098 Kelly’s Aortic Dissection Adventure

February 16, 2017

...nt so many kind notes and prayers. Some important links: The Mayo Clinic’s page on aortic dissection. John Ritter died of a aortic dissection. A foundation was set, in his name, that helps educate medical personnel on how to better recognize the symptoms. Kelly did not have a heart attack, but it’s always good to review the subtle symptoms of heart attacks experienced by women. If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please c...

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Nomadic Furniture

Mr. Homegrown

February 5, 2014

Design

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...shelves, lamps made from milk jugs, hexagonal dining sets as well as a two page hymn to the waterbed (ok, not sure about that thoughtstyling). The subtitle of the book sums it up, “how to build and where to buy lightweight furniture that folds, inflates, knocks down, stacks, or is disposable and can be recycled.” You can see more of their work thanks to a recent retrospective of their work in Vienna. My favorite project in the book is the series o...

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Bird’s Nest

Mrs. Homegrown

July 7, 2015

Animals, Thoughtstylings

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...grape skins onto our patio every night, as we steadily lose our war with the nocturnal creatures for our grapes. But that is the subject of another post. Anyone have any guesses about what kind of bird made this nest? The bowl is about 3 inches (7.5 cm) across. ETA: I’ve been looking at this great page of bird nests–it’s heaven for the bird nest enthusiast. So many types of nests! Wee little eggs! Baby birds! One bird even made its nest in a swea...

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How to Search for Science-Based Gardening Advice

Mr. Homegrown

February 24, 2014

Gardening

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Agricola’s search page. In the course of writing our books and this blog we’ve had to deal with a lot of thorny gardening questions such as the effectiveness of double digging, the toxicity of persimmons, compost tea, lasagna gardening and how to mulch to name just a few. While the internet is an amazing tool, the number of conflicting commercial interests, biases and crazy talk in the eGardening world can make it difficult to, as Mark Twain put...

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Bees will love your Coyote Brush Hedge

Mrs. Homegrown

March 27, 2014

Bees, Garden Design, Urban Farming

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...st at the Curbstone Valley Farm blog with lots of pictures. And here’s its page at Theodore Payne Foundation.) What I didn’t realize until our recent garden tour at the Natural History Museum, though, is that coyote brush makes a perfectly lovely hedge if it’s pruned up right. I’d never even thought about it. Most of the talk one hears about coyote brush is that it is sort of ho-hum in appearance but can be used to provide a background to the more...

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