Creating a Moon Garden

...t pollinators and other wildlife. Bornstein had a number of great tips for making a garden interesting at night: Consider color. White flowers, of course, will pop out under moonlight. But yellow flowers stand out even more. We’re lucky in Southern California to have a lot of native plants with silvery grey leaves (an evolutionary adaption of dry climate plants). Masses of silvery grey leaves stand out well at night. Include a contrasting backgrou...

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Maintaining a Worm Bin

...ss than an hour. You could go through a plastic tote-type bin much faster. Making a New Working Side After harvest you’ll have empty space–and that space will become the new working side, which means you need fresh bedding for the worms. I usually start by robbing some of that from the other side of the bin. Anything that’s big enough to notice, like a corn husk or a coffee filter or a handful of straw, I’ll grab. Today, I scraped the top layer of...

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A viewing suggestion from the media arm of Root Simple

...outside world, to the electric light burning beside me. Bless the BBC for making Tudor Monastery Farm (a title which I believe would not fly on American television). This is a quiet series showing three historians/archeologists at play in the Weald & Downland Open Air History Museum, trying out some of the skills they’d need to be tenant farmers to the local monastery. It has some of the structure of a reality show, but it seems that no one reall...

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Saturday Linkages: Goats, Chainsaws and a Big Blue Rooster

...ou-can.html?utm_source=feedly … Crafty Crafting with cat hair: no, I’m not making this up The Redventure Romp Cocktail by Amy Stewart http://gardenrant.com/2013/07/the-redventure-romp-cocktail.html?utm_source=feedly … Vinyl Record Lamps http://www.dudecraft.com/2013/07/vinyl-record-lamps.html … Combine a Mason Jar and Juice Carton into a Resealable Dispenser http://lifehacker.com/combine-a-mason-jar-and-juice-carton-into-a-resealable-845153794 … A...

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Eight Things to Consider When Saving Vegetable Seeds

The directions for seed saving in our last book, Making It, almost got cut. Perhaps we should have just changed those directions to “Why it’s OK to buy seeds.” The fact is that it’s not easy to save the seeds of many vegetables thanks to the hard work of our bee friends. That being said, Shannon Carmody of Seed Saver’s Exchange gave a lecture at this year’s Heirloom Exposition with some tips for ambitious gardeners who want to take up seed saving...

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