Drippity Doo Da

Did you know that in Southern California you're supposed to get your roof checked and maintained by a professional roofer every year around September before the rainy season starts? I didn't. So now I have a giant, watery, plaster blister in my ceiling. All because of an open nail hole in the roof.

I don't understand why all the meteorologists were insisting this winter was going to be a La Nina. I think even my garden is getting tired of the rain.

-J

The End of Holes

I (unfortunately) had to move this week and the only good thing that came out of it was this:

Acrylic latex caulk.  A miracle product. 

Worms!

It's been raining so hard I haven't been able to do any gardening, so instead I made a worm bin! There's supposedly 50 worms in there right now. I didn't actually count when I added them. Not too many, but I thought I'd start small (also I'm being cheap). Hopefully they'll multiply quickly. The instructions for building the bin are available online from the WSU extension. (Thanks Yoonjo for the link!) It was SOOO easy.

I'm a Sucker

Last Friday, I attended a work Christmas Party and through the glass door of the house, I saw the cutest stray kitten ever.  After feeding it chucks of spiral cut ham, I knew I had to take her home.

Leo meeting the new kitten.

Review of Master Nursery Bumper Crop - worse than poop

I hate that my first review of a product has to be negative. In fact, I'd been holding out on posting this because I wanted to first have a lab test the product. But I've gotten the results, and I have to say, Master Nursery brand's Bumper Crop Soil Builder is just not a product I will ever use again.

Here's the full review...

Conserv O Gram - Easy to read information on preserving your personal treasures, or how to hoard for future generations

You may have noticed a new link in our Stuff We Like section to the National Park Service's Conserv O Gram. This is not a newsletter about trees. I swear.
Conserv O Gram is actually a series of pamphlets about preserving and caring for museum collections of all kinds. However, the information is also really helpful for anyone who wants to take care of their personal heirlooms and treasures, everything from photographs to old quilts. And for you hoarders, there's information to help make your stacks and stacks of newspapers last as long as possible...

The Joy of Being Alive

Sometimes I wonder why...
-E

Don't Eat the Edibles of Tomorrowland - A Botanical Tour of Disneyland

Going off on a little bit of a tangent, today we will venture out of my very idiosyncratic DIY garden, and instead look at the super professional gardens of Disneyland. A cynical person might say this is probably because I didn't get any work done this weekend and these were the only photos I had to share. Well, they may be right, but don't you want to know why you should never eat the edible plants at Tomorrowland?

So here's a little album and commentary of plants from my trip...

Succulent Wreaths

This weekend, Erin and I built succulent wreaths. So how did it go?...

Our New Conservation Website!

This is a little bit of a sidebar, but come check us out at our new website for private paper and objects art conservation. Then tell your friends! Then link to us! Please...



Los Angeles Art Conservation
www.losangelesartconservation.com

vintage bakelite light switch plates

Bakelite! The plastic that smells like formaldehyde when you rub it! Yummy!
Let's talk about this fun and historic thermosetting plastic, and where you can get a cool vintage Bakelite light switch plate like this one...

Short Book Reviews: Part I

I've been looking for a house now for about 4-5 months, and, so far, it's been pretty disappointing.  Every offer I've put in has been counted by an all cash offer, which is almost always accepted over normal bids. At first, when I thought finding a house was imminent, I lost sleep over all the things I didn't know about - like how I was going to unclog my sink or how I was going to layout my garden, which I hadn't seen even yet.  The answer to my sleepless nights: research!  I realized I knew nothing about home improvement or gardening, so I hit the bookshelves at home depot (and at Jennifer's house) and this is what I found....

Cheap Plant Markers From Plastic Utensils

Here's a quick suggestion for cheap plant markers that reuses something difficult to recycle: plastic utensils with writing in grease pencil (aka china marker).

Composting for Beginners

 

This past weekend, I attended a composting workshop at the Milagro Allegro community garden in Highland Park, which was taught by master gardener Lora Hall.  Having no previous experience in composting myself, I sat through the hour-long lecture with an expression of awe and fear. 

RACCOONS!!! - Anatomy of a Vegetable Massacre

Animals vandalized my garden last night! I say vandalized because I don't even think they ate anything. They just showed up, broke stuff, dug stuff up, had themselves one of those rave parties the kids are into, and then left!

Book Repair Part III - Ta Da!

Don't worry folks, we're almost done here. I would just like to point out that I never said the repair would be fun. In fact, every time a recently published book falls apart on me, I get closer to splurging on a Kindle or some other e-reader. 

Happy Halloween!

Pumpkin Kanye would like to wish you a spooky Halloween. May autotuned theremin music haunt your evening. (My cousin made this jack o' lantern today. She's 22 years old and had never carved a pumpkin before. Shocking! We had to rectify the situation immediately!)

- J

Book Repair Part II - It's All About the Glue

So now that you've spent a bunch of time removing crappy glue (see Book Repair Part I), you'll want to find some good glue to use for the new binding. There's a few other items you'll need to get together too. I probably should have discussed materials earlier, but I didn't. So now here's a quick list of all the materials you're going to want to get ready (I'll go more into detail about them as we discuss the process)...

Book Repair Part I - Comedic Ironies

Irony #1 - Currently one of the most common book-making methods uses an all glue binding. This binding is weak, often falls apart immediately, and even when working properly makes it difficult to open a book completely; and it is called, Perfect Binding. That is the actual name of the binding method... Perfect...

Irony #2 - The book we will be repairing today, which fell apart because it used this terrible, poor quality, Perfect binding, is actually a catalog for archival, conservation, and preservation supplies... Naturally...

Jack O' Lantern Jade Plant Planter

We have a pumpkin carving contest at work every year. This year, I made a pumpkin planter filled with Jade Plant and Elephant Bush cuttings.

Nuts to That

Our LACC home repair class was canceled! We were totally looking forward to learning about electrical wiring, plumbing, and drywall repair.  To subdue some of our disappointment, we’ve refocused our energies and are now thinking about applying to a Master Gardener class.

Halloween Costumes for Your Garden

My brussels sprouts are going as the Bride of Frankenstein. 

...I know, but let me explain... 

My New Buddy

To the world, this is Lenard!

 The intellectual

Station Wagons Rule!

Because even in a small wagon like mine, you can still fit two giant bales of straw. It's time to refresh the mulch in my vegetable garden. This is the second year I've gone to Stephen's Hay and Grain for my straw mulch. A single bale lasts a long time. There's still quite a few seeds in the straw, but I make my mulch layers so thick that it's not generally a problem for me. And at $7.95 per bale, you can't beat the price!
-J

Fall is for PLANT SALES!

I love plants. I love sales. I love plant sales! Squeeeeeeeeeeeeal! This weekend Erin and I went to the Huntington Botanical Gardens plant sale and the Theodore Payne Foundation Fall Festival members' pre-sale. We also realized we may be plant hoarders. Could a cable TV reality series be soon to follow?

Sunset Nursery: Take My Money, Please!

In the past month, I've become completely obsessed with cacti and succulents.  The tiny balcony attached to my apartment is filled to capacity with varieties of aeoniums, agaves, euphorbias, kalanchoes, and tons of other plants whose names I can’t remember right now.  I even started moving specimens to my parents’ house to make space for new ones. 

Since my cactus-hoarding days began, I've been to no less than 10 nurseries in the greater Los Angeles area.  Armstrong is super cute but pricey, and Home Depot has a surprising variety of plants at low prices (I found a dragon fruit tree once!).  The California Cactus Center has an amazing variety of succulents and cacti, but can also be quite expensive. Out of all the places I've visited, Sunset Boulevard Nursery in East Hollywood has the best selection of cacti and succulents at the most reasonable cost.

Candy Plants: Part 1

Did you know that there is a plant that smells exactly like an orange Tic Tac?  It's known as Osmanthus frangrans var. aurantiacus, or "Sweet Olive."  After eating one of its orange flowers, I realized the delicious smell was not translated into flavor.  If you are heading to the Huntington Gardens, you can find these trees in bloom near the parking lot outside of the library building.
-E

It's October... Or as it is known to Southern California gardeners, "Spring Part Deux: The Reckoning!"

It's still pretty warm, but it's supposed to cool down soon, so I began pulling up my summer vegetables to prep the ground for some cool season veggies. When I discovered, to my horror, evidence of nematodes. Guh-ross. Or at least I'm pretty sure I did. There were gnarly gall and cysts on lots of the roots. (This also explains the poor yield of cucumbers, zucchinis, and heirloom tomatoes I had all season. My hybrid tomatoes and peppers did fine, but that's probably because they were resistant varieties.) First, I flipped out. Then I started looking for a solution. I referred to all the gardening books I had at hand, scoured my favorite garden websites, and googled nematodes...

REEMAY: From the lab to the garden

Or: Helping your garden survive a heat wave with salvaged materials

Reemay is a non-woven, spun-bond polyester fabric. Paper conservators use it for many purposes: supporting artwork during bathing or humidification, as a release layer for mending or lining, etc. Textile conservators also use it for similar purposes. Object conservators can use it too: as an archival storage material, for leather repairs, to make Halloween ghost decorations, and so forth. Reemay can be reused in the lab. But sometimes it just gets too funky to keep using on artwork and artifacts. This is where my hoarding sensibilities really pay off. I can't bear the thought of tossing old Reemay just because it's dirty by conservation standards, because it's still really clean by garden standards. So instead of throwing it out, I take it home, while mumbling, "Score!" 

Reemay gets used in the garden quite a lot. Usually in garden catalogues it's called "floating row cover," or some variant of that. It will let water in, and a portion of light. Depending on the thickness or weight of the particular Reemay you have, you can use it to protect your plants from light frosts or exclude bugs. This particular heat-wave weekend, I'm using some scraps I've saved to provide shade for pea and flower seedlings that I had sowed earlier in the month, when it was really really cold (not loving this confused weather). We're expecting at least another two days of temperatures near or past the century mark, and I'm not sure how well this is going to work, but I figure it's worth a shot. 

Going Live and Upcoming Articles

Welcome to our launch party! You are reading the inaugural post of our new home improvement blog. We will post things we know and things we learn that will hopefully help you in some way, or at least entertain you. 

Some of our upcoming articles:

• Mini-series: Reporting from the LACC community extension class in home repair
• Integrated pest management
• Personal dragon fruit craze
• First timer looking for a house in Los Angeles
• Archival framing of photos and artwork
• Horror stories of home repair

Stay tuned...