Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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Build a vegetable prison to keep out raccoons and skunks

...ar’s Crittercam surveillance project demonstrated the futility of planting vegetables in our yard without serious fortifications. Bird netting? Useless. If we want to grow our own veggies we had to build something that can resist the strong arms and fingers of our local band of late night hipster raccoons. Once again, I can’t say enough good things about the usefulness of the free 3d drawing program Sketchup, which I used to plan out my veggie pri...

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A Hinged Cover for a Raised Bed Vegetable Garden

...reate a hinged cover for one of my raised beds so that I can easily access vegetables without having to remove the bird netting or row cover each time I want to access the bed. I’ve found that I can remove the netting once the vegetables have matured. To create the cover I made a frame with some 2 x 2 inch lumber and bent some electrical conduit pipe (and a piece of leftover copper pipe) for the hoops. I put some gate hinges on the back, stood bac...

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LA Cracks Down On Parkway Vegetable Gardens

...Los Angeles apparently has nothing better to do than crack down on parkway vegetable gardens two years after hassling Ron Finley. Steve Lopez, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, wrote a great column about this ridiculous situation, “L.A. still saying parkway vegetable gardens must go.” And above you can hear Lopez joined by Finley and Councilman Bernard Parks (who sounds like the president of an excuse factory) discuss the situation. Please Tw...

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Anne Hars’ Top Ramen Keyhole Vegetable Garden

...lanted things that go well in Top Ramen.” Hars is referring to her keyhole vegetable bed that she created this winter. With the keyhole, Hars has made good use of a very small front yard with a dense planting of Ramen friendly veggies including bok choi, three kinds of kale, sunflowers, carrots, peas, garlic, radishes, spinach, romaine lettuce, cilantro and parsley. Anne with husband Bill and Petra the chihuahua. She was inspired by a video by the...

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