My first house had siding of shiplap cypress. Great wood for building, tough for painting. I often wondered about those bags of cypress mulch at the garden center…seems it really is too much of a good thing…
It seems that in the past ten years or so cypress logging as an industry has taken off. In [...]

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Dear Kitchen Gardener,
What’s a home garden worth? With the global economy spiraling downward and Mother Nature preparing to reach upward, it’s a good question to ask and a good time to ask it.
There isn’t one right answer, of course, but I’ll give you mine: $2149.15. Last year, my wife Jacqueline suggested to me that [...]

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Good article on the food safety issue from The Ethicurean Blog.
Down on the farm
Here’s a quick backgrounder: After the E. coli/spinach episode in 2006, big leafy greens producers in California (where the toxic spinach was grown) got together and drafted guidelines to reduce the risk of contamination on farms. These guidelines had some issues: they [...]

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The Power of Less Video from Leo Babauta on Vimeo.

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This is an amazing story…

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Anything Wendell Berry writes is worth the time it takes to digest…My recommendation is to go spend some time today with the man…
The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay, so [...]

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CARSON, NEW MEXICO—When the wind comes up the mesa, which it often does, there is a particular rusted-out old car nearby that whispers the same eerie, long-toned question every time: “Whoooooo?”
I sometimes think: “Us.”
Out in this remote part of the American Southwest lies the closest thing I have seen to an answer to how to [...]

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