Non-Toxic Cleaning for the Home

...ays to kill moth eggs. Wipe down all of your cabinet shelves with vinegar, making sure to get it in the cracks between the walls and the shelves. And if you have rats or mice, classic snap traps are very efficient and kinder than slow poison. You also do not run the risk of accidentally poisoning other creatures who might encounter the poison or the poisoned rat: cats, dogs, hawks, owls. Internet Myths and Chemistry Errors Over the last ten years...

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What’s Buried in Your Backyard?

...e’s a handy page for dating bottles, scans of antique bottle catalogs, and page after page of bottle types. My unintended archaeological efforts have yielded no Spanish doubloons, viking graves or Anasazi ruins, but I have found lots of glassware, mostly broken milk bottles. I’ve also discovered what I think are cheap perfume bottles like the one above. If you know what this bottle contained please leave a comment. I suspect perfume, because this...

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What Will Be the New Kale?

Our 2011 crop of spigarello. Since 2011, we’ve been saying that Spigarello is the new kale. Thanks to a tip from the folks at Winnetka Farms, we may need to wait for BroccoLeaf™ to have its fifteen minutes of fame as the new kale. The Salinas, California based Foxy Organic is, quite sensibly, marketing broccoli leaves. Broccoli leaves are indeed edible and tasty. Foxy has the recursive media to prove it, a Facebook photo of someone Instagramming...

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More on our gardening disasters

...to put the heart back into our garden. (Our Heart of Flax from way back in 2011) I thought I’d chime in on the subject of this year’s garden failures. Before I do, I’d like to thank you all for your kind advice and commiseration that you left on Erik’s post. First, I will agree that it really, truly has been a terrible year in the garden. Sometimes Erik gets a little melodramatic when it comes to the crop failure (e.g. the Squash Baby adventure)...

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Cat Litter Compost, Installment #3

..., but for various reasons decided to throw money at the problem instead of making it a project. I really like this system because a) It’s much neater. Pine litter is less dusty than clumping litter, which means less tracking, less dust on surfaces, cleaner cats. b) And it’s cheaper. Pine litter cost less than clumping brands, and I’ve heard that Equine Pine, bought in bulk, is much, much cheaper per pound than the kitty brands. Next time we go to...

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