Free Introduction to Permaculture

...on for creating sustainable lifestyles in the city. Learn how to cope with peak oil and the energy descent society of the future. Become the solution! Learn how LA can be a model for sustainable cities. This Free Introduction to Permaculture Class is an outline of the science and art of Permaculture. It will define the term, its history, its founders and the curriculum of the design course certificate, its ethics and foundations. It will describe...

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Stellarium: A Handy Desktop Planetarium

...ous time to view a meteor shower (like the Persead shower that reached its peak last week). You’ll want to pick a time when the moon is not up. Or let’s say you want to have some friends over for some planetary viewing and a glass of bourbon (as happened last night at the Root Simple compound). In that case you might want to pick a time when you can also take a look at the moon. In the pre-personal computer era I used to use a planisphere. I still...

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How to Roast Coffee in a Whirley Pop Popcorn Maker

...ll be dark brown. For a French roast: pull as the second crack reaches its peak. Beans will be very dark and shiny. Cooling the beans and removing chaff As soon as you finish roasting you need to cool the beans down as quickly as possible. Pour them into a metal colander or bowl. I take them outside at this point and pour them repeatedly between a colander and a metal bowl. The chafe will drift away in the process You don’t have to remove all of t...

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Time for some comments . . .

...the Triple Headed Hydra of Despair: Climate Change, Economic Collapse and Peak Oil. Don’t worry about us becoming a doomer blog, though. We’re going to focus on positive strategies. But we want to pause for a moment and listen to you guys. Here’s some of the things we’re curious about, but feel free to sound off about anything else: We’re sensing anxiety in the air. Are we imagining it? Are you anxious over these things? The people you know? How...

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Our new front yard, part 5: Constructing a meadow community

...his sounds pretty straightforward, but once you get into the weeds (so to speak) it gets a little confusing. I wasn’t always able to decide what category a plant should be in. For instance, yarrow (Achillea millefolium) is a seasonal theme layer plant, but it is low and spreading and works rather well as a ground cover when not blooming. It’s usually considered a sun-loving plant, but our sun here is not like normal sun, it’s SoCal SunPlus! ™ and...

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