Book Review: My Side of the Mountain

November 30, 2012

...ok-learning alone. He needs a kindly old man to demonstrate the whole fire making process to him. So not only does the book show that failures are the merely part of the road to success, it also teaches us that sometimes we can figure things out by ourselves, if we persevere, but that sometimes we need good books, and sometimes we need good people to help us and show us the way. Erik and I speak of this often, in our books, on this blog and in our...

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Supper for a buck?

Mrs. Homegrown

February 25, 2013

Bean Fest, Food

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...One pound of dry beans makes about 6 cups of cooked beans. That’s a lot of food. I’m not going to try to do the math and add up the costs of the onion and herbs and olive oil I add to the beans. And I surely don’t have the patience to figure out the cost of the salad from our garden (do I have to figure in the mortgage?), but I do know that around this time of year I could forage a salad for free from the spring weeds. But for the sake of a sensat...

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Our new front yard, part 3: design

Mrs. Homegrown

November 17, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...what’s left of our wildlife, our native insects particularly, by planting food sources for them. Designing a community Rainer and West emphasize that a community is built in layers. They want close planting. They point out that a natural meadow, or even a vacant lot colonized by weeds, will host hundreds of species on one patch of ground. Compare this to the paltry biodiversity of our typical yard, where the number of species can often be counted...

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Creating a Moon Garden

Mr. Homegrown

July 17, 2014

Design, Gardening

2 Comments

...t pollinators and other wildlife. Bornstein had a number of great tips for making a garden interesting at night: Consider color. White flowers, of course, will pop out under moonlight. But yellow flowers stand out even more. We’re lucky in Southern California to have a lot of native plants with silvery grey leaves (an evolutionary adaption of dry climate plants). Masses of silvery grey leaves stand out well at night. Include a contrasting backgrou...

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Do Something Day

Mr. Homegrown

November 28, 2008

Thoughtstylings

4 Comments

...is fridge is sure to maintain the temperature and spiritual balance of all food. Due to health and dietary restrictions and my strict belief in the tenets of Mahayana Buddhist teachings, I asked his holiness Tenzing Norbu to bless the fridge upon his last visit. He guaranteed blessings and long life would be bestowed upon the fridge and the contents it protects. We have not used the fridge yet and unfortunately we need to move and can not bring th...

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