How much time do you spend cycling in the city?

...tize walking and cycling over driving. This involves slowing down traffic, making parking expensive and difficult, installing bike and bus only lanes and heavily penalizing anyone who texts and drives. Unfortunately, these are unpalatable and career ending policies for our council members and mayor. But we can’t give up hope. I was a small part of the push, ten years ago, to make things better for cycling in Los Angeles. I feel like contributing t...

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Big List of Earth-Friendly (homemade, compostable, recyclable, no-plastic) Holiday Decorations

...reconnect with nature. This alone can be enormously calming at a stressful time, and may help us back into a more expansive state of mind. The holidays can be so loud and jangly and rushed. Just stepping back and spending some time admiring the geometry of a pine cone or the cleverness of an acorn helps cleanse the mind of all that noise. Seasons come and go. Holidays come and go. Ornaments which reflect the seasons should come and go, too. The fa...

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The Wonder of Worms

...n this is “why bother?” Just put the dry castings on or in the soil. Every time you water your plant, the castings will release nutrients. Making tea is just extra work for you. Humans like to complicate things. Worms leave their castings in or on the soil. We should, too. (Leave the worms’ castings, that is, not our own castings. We needn’t alarm the neighbors.) Third, there’s aerated compost tea (ACT), as popularized by Elaine Ingham. This is ma...

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Planting in a Post-Wild World

...landscape out of the Grey Gardens situation we’ve got going now — and not making much progress. Then this book came to my rescue.* Look for posts in the near future charting the progress of our redesign using this system. October/November is the time for this work in Southern California. The idea is to get the plants in before the winter rains, so they can establish before the summer heat and drought hits. In temperate climates, folks are just be...

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Root Simple Reader Survey Results

...al to put out three to six blog posts a week plus a podcast. I have a hard time knowing if we’re putting out too much or too little. There’s a paradoxical problem with a DIY blog. If we’re gardening or in the garage making something we’re not writing and vice versa. It’s been difficult to find the right balance. Looks like you’re all good with where we are. When we first began this blog ten years ago the standard advice was along the lines of, “pe...

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