Our Rocket Stove

...ew small branches or twigs. Before we built the rocket stove we considered making a cob oven, a mud domed wood fired oven in which you can cook bread and pizza. There’s a trend in the eco-world to build cob ovens and we felt a certain pressure to keep up with the eco-Joneses. We started to build the base for one and then began to think about how often we would actually build a fire, especially considering that it has to burn for several hours befo...

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William Morris is the Marie Kondo We Need

...l dazed at the thought of the immensity of work which is undergone for the making of useless things. It would be an instructive day’s work for any one of us who is strong enough to walk through two or three of the principal streets of London on a weekday, and take accurate note of everything in the shop windows which is embarrassing or superfluous to the daily life of a serious man. Nay, the most of these things no one, serious or unserious, wants...

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Straw Bale Garden Part V: Growing Vegetables

...seedlings. Others, like this cucumber, I sowed directly into the bales by making a little hole and putting in the seed with some home made seedling mix. Again, the vegetables in the bales are doing better than veggies in my two remaining raised beds. The reason, I believe, is that the beds are depleted and the compost I added to them was low quality. While more resource intensive than growing in the ground or raised bed, straw bale gardening has...

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Prickly Pear Jelly Recipe

...of cactus fruit to deal with this season. Next year we’ll take a crack at making a batch of Tiswin, the sacred beer of the Papagos Indians of central Mexico (usually made with saguaro fruit but prickly pear fruit will do in a pinch). This August we’re making jelly. Here’s how to do it: 1. Taking reader Steven’s (of the fine blog Dirt Sun Rain) suggestion, burn off the nasty spines by holding the fruit over a burner on the stove for a few seconds....

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So Wrong it’s Right

...st post a few corrections this morning. Please note our corrected posts on making prickly pear cactus jelly and on our tomatoes. Also, our poll results are in and you all want more info on growing your own food! We note with some dismay the low rating of the harangue, the popularity of which is a minority view not surprisingly expressed by two friends and professional harangists, one an attorney and the other LA bike activist extraordinaire SoapBo...

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