Saturday Linkages: Goat Wars, Dinites and a Sanitary Pad Revolution

...er-heating-system-for.html?spref=tw … A Solar Heated Loo http://www.builditsolarblog.com/2014/02/a-solar-heated-loo.html?spref=tw … A rat map that shows NYC’s restaurant rodent takeover http://barfblog.com/2014/02/a-rat-map-that-shows-nycs-restaurant-rodent-takeover/ … Is hot water more effective for washing hands? No! http://barfblog.com/2014/03/no-is-hot-water-more-effective-for-washing-hands/ … Red house with salvaged doors in Liverpool http://...

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Root Simple Visits Simparch’s Utah Compound

...WII era Quonset hut. Water is biked in with specially adapted cargo bikes. Solar power pumps the water up to the tower where it is heated by the sun in a black drum. A solar panel array and batteries provide more than enough power, all day and all night, to run power tools and pump some tunes out on the powerful stereo system. The composting toilet features, what must be the most stunning view to be seen from any toilet seat perch in the world – t...

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More on our gardening disasters

...to put the heart back into our garden. (Our Heart of Flax from way back in 2011) I thought I’d chime in on the subject of this year’s garden failures. Before I do, I’d like to thank you all for your kind advice and commiseration that you left on Erik’s post. First, I will agree that it really, truly has been a terrible year in the garden. Sometimes Erik gets a little melodramatic when it comes to the crop failure (e.g. the Squash Baby adventure)...

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What Will Be the New Kale?

Our 2011 crop of spigarello. Since 2011, we’ve been saying that Spigarello is the new kale. Thanks to a tip from the folks at Winnetka Farms, we may need to wait for BroccoLeaf™ to have its fifteen minutes of fame as the new kale. The Salinas, California based Foxy Organic is, quite sensibly, marketing broccoli leaves. Broccoli leaves are indeed edible and tasty. Foxy has the recursive media to prove it, a Facebook photo of someone Instagramming...

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Bike Lane Blocking, An Angry Rant and Something You Can Do

...xy and often politically unpalatable work of installing bus only lanes and making the city more pedestrian and bike friendly, seems to think that the future lies in a techno-optimist future of flying cars and private tubes as peddled by Elon Musk. Instead of improvements we could have right now (all a bus lane takes is a line of paint) we’re waiting for a future that will never come. I’ve held off writing this post for years but I can’t stay silen...

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