Solar oven

This solar oven is based on the plans by Joe Radabaugh. They are very well thought out: the mixture of water and glue goes onto the foil smoothly; the pieces fit together pretty well, the collector folds up nicely. And you can cook many, many dishes in one of these. Today, we baked cookies, which we overdid a little; cooked an egg; boiled water for tea; and started pepper-parmesan bread. So easy! Free cooking! No fuel required! No pollution! Brilliant!

Solar cooker

Made a solar cooker from a car windshield shade! Simple, and cost about $9 in materials. It is incredibly straightforward to put together. The windshield shade cost about $6 from Pet Boys, and I also bought some velcro for less than $3. And a special oven bag. The whole design is a mini portable greenhouse (the plastic oven bag) that sits inside a solar collector (the windshield shade folded up in a cone.) The whole thing folds up nicely, is relatively easy and light to move around and reposition, and it works OK. I've used it lots of times to boil water for making tea.


But the bag isn't large enough to fit much into. And the cooker is difficult to position. The original plans must have used a shade that was much stiffer than the one I bought, which was the cheapest one stocked by Pet Boys. You can mold it into the desired shape with your hands, but a moment after you let go, it flops and sags. I ended up pinning strings to the border of the shade and using the strings to stake out the collector. This makes it quite inconvenient to shift with the sun. And the cake rack kept falling into the bucket. This isn't an easy cooker to use, at least not the way I built it, with the floppy shade.

Oddity of online purchases

OK, trip done, back to 2008.

An oddity of buying things online from Amazon--whose website I love, for their enormous investment in the infrastructure and development for storing all those reviews by customers -- is their weird policy for free shipping. I just bought something for which the total came to $24.99, one penny less than qualifies for free shipping. The shipping total was a bit over $5. So anything less than $5 shipped from Amazon is free, but it's hard to find stuff for less than $5.In the modern age, it is just guaranteed that someone has put a solution to this problem somewhere on the web, and as expected, here is a whole compilation of various solutions:

http://www.wisebread.com/filler-strategies-for-amazon-s-free-super-saver-shipping

Ha! So Amazon paid me about $5 to accept an espresso spoon, whatever that is. This is a nonsensical business decision on the part of Amazon -- why does anyone still think the macroeconomics idea that the market is rational?

Seaside Daisy (Erigeron glaucus)

Nice little low green plant with daisies. The daisies look white, pale pink, pale blue, or lavender, depending on the light. The ones in the photo are in partial sun in the summer, full shade in the winter. They get a little bit of supplemental water: I spray them for a few minutes when I water my street tree every few weeks in the summer. They have spread out to make a pretty nice groundcover. In the picture, the seaside daisy is the green plant to the center bottom left-ish with 2 white flowers in the center. This one has been there about a year and has been blooming periodically the whole time.

Dwarf Coyote Brush (Baccharis pilularis Twin Peaks)

For me, this has formed a low, dense, green mat of groundcover, filling a spot in the hellstrip that gets very little supplemental water for the last 4 years. Las Pilitas apparently hates this variety, but I bought this plant before reading their opinion, and it has worked very well for me in an awkward spot so far. I'm 4 miles from the ocean, and they seem to have had trouble with it inland, so perhaps that's the critical difference. Or maybe it's going to die in the middle in a few more years. Hope not!

It's nice because it's completely green, no hint of gray. A nice contrast to other CA natives. And it totally covers the ground, looking lush and dense. It has yellow flowers, but they're barely noticeable.

Has received no care from me since the first summer. This nursery says to shear hard once a year. Have never done that.

This spot gets full sun in the summer, partial sun in the winter. The width of the planted area in the photo is 4 feet. The Theodore Payne website says it should be in full sun, but it has been OK for hte last 4 years in pretty dense shade during the winters at my house.

Giant Wild Rye (Elymus condensatus Canyon Prince)

Very cool-looking grass. Big! Mine is about 4 feet wide after 4 years, and starting to look a bit squashed in the spot it lives in. Las Pilitas says it should get about 30 inches of rain a year, so our 15-20 inches in LA is a bit low, but my Canyon Prince is near a street tree that has to be watered, so it gets a little extra water anyway.

In the closeup photo, the wide, bluish leaves belong to Canyon Prince, and the narrow, green ones to deergrass.

It has blue-gray-silver strap-like leaves, about an inch across at their widest, and a couple of feet tall. It has a pleasant, mounded shape that doesn't need pruning or attention. It looks good all year. Mine is in full sun in the summer, partial sun in the winter. Has never needed any work after the first planting and watering.

I liked this big guy so much that I went back to several more 1-gallon pots of it at Theodore Payne. They were out of the Canyon Prince variety, so I bought 3 of the plain species Elymus condensatus. Big mistake. Totally lame-looking plant. Flops over, looking messy, lacks the nice, dense, moundy shape of the Canyon Prince, and is a boring plain pale green instead of the cool blue-gray of Canyon Prince. They never looked like anything but weeds, and I pulled them all out after a year and threw them away. An expensive mistake.

Yarrow, Achillea

Yarrow (achillea millefolium) is pretty, is easy to grow from seed, has lovely soft, ferny foliage, big flower heads that dry in place and still look pretty good. It's one of the few natives that has grown well from seed for me. Although several references say it's good for dry shade, it hasn't done much for me in the totally unwatered part of my shady front yard. Each plant is still a couple of inches across after a couple of years. But the somewhat watered ones look great.

It appears that there is a European yarrow and a native one...can't tell what I have. The seeds came from Theodore Payne.