday weekend surfing: More than you ever wanted to know about the world’s smelliest fruit: Durian (Durian Palace) The California Rare Fruit Growers, “Pushing the Limits of Fruit Growing, Worldwide” (CRFG) The world’s largest f...

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Kitchen Alchemy

Mr. Homegrown

November 6, 2008

Food, Recipes

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...Shannon Hayes of New York’s Sap Bush Hollow Farm. She’s the author of two books on how to cook grass fed meat. Hayes is currently working on a book on what she calls “enlightened homemakers”, touching on the kind of societal transformation that can occur when we change the way we run our abodes. Lastly, there’s a new online cooking school that has some mighty nice how-to videos and a free trial offer for 30 days. At Rouxbe.com we’ve learned a cou...

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FEMA Plans for a Bar That Folds Into a Fallout Shelter

Mr. Homegrown

December 4, 2008

Design

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...ome study course in radiological emergency management. Along with the text book and quizzes came a couple of plans for home built fallout shelters. Most of these shelters were what you would expect, underground cinder block cubes accessed through a trap door on your back patio. But one plan really stood out for its cocktail era inventiveness, a basement “snack bar” that converts into the perfect place to ride out Armageddon. “The principal feature...

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Do Something Day

Mr. Homegrown

November 28, 2008

Thoughtstylings

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...ay was, instead, Do Something Day or, perhaps, Build Something Day. In our book and presentations we’ve distanced ourselves from the dourness of the environmental movement, preferring ideas to be presented in the positive rather than the negative, in the form of actions rather than protests. So rather than head to the mall today we propose learning an odd and useless task, say the feat of balancing on chairs. From Practical Projects for the Handy...

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