Search Results for: label/book reviews/page/32/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

777 results

Deep Bedding for Chickens

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Composting
42 Comments
We’ve got about 5-6″ of loose stuff on the floor of our chicken run. Underneath that, it’s black gold. Around this time of year, folks are getting chickens. Some for the first time. So I figured it was time to talk about deep bedding again. I know we’ve written about it before, in our book, or on this blog, but this advice bears repeating: Nature abhors bare ground.  Line your chicken coop and run with a thick l...

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The Pressure is On

Mr. Homegrown
Food
14 Comments
My pressure cooker is my new best friend. Especially when I’m not in the mood for cooking, I can toss a few ingredients in, lock the lid down and come back to a healthy, nutritious supper in just a few minutes. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a pressure cooker cookbook up to my standards. All of the ones I checked out from the library, even those newly published, seemed stuck in the 1950s tuna noodle casserole era, when pressure cooki...

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Borage (Borago officinalis)

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs, Vegetable Gardening
9 Comments
Borage, just about to bloom. Borage is an ugly sounding name for a beautiful and useful plant. The moniker is probably a corruption of the Andalusian Arabic abu buraq or “father of sweat”, a reference to it’s diaphoretic qualities1. Both the leaves and the blue flowers (sometimes white flowers) are edible and have a refreshing cucumber like taste. Borage is an annual herb that we plant in the late fall here in Los Angeles for...

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Advances in Gardening: The Trough of Garlic

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
7 Comments
Remember a while back I posted a picture of Erik in a manly pose, whomping our patio with his sledgehammer? He took out a strip of concrete and built this over the hole: a new planting bed.  That’s the Germinator on the right, butting up to it and my Fan behind it.  When we’re done with all this redoing, we’ll clean everything up and take some wider shots so it all begins to make sense. For now–believe me–it’...

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Free Introduction to Permaculture

Mr. Homegrown
Permaculture
RLeave a comment
Local permaculture expert David Khan will be presenting an introduction to permaculture on Saturday January 20th 2007 at 10:00 am at the Audubon Center at Debs Park: 4700 North Griffin Ave.Los Angeles, CA 90031 After the lecture author Shay Salomon and photographer Nigel Valdez will do a slide show and talk about their book Little House on a Small Planet. SurviveLA attended Khan’s introductory lecture last month and found it thought provok...

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How to Juice Prickly Pear Fruit

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, How-to
9 Comments
Joseph working the thrift-store mill I always know it’s prickly pear fruit season when questions start coming in on a recipe I did for a prickly pear fruit jelly. Unfortunately, the mucilaginous and seedy texture of the fruit makes it difficult to work with. The only tested recipe I could find, for a prickly pear marmalade in the Ball Blue Book, says nothing about how to seed or juice the fruit. With the assistance of two fellow...

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Tuesday Morning Fruit Linkages

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening
1 Comment
We’ve been reading Adam Leith Gollner’s entertaining book The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession and Gollner mentions a number of intreguing internet resources, perfect for a little post holiday weekend surfing: More than you ever wanted to know about the world’s smelliest fruit: Durian (Durian Palace) The California Rare Fruit Growers, “Pushing the Limits of Fruit Growing, Worldwide...

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Vegetable Garden Update: Too Much Salad

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
11 Comments
It’s amazing what you can grow in just a 4 foot by 8 foot area. From top to bottom in the picture above: Escarole mix: Misticanza Di Indivie E ScaroleLettuce: Lattuga Quattro StagioniChicory: Cicoria Variegata Di CastelfrancoDandelion GreensSwiss Chard: Verde Da Taglio Approximately half the bed is devoted to salad makings. Combined with another 2 foot by 4 foot area of arugula elsewhere in our yard, we’ve had a whole lot of salads...

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Bantam Returns

Homegrown Neighbor
Animals, Chickens
8 Comments
Homegrown Neighbor here: I’ve been busy in the garden and letting the neighbors focus on their book, so I haven’t been blogging in a while. But today something very special happened that I have to share with you, dear readers. My bantam chicken, Debbie, the lighter colored chicken in the photo, disappeared last week. She simply didn’t come in at chicken bed time. This is very unusual. The chickens usually all line up and go...

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Why You Should Avoid Staking Trees

Mr. Homegrown
Fruit Trees, Gardening, Miscellaneous, Trees
6 Comments
The correct way to stake a tree. Image from the Vacaville Tree Foundation To answer the question of why tree staking should be avoided, one can turn to the latest Extension Service advice or to the nearly 2000 year old words of Seneca: No tree becomes rooted and sturdy unless many a wind assails it. For by its very tossing it tightens its grip and plants its roots more securely; the fragile trees are those that have grown in a sunny valley. It...

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