The Great Water Conservation Grift

...onceived water conservation policies have gone poorly when it comes to our urban landscapes. Take, for instance, LA’s horrible lawn replacement rebate program that ended up in the hands of fly by night operators who exploited their workers and left us with acres of gravel and plastic lawns. Or, since most homeowners don’t have any understanding of climate or horticulture, we just get dead lawns or, at best, decomposed granite and a few sad cacti....

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The Rat of the Land

...ry and Global Positioning System (GPS) rarely work because of interference from buildings and hard surfaces. At the end of his blog post Frye has a nice collection of research papers on urban wildlife. I highly recommend one of those articles, which was published in Science a few years ago, Evolution of life in urban environments....

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Homegrown Evolution in the LA Times

...rdener movement takes root in L.A. area”. The article mentions our parkway vegetable garden, which consists of two 6-foot square raised beds with two wire obelisks to support beans and tomatoes. We constructed it in October of 2005 and have grown a few season’s worth of crops. Here’s our parkway garden just after putting it in. We installed raised beds because of the compacted, poor quality soil. Winter and early spring is the best season for most...

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Garden and Ego Destroyed by Skunks

...ure of the perpetrator: Skunk lessons learned the hard way: tightly secure vegetable beds with bird netting don’t do a half-assed job with the hoops that support the bird netting don’t think that “this year those skunks won’t go digging for grubs.” transplant instead of sowing directly (more work, but it just works better for me) lay compost on beds and let the skunks work it in with their high heels Here’s what the our new keyhole bed looks like...

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Should I Put Coffee Grounds in a Worm Bin?

...is my takeaway. If and when someone studies the issue to determine a safe percentage, it would be unwise to recommend the practice, given the results of the referenced paper. Coffee grounds also form large anaerobic clumps worms don’t like. Clearly, they prefer vegetable scraps and large amounts of fluffy carbon material like cardboard and wood shavings. Now wouldn’t it be great if Elon Musk would fund local Extension Service home gardening resear...

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