Luddite’s Moonshot: Dealing With Leafy Green Pests

...w cover, specifically Agribon 15. The row cover thickness you use will depend on your climate. I opted for the lightest available as we often have freak heat waves in the winter here. But I haven’t deployed any row cover in years. It’s a pain to use. You have to be diligent in making sure the whole bed gets covered and it’s hard to see the plants under the cover without having to pull it on and off. And row cover won’t prevent slugs. Here’s UC Dav...

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Our New Open Floor Plan

...cast to gently defend open floor plans. Naturally, I’m spending this month making our house, gasp, more open. Let me explain. When I installed the floor in the living room in the aughts I discovered an opening that used to exist between our living room and what we use as our bedroom. Back in 1920 this house was a one bedroom with a kind of sitting room open to the living room. I’ve also long know that the closet used to have a window in it that wa...

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How to Make a Hexagonal Raised Bed

...ine that supplied the clay for our adobe oven. Our landscaper has proposed making this part of our yard a rain garden. More on that project later in the year. One disadvantage of beds with this odd shape is that they are harder to critter-proof. I don’t consider this a deal killer, but it’s something to think about if you have the hoards of marauding mammals that nightly assault our backyard even in this very urban part of Los Angeles. You can see...

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Saturday Tweets: Beet Raisins, Seed Libraries and a Pepperoni Disaster

...elSurls) April 6, 2018 Eric Garcetti can’t be a ‘climate mayor’ while he’s making more room for cars https://t.co/sg9Uf83izf — BikeLA (@Bike_LA) April 6, 2018 "Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf." — Lewis Mumford pic.twitter.com/7yd0JGil4B — Wrath Of Gnon (@wrathofgnon) May 4, 2016 Waze has turned the nearly undriveable, fifth-steepest hill in America into a disaster-strewn major thoroughfare https://t.co/OogoX0a5cb — Root Simple (@roo...

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Bottom-up Urbanism

...tal property. Johnny describes himself as a “rodent who scurries about finding the opportunities other don’t recognize.” A lot of the things he talks about in the video are things we’ve done in our own very small Los Angeles house, such as adding sheds and making the garage space usable, all strategies for getting by on the expensive West Coast. The video even includes a bonus visit to a Murphy bed manufacturer. You can follow Johnny on his blog G...

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