Saturday Tweets: Cutting Through the Kudzu

...sal http://t.co/ZnUwxviSBp via @DiamondBarPatch http://t.co/UeoVXo2uuu — UCUrbanAg (@UCUrbanAg) August 26, 2015 Oslo builds world's first bumblebee highway http://t.co/ZbSwjYWW9E via @TheLocalNorway — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 26, 2015 Plant from 130 million years ago is among 'first flowers': study http://t.co/cPjiftSKZK via @YahooNews — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 24, 2015 Summer of Science | Even When You Go Off the Grid...

Read…

Saturday Tweets: Compressed Air, Digging Down and Orange Marmalade

...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...

Read…

The Rat of the Land

...ry 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, Evolution of life in urban environments....

Read…

The Great Water Conservation Grift

...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....

Read…

Growing Pink Oyster Mushrooms

...summer. I need to improve step 4. The difficulty with getting mushrooms to fruit is that they benefit from humidity and oxygen–you can’t just put them in a bag with no ventilation. While I’ve grown mushrooms outside without any kind of humidity control, I think I’d get bigger mushrooms with some kind of fruiting chamber. A lot of people make what’s called a Martha, named after a Martha Stewart mini greenhouse. I’m of two minds about this kind of t...

Read…