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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Permaculturalist Paul Wheaton in Los Angeles

...y/Time Sunday, March 3rd 10am to 8pm Location Daytime Events @Institute of Urban Ecology 3896 N Fair Oaks Avenue, Altadena , CA Evening Paul Wheaton Lecture @Armory Center for Arts 145 N Raymond Ave Pasadena, CA 91103 Registration (click here to register) $5 for 1st ticket $1 each add’tl ticket Sponsoring Organizations Institute of Urban Ecology RIPE Altadena La Loma Development EcoWorkshops.com Oh Happy Days Natural Foods Market Whole Foods Marke...

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Are We Keeping Too Many Bees?

...[shopping/golfing/riding jet skis].” This month’s backlash story concerns urban beekeeping in London. Reader Cassandra Silver (who has a really beautiful blog) alerted us to a bee story in the Independent, “How do-gooders threaten humble bee.” The gist of the article is that urban beekeepers in London have more hives than the nectar and pollen sources can support: The London Beekeepers Association (LBKA) is warning that there could be “too many b...

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