The Unintended Consequences of Water Conservation

...strictions we put in place. My own two cents is that our elected officials used landscape irrigation as a convenient scapegoat to direct our attention away from powerful agricultural interests. The result has been dead trees, melting synthetic grass and shady contractors installing ugly heat generating gravel landscapes with lawn rebate money. Part of the problem is that, to many political leaders, plants are just a kind of background material lik...

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The Best Way to Bake Pizza in a Home Oven

...High temperatures. You just can’t make good pizza in a home oven. Or so I used to think. One evening I invited some friends over for an outdoor pizza party but rain put a wrinkle in those plans. I remembered that Josey Baker had some instructions in his book Josey Baker Bread on how to make pizza in a home oven, so I decided to give it a try. Baker credits this home oven technique to a San Francisco street pizza maverick who goes by the name Pizz...

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Strapping Bee Hives

...quakes. Eric says: Strapping your hives with ratchet straps, the good kind used by truckers, will reduce the chaos when a beehive is knocked over. We first started strapping our beehives as part of our bear proof the bee yard project. If the hives are strapped, the hives stand a better chance of surviving a bear in the beeyard. One can say that a ratchet strap won’t keep a bear from tearing open a beehive, but I’ve read where the strapping has hel...

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Peat Moss is Gardening Crack

When it comes to potted plants and raised beds we’ve used our share of peat moss. Many bagged soil providers like to say that their peat is “sustainably” harvested. The image above as well as an extensive list of citations and peat alternatives in the Facebook group In Defense of Plants proves that peat moss is as sustainable as tobacco is safe. Here’s those citations: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090904165253.htm http://hortsci.a...

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How to Make a Breakfast Nook Comfortable

...ded to be made. We had, after all, voted with our derrieres. Neither of us used the breakfast nook for anything other than as a repository for junk. Here is our nook, as it looks today, after some changes we made to make it more comfortable: Those changes were made possible thanks to handy a resource called Architectural Graphics Standards. AGS, offers a set of standard measurements for everything from table height to the length of a fencing piste...

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