Mulberries

...to croak. We wonder if this is a myth, like the story about boy scouts roasting hot dogs on Oleander sticks (yes, Oleander is very poisonous, but apparently the boy scout story is an urban legend). We found the Mulberries sweet and delicious. It’s a fruit that doesn’t ship well, hence its absence in our crummy supermarkets....

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The Great Sunflower Project

Help determine the health of urban bees with a citizen science experiment called the Great Sunflower Project. It’s simple and free. Just register at the Great Sunflower Project website and you’ll be sent a package of wild annual sunflower seeds (Helianthus annuus). Twice a month you’ll get an email to remind you to time how long it takes for five bees to visit your sunflowers. Sounds like it has drinking game potential, though that might lead to...

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Car Free in the City of Cars

...0-1608 This talk is sponsored by L.A. Eco-Village in association with: CICLE, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, and CRSP in support of the Los Angeles Bike Summit planned for the fall by the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. And a special thanks to Joe Linton and everyone at the L.A. Eco-Village for inviting us to speak last night!...

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June: National Bathroom Reading Month

...itional supplements. Precisely the items you don’t want for getting around urban Los Angeles. This particular catalog featured something new, however, his and hers matching bikes from Schwinn called, we kid you not, “Sid and Nancy“. Sid and Nancy feature automatic shifting since either bike gears are too complicated for Americans to figure out, or folks want to do what they do while driving: talk on cell phones. But why do Sid and Nancy have gears...

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Mistakes we have made . . .

...t is too prodigious, and that’s the kind of problem you can hope for as an urban homesteader. 3. Newspaper seed pots Those newspaper seed starting pots we linked to earlier this year . . . well, there seems to be a problem with them. I think the newspaper is wicking the water away from the soil. While in Houston recently, I took a class from a master gardener in plant propagation and we used regular plastic pots, a thin layer of vermiculite over t...

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