Search Results for: label/bikes/page/2/2011/04/making-it

393 results

Yucca!

Mr. Homegrown
Foraging
1 Comment
“Now on the western side of the First World, in a place that later was to become the Land of Sunset, there appeared the Blue Cloud, and opposite it there appeared the Yellow Cloud. Where they came together First Woman was formed, and with her the yellow corn. This ear of corn was also perfect. With First Woman there came the white shell and the turquoise and the yucca.” -The Origin Myths of the Navajo Indians The Creation or Age of...

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Media Fasting

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
19 Comments
Ant Farm’s Media Burn For the last year I’ve been trying, as an experiment, to see what it would be like to cut off the news. That means no newspaper, no Google news, no NPR, no broadcast television of any kind. At the beginning of my media fast, I was concerned that I would somehow lose touch with reality, with important details of what’s going on in the world. In fact, some news does reach me, filtered through conve...

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Homegrown Evolution Visits the Los Angeles County Fair

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
2 Comments
...the return of draft horses to Los Angeles. To preview that possibility and experience the fading agricultural glory of Los Angeles County we headed to the Los Angeles County Fair this past week. Here’s a pictorial tour: It was a real pleasure to view the elegant moves of the draft horses and their handlers. The competition we watched involved maneuvering a carriage around obstacles, backing up into a tight space, stopping at a mail box and...

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Seedling Disaster!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Mistakes, Seeds, Vegetable Gardening
33 Comments
“No one talks of failure as anything but shameful; this is wrongheaded and foolish . . . Mistakes are synonymous with learning. Failing is unavoidable. Making is a process, not an end. It is true that deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems when they come up.” -Tom Jennings, as quoted in Mark Frauenfelder’s excellent new book, Made by Hand: Searching f...

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How to start a chicken retirement community

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
34 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: So–here’s the story of another mistake we made. When Erik and I first got chickens we didn’t lay out a plan for dealing with the chickens as they aged. That was the mistake. Simple as that. Make your plans, people! We learned how to slaughter chickens–we knew we could do it if we needed to–but we never really sat down and decided what would happen to our ladies when they stopped laying. We̵...

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Build a Solar Dehydrator

Mr. Homegrown
Appropriate Technology, Preparedness, Solar
18 Comments
Like many of you, I suspect, we’ve got a few too many tomatoes at this time of the year. One of our favorite ways to preserve our modest harvest is with our solar dehydrator. There’s nothing like the taste of sun dried tomatoes, but unless you live in a very dry desert climate like Phoenix, Arizona you can’t just set fruit out in the sun and expect it to do anything but go moldy. In most places in the world, including here in...

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Trapping bees out of a kitchen vent

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
3 Comments
...c” box (a cardboard box that holds five frames) that contains open brood comb, cells with eggs and larvae, from another hive. The workers can’t get back into their old home, adopt the brood comb in the box and use it to create a new queen. The process takes at least four to six weeks since you have to wait for the old queen to stop laying eggs and for all the bees in the wall to make their way out. At then end of the six weeks the bee...

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It’s Calendula Season!

Mrs. Homegrown
Body Care, Domesticus, Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs
17 Comments
Just a reminder to you all that Calendula officinalis (aka Pot Marigold) is super-easy to grow in the garden. Why should you grow Calendula? To make Calendula infused olive oil, of course– as I’m doing above, with inevitable feline assistance. Well, that’s why I grow it. Calendula infused olive oil is the base of all my lotions and potions, because it is such a potent healer of dry, itchy, burnt or otherwise irritated skin. I&...

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Kelly’s Shibori Challenge

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus
20 Comments
like red cabbage and sour grass, following the instructions in The Handbook of Natural Plant Dyes: Personalize Your Craft with Organic Colors from Acorns, Blackberries, Coffee, and Other Everyday Ingredients by Sasha Duerr. It’s a gorgeous little book and very inspirational–we’ll see if the instructions work. Part the Second: I will apply these dyes to fabric using shibori techniques. Shibori is the art of dying fabric using p...

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Allium ursinum

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening
1 Comment
thrives in moist, acidic soil–forest conditions, in other words. In short, not appropriate for our climate in Los Angeles, but folks in the northwest might consider planting some. Like all members of the Allium species it’s toxic to dogs, but we’ve never had a problem with our dog eating onions (he prefers raiding our avocado tree and tomato bushes for illicit snacks). Special thanks to Steve Rowell of the Center for Land Use I...

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