The Rat of the Land

February 3, 2020

...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

Mr. Homegrown

May 24, 2022

Gardening, Thoughtstylings, Water and Power, Water Conservation

5 Comments

...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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How to make your soup wonderful: Wild food soup stock

Mrs. Homegrown

March 26, 2013

Food, Food Preservation, Foraging, How-to

6 Comments

...ood, but go on to make really good stuff with it. One of their websites is Urban Outdoor Skills, and I like to go there to check out a section called the Food Lab, where they talk about food products they’re experimenting with, and give how-to’s. A few months ago Erik brought home a beautiful bouquet of nettles. I decided to try one of the Food Lab projects that intrigued me — Wild Food Soup Stock Preserved with Salt. This is no more than a bunch...

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Saturday Tweets: Happy Feet and Sad Feet

Mr. Homegrown

July 20, 2019

Saturday Linkages

...triot @GeorgeMonbiot tells it like it is: Driving a gas guzzler is killing urban life and the least cool thing you can do!https://t.co/hZcF20OBxd — MonkeyWrenchGang (@M_WrenchGang) June 23, 2019 “At a certain point, if you’re playing Dr. Pangloss to people who administer a monstrous social order, then at some point you’re going to rub shoulders with and do favors for actual monsters,” https://t.co/JiGukRJXfi — Root Simple (@rootsimple) July 17, 20...

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Our new front yard, part 3: design

Mrs. Homegrown

November 17, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...sses, shrubbery and trees, which is to say, the elements of the classic suburban yard. 3. The forest, which is design in cooperation with stands of trees. They take apart each archetype in detail and discuss the design considerations for each, the possibilities and potential problems. I focused on the grassland section, because I had already decided that I wanted my slope covered with low growing, meadow-type plants. As I’ve already discussed, we...

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