Saturday Tweets: We Really Need a Cat Pajama Party

...Nat Geo on the work of the Felix Gillette Inst. https://t.co/7PLYLINiSL — Fruit Cornucopia (@ValenzuelaJohn) October 17, 2018 British Hoarders Stock Up on Supplies, Preparing for Brexit https://t.co/mKgQGa5qF3 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) October 17, 2018 It's the birthright of bees to build comb https://t.co/Sx3LUo4LAP — Root Simple (@rootsimple) October 14, 2018 If you like the #SHOT2018 venue you’re gonna love our panel on trains, buses, ro...

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grub

...into valuable resource.” To raise Hermetia illucens you put vegetable and fruit trimmings in a container with a small opening for the black soldier fly females to fly in and lay their eggs and a method for the grubs to climb out of the compost. You can also feed them small amounts of fish and meat but they can’t digest cellulesic materials. A company called ESR International markets a black soldier fly growing system called the BioPod™ at www.the...

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Worm Composting

...kitchen scraps. However, you can find yourself with unpleasant smells and fruit flies if you add too many scraps for the little buggers to digest. We had problems maintaining the correct moisture level in the bin and ended up drowning a bunch of the hapless critters when we accidentally left the worm composter out in the rain. In the end we released our worms into our large compost pile, where they live very happily, occasionally humming the tune...

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Mutant Squash

...his summer they seem to have hybridized again and now yield less flavorful fruit. More information on the botany of pollination and advice on saving vegetable seeds can be found in this excellent article. Also of note, the new issue of Make Magazine, the Popular Mechanics of the geeky hipster art school crowd has a story on “hacking your backyard plants”. But in the meantime, a tip of the SurviveLA hat to a new squash variety: Cucurbitaceae Nusia....

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Roundup

...n store bought foods is yet another reason to grow your own vegetables and fruit if you can. As far as weed control goes, there are some weeds such as crabgrass which are very difficult to deal with, and Roundup used to be SurviveLA’s last-resort option. Fortunately there are alternatives. First of all we are mulching much more than we used to. Newspaper topped with leaves and twigs seems to work great, and the newspaper takes much longer than one...

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