The Dry Garden: Dig it
The fig beetles seem late this year, and maybe they are. It’s been unseasonably cool for much of the summer. Yet when these drowsy fliers properly known as Cotinis mutabilis appear, it’s a cue. It’s time to empty the contents from the bottom of your compost bins to make room for fresh additions at the top.
Why? These bugs, also called June beetles, are in search of decomposing vegetation in which to lay eggs, where their grubs will become an integral part of the composting process. If you want to enlist these most excellent helpers and prepare your compost bin for fall planting, the time to do it is now.
You will need a pitchfork, a wheel barrow, some burlap, a scoop shovel and fluent profanity.
Click here to keep reading ‘The Dry Garden’ in the Los Angeles Times. Then by all means please return to check newly compiled listings …
In praise of Mark Gold
Few of us come so near greatness as to be crushed by a defeat. This week, after 22 years with Heal the Bay, the man synonymous in Los Angeles with the health of our ocean and beaches was crushed. Moreover, he was flattened while the nation was watching. Until the wee hours of August 31st, it seemed as if Mark Gold, president of Heal the Bay, had led California, and hence the country, in a ban of the single-use plastic bags handed out in stores. Then the state senate rejected the ban, 21-14.
On the morning of September 1st, as news organizations reported how plastics industry lobbyists stopped the first bag ban in the nation, Gold’s blog “Spouting Off” was surprisingly empty. Over at Heal the Bay, the Action Alert asking Californians to call their senators to support AB 1998 still sat on the website.
Where was Mark? Aside …
Sherman’s “little friend”
When Las Vegas Review-Journal publisher Sherman Frederick assured his own readers yesterday that anyone who posts an article from his newspaper without securing copyright permission “will meet my little friend called Righthaven,” he sounded like a thug, which he clearly intended and enjoyed, but mostly he came off like the kind of fool that has so successfully reduced Las Vegas to one of the most depressed and depressing places in America.
Frederick argued that by using Righthaven, a company suing an ever-expanding array of non-profits, internet bulletin boards and even a local PR firm for unpermitted reproduction of R-J content, he is saving newspapers in an age of rampant internet pilfering.
With saviors like that, who needs a wrecking ball? As held earlier on this site, what Frederick really is doing is rendering R-J content worthless. For a perfect example of how, turn to the paper’s arch rival, the …
September fully loaded
Summer heat is late and fiery days are surely ahead in Southern California, so planting season is still months away. However, the number of courses aimed at helping homeowners and facilities managers convert from lawn to less wasteful landscapes ramps up in September. Book now to attend the Pacific Horticulture Society’s “Gardening under Mediterranean Skies” symposium from September 23-26 in Arcadia or click here for a full calendar of region-wide events. If you have an event to include, please send details to emily.green [@] mac.com.…
The week that was, 8/22-28/2010
Bullets rain on the Swat Valley in a drawing done by one of Feriha Peracha's students school for "Taliban" survivors. August flooding has brought fresh anguish to the already chaotic and deadly region that Peracha remembers as paradisal during her childhood visits. Source: American Public Media's 'The Story.' Click on the drawing to be taken to Dick Gordon's interview with Peracha.
As we remember the tragic delays after Hurricane Katrina hit the Louisiana coast five years ago today, arguably the single most meaningful way that we can mark the anniversary is to help the millions in Pakistan whose livelihoods are being washed away now, who are desperate now.
For a glimpse of the horror being visited on that country by unprecedented monsoonal flooding, and the bewilderment and desperation of the people in the path of the water, there is no better sampling than Dick Gordon’s August 25, 2010 interview with …
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