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

306 results

How To Design a Garden Step I: Identifying Goals

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
7 Comments
...s space for native plants areas that are semi-wild and not often visited  space for the composting Think and meditate on your goals before drawing up a plan.  And for those of us in the urban homesteading movement, I think it’s important to measure productivity in more ways than just the amount of food you get from your yard.  How will the garden provide peace and well being? Educational opportunities? Ways to commune with nature? Some g...

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Tame the Email Beast and Have Time To Run Your Urban Homestead

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
19 Comments
...modern life from which to “harvest” some time other than from evening TV-viewing hours. Email is where I’ve begun my time harvesting lately. While incredibly useful, email has become a daily, herculean task. It’s also a medium that’s as addictive as crack (there has been debate about including email addiction in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Like lab rats waiting for a treat to shoot dow...

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Tassajara Cookbook

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Reviews
7 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: A quick cookbook review for ya’ll. I’m having lots of fun with the Tassajara Cookbook which I have out from the library. So much fun that I’m considering buying it. Tassajara Zen Mountain Center is a Buddhist monestery here in California. This book is based on their famous bagged lunch offerings for their guests. This means it’s all picnic/finger food sort of stuff. This suits me fine because summe...

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Our Happy Foot/Sad Foot Sign

Mrs. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
16 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: Nothing about growing or making today–sorry to go off topic (Erik is wincing a bit as I post this), but I want to talk about our Foot.  It’s a very local sort of story, but isn’t localism what it’s all about? The podiatrist’s sign above marks the entrance to our neighborhood. It charmed us the first time we saw it: It’s a foot–with feet!  And we immediately named it the Happy Foot/S...

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National Wildlife Federation Teams with Scotts

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
8 Comments
Time to take down those “certified wildlife habitat” signs as it seems the National Wildlife Federation has entered into a “partnership” with Scotts, manufacturers of a host of wildlife unfriendly synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Some thoughts: Scotts products do grave injury to microbial and fungal life in the soil to say nothing of insects. The NWF has too narrow an idea of what constitutes “wildlife”...

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Make a Spore Print

Mr. Homegrown
Mushrooms
5 Comments
Making a mushroom spore print is a fun activity for the kidlings and it’s simple: 1. Pick a mushroom (from the wild or the supermarket) and break off the stem. 2. Put your mushroom, spore side down, on a piece of white paper (or a 50/50 split of of dark paper and white paper to check subtleties in the color). 3. Put a glass over the mushroom and wait 24 hours. The next day you should have something that looks like the picture above. Spore...

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Alternatives to the Funeral Industrial Complex

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
40 Comments
A casket made by the monks of Saint Joseph Abbey in Louisiana. If there’s one business I’d like to see shut down and rethought it would be the funeral industry. I’m not going to mince words. The funeral directors I’ve had to deal with just wanted to turn grief into dollars. When my dad passed on his pastor warned me about what would happen at the funeral home, telling me that they would try to up-sell my mom and I. He sa...

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Irish Soda Bread

Mr. Homegrown
Bread, Food
1 Comment
...d with the recipe my comrade in arms decided to post as representative of the best of quick breads. For years I’ve been making a much better whole wheat-ish quick bread (which he seems to have forgotten) and this is how it goes: Irish Brown Soda Bread 1 3/4 c. all purpose flour1 3/4 c. whole wheat flower3 T. toasted wheat bran3 T. toasted wheat germ2 T. old fashioned oats(note: change up or skip these nuggety bits as necessary–they ju...

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Saturday Linkages: Pig’s Milk, Hot Sauce, Clutter

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
3 Comments
...ports on Use of Non-Traditional Materials for Crop Production: http:// extension.agron.iastate.edu/compendium/ind ex.aspx  …   Cross-contamination: washing chicken or any meat is a bad idea | barfblog: http:// bit.ly/M4pybB   Making hot sauces with wild plants: http://www. urbanoutdoorskills.com/wildfoodlab.ht ml  …   How to Restore an Heirloom Axe | The Art of Manliness http:// artofmanliness.com/2012/07/17/how -to-restore-an-heirloom-axe/  …  ...

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