Satan’s Easter Basket is Filled with Plastic Easter Grass

...round this morning, especially because Echo Park surrounds a lovely little urban lake full of birds. Read on to find out why. 4 Excellent Reasons to Avoid Plastic Easter Grass and use all of your influence to make sure other people avoid it, too: Domestic cats and dogs eat Easter grass and it can cause intestinal obstruction. Cats are particularly attracted to its stringy texture, but dogs might also gobble it up when they raid a kid’s Easter stas...

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That ain’t a bowl full of larvae, it’s crosne!

...n, justifiably, gives me a hard time for growing strange things around the homestead. This week I just completed the world’s smallest harvest of a root vegetable popularly known as crosne (Stachys affinis). Crosne, also known as Chinese artichoke, chorogi, knotroot and artichoke betony is a member of the mint family that produces a tiny edible tuber. While looking like any other mint plant, the leaves have no smell. The tubers look all too much li...

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Build a Ghetto Solar Cooker

Using crap we had laying around the homestead, SurviveLA fashioned a solar cooker based on plans from Backwoods Home Magazine, the Dwell of the Ted Kaczynski set. We just substituted an old cooler for the cardboard boxes, and we finished it off by using one of Los Angeles’ ubiquitous abandoned car tires as a cradle to keep the cooker oriented towards the sun. It ain’t pretty but it works. In our first test we reached 160º inside the oven, but we...

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133 Trees of Power with Akiva Silver

...lk to Akiva Silver of Twisted Tree Farm, described in his author bio as a “homestead, nut orchard and nursery located in Spencer, New York where he grows around 20,000 trees a year using practices that go beyond organic.” Akiva’s background is in “foraging, wilderness survival and primitive skills.” He is also the author of Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies (Amazon, library) just published by Chelsea Green. In our conversation we discu...

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Ways to Critter Proof Your Vegetable Beds: A Competition

...F.A., and is a blistering in-house art and design critic around our little homestead. Participants can leave a comment on this post linking to an image, or send us an email at rootsimple@gmail.com. The winner will get a package of our newest publication–a series of booklets we wrote in collaboration with the Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano. I will also be participating in this competition which does seem unfair, but we’ll let Mrs. Homegrown...

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