030 Christmas Eve Podcast

...ing during the holidays: When Mommy and Daddy Took the Toys Away Five Ways Frugal Living Benefits Kids I mention Shannon Hayes’ post: Murdering Santa and Other Tips for Enjoying the Holidays If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmail.com. You can subscribe to our podcast in the iTunes store and on Stitcher. The theme music is by Dr. Frankenstein. Additional music by R...

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What’s Buried in Your Backyard?

...e’s a handy page for dating bottles, scans of antique bottle catalogs, and page after page of bottle types. My unintended archaeological efforts have yielded no Spanish doubloons, viking graves or Anasazi ruins, but I have found lots of glassware, mostly broken milk bottles. I’ve also discovered what I think are cheap perfume bottles like the one above. If you know what this bottle contained please leave a comment. I suspect perfume, because this...

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What laundry detergent should I use for greywater applications?

...l because they are essentially salt-based (look for the word sodium on the label). They play well with aquatic life, bless them, and they’re a fantastic alternative to more toxic detergents if your laundry water is going to the sewer, but they aren’t good for soil microorganisms. Surely you’ve heard that salting the land is a bad idea? You don’t want to salt your garden. It’s worth adding that the drier your climate, the saltier the soil, because...

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Why Urban Farm?

...r total up to four. Such are the cycles of life and death on the new urban homestead. Bryan Welch, who raises livestock and is also the publisher and editor of the always informative Mother Earth News, wrote an editorial in the February issue called “Why I Farm” in which he says, “There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as the liv...

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