Easy Gardening

Q: Just off the side door in my house are the stairs that go down to the basement. The ceiling overhead is sloped where the underside of the stairs to the upstairs go.

The house was built almost a hundred years ago, with plastered walls and ceilings, and there are a lot of cracks in the plaster in this area. I have tried spackling the cracks and repainting them, but they keep coming back. They seem to open up in the winter and close a bit in the summer. Regardless, the spackle doesnt keep them sealed.

Would using caulk help? If so, what is the best way to use it?

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With all the hoopla surrounding the release of the final installment of the “Harry Potter” films this weekend, you may not have realized the much-anticipated by all us geeks anyway film “Captain America: The First Avenger” opens next Friday, July 22. The film marks the first live-action feature starring the Star-Spangled Avenger since 1990′s “Captain America,” starring none other than Matt Salinger son of the late and famously reclusive author J.D. Read more…

SAN JOSE, Calif. For years, Aviad Giat missed the sun-ripened tomatoes and strawberries of his youth. An Israeli native transplanted to urban Oakland, Calif., he became increasingly nostalgic about his childhood visits to his uncles’ farms in Zichron Yaakov.

“Deep down inside I guess I carried a farmer” to America, says Giat, 38, who had to make do with growing cilantro, rosemary, mint and other herbs in window boxes in the city.

Then one day in 2009 he and his wife, Cristele, were apartment hunting in the Grand Lake neighborhood and spotted a “for rent” sign for a seventh-floor unit in an eight-floor building. Read more…

A generation or two ago, heirloom seeds were a bit of a mystery.

“Nobody knew what heirlooms were a piece of jewelry from Grandma?” John Torgrimson says. “Now it has a certain panache.”

Torgrimson is the executive director of Seed Savers Exchange, a nonprofit organization that over the past 35 years has helped create that panache by educating gardeners about heirlooms and preserving the heritage of hundreds of vegetables. Seeds from its collection have ended up in gardens around the world, whether sold directly to gardeners or to seed companies.

“I think we helped develop the heirloom concept for people,” he says. Read more…