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

358 results

Using Kosher Salt for Making Pickles

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation
19 Comments
...t for fermented pickles, you must weigh out the proper amount.Weigh out 73⁄4 ounces (220 grams) of flaked salt, and you will have the equivalent of 1 cup of canning and pickling salt. This same publication also notes how easy it is to find pickling salt and how hard it is to find kosher salt. It’s just the opposite here in Los Angeles. So what kind of salt do you use for pickling and fermenting? What’s the easiest to find where you l...

Continue reading…

Our Books

Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World , by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen This book, written by a husband-and-wife team of die-hard DIYers, will leave you thinking you can take on the world and win. –Milwaukee Journal Sentinal My favorite of all these recent books by far… — Kirkus Reviews A how-to book providing you with all of the tools you need to become a producer instead of a consumer and transform your h...

Continue reading…

Saturday Linkages: Making Things and Herding Ducks

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
1 Comment
Herding ducks. Via The Tangled Nest. DIY Simple Swiss fences for the homestead: http:// dirttime.com/?p=2687 via Practical Parsimony Build-It-Solar Blog: Comparing the Performance of Two DIY Solar Water Heaters http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/07/compar ing-performance-of-two-diy-solar.html?spref=tw  … Build-It-Solar Blog: Using Your Lawn Sprinkling Water to Cool the House… http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/08/using- yo...

Continue reading…

The Making of a Great Olive Oil

Mr. Homegrown
Food
4 Comments
...e At the end of all this machinery the oil pours out of a spigot and into a steel drum: We all had the great privilege of tasting the freshly squeezed oil. I won’t soon forget that heavenly flavor. Matt told us that it takes around a ton of olives to make 25 to 30 gallons of oil. The olives come from a thousand trees that are tucked around the vineyards. If you’re ever in Northern California the Preston Vineyard is well worth a v...

Continue reading…

Harvesting and Drying Calendula

Mrs. Homegrown
Body Care, Calendula series, Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs, How-to
32 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: Okay, so in a previous post I talked about growing Calendula. This post I’m going to talk about harvesting and drying it. The next post I’ll do on the topic will be about making a skin-healing salve from the dried petals, olive oil and beeswax. When to harvest:  Start harvesting your Calendula as soon as the first flush of flowers is in full bloom. Don’t try to “save” the flowers. The more you...

Continue reading…

How to Make Soba Noodles

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
11 Comments
Last month I took an amazing class with author and chef Sonoko Sakai on how to make soba noodles by hand. She’s a great teacher and I managed to make a halfway decent couple of servings of noodles during the class. Like many Japanese arts, soba making has a series of very precise steps. The recipe itself is simple (just buckwheat flour and water), though you do have to pay close attention to the temperature and humidity in the room. Whil...

Continue reading…

Adventures in Gardening Series: Wrap up on the Hippie Heart: Growing lentils and flax

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
10 Comments
The Hippie Heart got a crew cut We’re clearing out our cool season crops for the warm season ones, so it’s time for some reporting on the new beds we’ve been profiling under the “Advances in Gardening” series. We’ll start with the Hippie Heart. The Hippie Heart is a heart-shaped bed where I was intending to experiment with planting seeds straight out of the pantry, ill-advised as that might seem,...

Continue reading…

More on our gardening disasters

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Mistakes, Thoughtstylings
15 Comments
We need to put the heart back into our garden. (Our Heart of Flax from way back in 2011) I thought I’d chime in on the subject of this year’s garden failures. Before I do, I’d like to thank you all for your kind advice and commiseration that you left on Erik’s post. First, I will agree that it really, truly has been a terrible year in the garden. Sometimes Erik gets a little melodramatic when it comes to the crop failure...

Continue reading…

CoEvolution Quarterly Online

Mr. Homegrown
Appropriate Technology, Gardening, Resources
4 Comments
While hunting down old appropriate technology resources on the Internet, I was delighted to find the winter 1978 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly, put out by the folks behind the Whole Earth Catalog. This issue of CoEvolution profiled Robert Kourik (which CoEvolution spells “Kourick”) who practiced permaculture before Bill Mollison gave it a name: [Kourick] is developing methods of growing edible and ornamental plants together for max...

Continue reading…

Mitchell Joachim’s Techno-Utopian Future

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
9 Comments
...loops could form the basis of a new faith to replace our current consumerist spirituality. In-Vitro Meat House. Mitchell Joachim At the risk of being a nattering nabob of negativity, I just have to say that I think it’s time to grow up and stop fantasizing about jet packs, hydroponic farms and electric cars.  We need to get realistic about our future and explore design work that lives within the resource limits of this planet. Li...

Continue reading…