Search Results for: label/2011/04/making-it

297 results

A Bustle In Your Hedgerow: California Natives for your Vegetable Garden

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Native Plants, Pests
8 Comments
...or randomly throughout) may increase the dispersal of small-bodied insect natural enemies through the fields. Scott Kleinrock, who is in charge of the new Ranch project at the Huntington, tipped me off to this research and is making use of a lot of California natives to create the urban residential equivalent of a hedgerow. In short, a hedgerow in our yards and urban spaces means making sure to include lots of natives and flowering plants that ca...

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Free Preparedness E-Books

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness, Resources
10 Comments
Camp loom, for making mats and mattresses from the 1911 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook Through a circuitous bit of aimless interweb searching I came across a huge list of downloadable urban homesteading/gardening/survivalist manuals on a site called hardcorepreppers.com. Unfortunately, this site is so popular that it seems to be down every time I’ve checked. But thanks to Google’s caching feature I was able to access a li...

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Some Thoughts on Mead

Mr. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food
19 Comments
I’ve had mixed success with making my own mead. One batch I made was OK and a few others tasted, as Mrs. Root Simple put it, “like a desperate white wine substitute for a zombie apocalypse.” Last year I attended a mead tasting put on by America’s first homebrew club the Maltose Falcons. Somehow I neglected to blog about it, so better late than never, here’s what I learned: If you want decent mead you have to brew...

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Grassfed Turkey Cooking Tips from Shannon Hayes

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
4 Comments
...f they have “access” to the outdoors – even if the “outdoors” happens to be feces-laden penned-in concrete pads outside the barn door, with no access to grass. “Pastured” implies that the bird was out on grass for most of its life, where it ate grass and foraged for bugs, in addition to receiving some grain” Wishing all of you a happy, pastured holiday season....

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How To Freeze Fruits and Vegetables

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation
11 Comments
Photo by Flickr user leibolmai Freezing foods is just about the most boring food preservation method. It’s also the easiest and best way to preserve nutrients. But, when it comes to freezing fresh vegetables from the garden there is one important step: blanching. Blanching slows down enzymatic activity that can deteriorate the quality of what you freeze. How much to blanch depends on the vegetable in question. Thankfully there’s a ha...

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Stickers for the Organic Gardener

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
6 Comments
Via BoingBoing a clever re-purposing: “Evil Mad Scientist Labs wants you to proudly label your organic garden with these handsome “Now Slower and with More Bugs!” stickers, originally produced to adorn software products. The influence of the Slow Food movement is increasing, and gardening is getting ever more popular. Even the tech bloggers are posting about local pollinators and getting beehives. In this environment, it is fi...

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Advances in Gardening Series: A Progress Report

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
13 Comments
Yes, you’ve seen this before. But Erik looks so bad ass with his sledgehammer, I just had to put it up again. Some of you may remember that back in November we ripped out most of our back yard, redesigning the layout to maximize our growing space, and accommodate interests we have now that we didn’t have when we put in the original plantings. We’ve learned from this experience that you should never be afraid to change...

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Quince: the “Poster Child of Slowness”

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Gardening
7 Comments
Oops–I think they mean “quince“ A year ago I planted a “Karp’s Sweet Quince” tree from Raintree Nursery and blogged about it, saying that I’d like to hear from fruit expert David Karp for whom the tree is named. Karp called me a few weeks ago to say that he was working on a quince article for the LA Times, “There’s a new taste for quince“. In the article Karp discusses varieties that...

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