Heirloom Expo in Photos

I highly recommend making the trip next year to Santa Rosa to see the National Heirloom Exposition put on by the folks at Baker Creek Seeds. The centerpiece of the expo is the massive display of hundreds of different varieties of squash, melons, tomatoes and other edibles. It’s inspiring and frustrating all at once since, unless you have your own garden, you’ll never see such diversity at the supermarket. I came back with the will to improve our...

Read…

Saturday Linkages: Paleo Flour, Viking Tents and Chinese Cabbage as the New Kale

...— Root Simple (@rootsimple) September 16, 2015 Via @NPR: Paleo People Were Making Flour 32,000 Years Ago http://t.co/Q6xlGIBBG3 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) September 17, 2015 Equity, the Mobility Plan, and the Myth of Luxury-Loving Lane Stealers http://t.co/nPB0sbqjug via @streetsblogla — Root Simple (@rootsimple) September 18, 2015 How America’s Staggering Traffic Death Rate Became Matter-of-Fact http://t.co/onrP7oreWC via @StreetsblogUSA — Root...

Read…

It’s safe to comment again

...service. Our intrepid webmaster put out the fire a couple of days back by making it hard to comment We’ve had no spam at all as a result. That is good. But no one is happy with the draconian commenting protocols. So we’re trying something new. Now, commenting is back to our usual system, but we’re closing down comments on older posts. We have a library of 2,522 posts on Root Simple as of today–crazy, huh?– and that’s a whole lot of territory for...

Read…

Does Compost Tea Work?

...epticism. Thankfully, I can now point towards the eXtension.org webinar on making and using compost teas that I’ve embedded above. I’ll oversimplify things a bit with a few of my own bullet points inspired by what Dr. Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, Associate Professor of Sustainable and Organic Agriculture at Washington State University and Catherine Crosby, a Ph.D. candidate in Soil Science at Washington State University had to say in the webinar. Due to...

Read…

Our new front yard, part 2: theory

...ch makes working on it real fun.) That might be one reason why the idea of making it into an orchard had so much appeal. When garden design books bother to address hillside gardens, they always feature much bigger hills than ours, and these hills feature expensive hardscaping, like artfully arranged imported boulders, fancy staircases which sweep along the contour of the hill, or dazzling water features. Nobody designs in 15 foot wide spaces stuff...

Read…