Free Egg Testing for California Backyard Chicken Keepers

...irds for various contaminants such as Pb, PCBs, and PBDEs. I know that our soil has lead in it and have always been curious to see if our chickens are passing any of this lead into their eggs. I sent off eggs for testing last Friday and will report back on the test results. The New York Times reported on the issue of contaminants in eggs from backyard flocks back in 2012. If you’re a California resident and would like to send in some eggs for test...

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Our new front yard, part 4: a digression on the new paradigm

...I cast blame around, against myself for being a poor gardener, against the soil, against the drought, against the nursery which sold the plant, against the plant itself. In all cases, though, I’m considering the plant as an isolated individual, and I’m evaluating its success or failure in myopic terms. Now, I’m not a botanist or any other kind of “ist” and I sometimes I suspect all I know about plants would fit in a thimble. Yet I don’t think that...

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Saturday Tweets: Taking Back the Wheel

...18 Assessment of Current Practices of Organic Farmers Regarding Biological Soil Amendments of Animal Origin in a Multi-regional US Study #Organic #FoodSafety #UCDavis @piresalda1 @micheletjay @ucdavisvetmed @ucanr @wifss @OrganicCenter @OrganicTrade https://t.co/D4xPwUqqBy pic.twitter.com/8STfDJSuHl — IIFH (@UCDavisIIFH) September 8, 2018 “Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel, and need no special parking facil...

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Garden Update Part II: The Good the Bad and a Lot of Ugly

...cleaning up faster. Don’t worry, I leave the leaves in place to enrich the soil. The leaf blower just helps me clear the hardscaping. There’s actually a nice brick patio under the weeds and clutter here. Ugh, more junk. Here’s the nice new patio the Haynes landscaping folks built. The adobe oven is under a blue tarp. Blue tarps are the architectural equivalent of a comb over. The oven needs a little roof which, to extend the metaphor would be the...

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133 Trees of Power with Akiva Silver

...Crops (Free download on Archive.org) Kat Anderson Tending the Wild Mulch, soil and water Processing acorns Exotics vs. natives – should we learn to love the invasives? Tree of heaven! Coppicing and pollarding Arborist fails and #arboristfails How to plant trees If you’d like 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...

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