Saturday Tweets: Compressed Air, Digging Down and Orange Marmalade

May 19, 2018

...8,000 acres of urban forest, according to a study published in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. https://t.co/eZw5XXnE5c via @AnthropoceneMag — Thomas Rainer (@ThomasRainerDC) May 17, 2018 'A pool in the basement is a clear marker of wealth': how the super-rich are digging down https://t.co/1zYqP2ALRl — Root Simple (@rootsimple) May 15, 2018 More amazing work from garden mosaic master Jeffrey Bale: https://t.co/B0kueZQOGM — Root...

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The Rat of the Land

Mr. Homegrown

February 3, 2020

Animals

27 Comments

...They’re secretive, they nest underground, they’re nocturnal, accessing them is difficult — and they’re likely to croak before we can study them. Radio telemetry and Global Positioning System (GPS) rarely work because of interference from buildings and hard surfaces. At the end of his blog post Frye has a nice collection of research papers on urban wildlife. I highly recommend one of those articles, which was published in Science a few years ago,...

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The Great Water Conservation Grift

Mr. Homegrown

May 24, 2022

Gardening, Thoughtstylings, Water and Power, Water Conservation

5 Comments

...onceived water conservation policies have gone poorly when it comes to our urban landscapes. Take, for instance, LA’s horrible lawn replacement rebate program that ended up in the hands of fly by night operators who exploited their workers and left us with acres of gravel and plastic lawns. Or, since most homeowners don’t have any understanding of climate or horticulture, we just get dead lawns or, at best, decomposed granite and a few sad cacti....

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2014: The Year in Review

Mr. Homegrown

December 29, 2014

Thoughtstylings

5 Comments

...uccessful straw bale garden in the summer of 2013, I finally got around to building new raised beds to replace some that we had taken out. Our lead and zinc contaminated soil necessitates this, but I wish I didn’t have to use raised beds for reasons I outlined in this post. March Is Ham Radio Useful? The jury is still out on this question, to be honest. I got my license late in 2013 (I’m KK6HUF, in case you’re one of the tribe). I have have a hand...

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The Year We Gave Up Our Smart Phones

Mr. Homegrown

September 3, 2018

Thoughtstylings

19 Comments

...if I just did nice things for the sake of doing those things rather than “building my personal brand?” What if a measure of success became making something that was so well put together and so appropriate for its setting that nobody noticed it? The revolution came sooner than expected. With the tech bros locked up on Mars we freed ourselves from the shackles of “surveillance capitalism.” For a time some of us went back to flip phones but that int...

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