News From Nowhere

...ecause they are needed: men make for their neighbours’ use as if they were making for themselves, not for a vague market of which they know nothing, and over which they have no control: as there is no buying and selling, it would be mere insanity to make goods on the chance of their being wanted; for there is no longer any one who can be compelled to buy them. So that whatever is made is good, and thoroughly fit for its purpose. Nothing can be mad...

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Baking Bread with Specialty Malts

...king and just use malted grains directly in your bread. The grains used in making beer are, mostly, barley that has been malted (sprouted) and then either caramelized or roasted. To make beer you soak the grains in warm water to extract the sugars that form in the malting process. Fermenting that sugary malt water creates alcohol. Most of the grain used to make beer is two or six-row malt. You add so-called “specialty” grains (that have been caram...

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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...

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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....

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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....

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