A Low-Tech Experiment in Growing Oyster Mushrooms

February 3, 2022

...tree. You can also, by the way, use straw instead of wood chips. By January 18th the oyster mushrooms were “pinning,” that is, beginning to fruit out of the 1/4 inch holes. On January 27th, I harvested my first cluster of mushrooms. I can report that blue oyster mushrooms are delicious, with a concentrated umami/super-mushroomy flavor. One curious thing: the mushrooms I harvested look more like the Italian Oyster mushrooms that North Spore sells,...

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Made in the shade- Passive cooling

Homegrown Neighbor

September 28, 2009

Domesticus

14 Comments

...s in the Winter can allow sunlight to enter your house in the cool season, making them ideally suited to passive heating and cooling. You can also shade your windows. Solar shades project out over a window, thus blocking the highest angle of the sun. When the angle of the sun is lower and the heat and sun less extreme, in Winter and during sunset and sunrise in summer, sunlight can still get in the windows. A roof that projects past the walls of t...

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Maggots!

Mr. Homegrown

July 29, 2006

Composting, Gardening

2 Comments

...brown, like dead leaves, sawdust and dry grass. Nitrogen materials include fruit, vegetable scraps and coffee grounds. The type of pile you construct depends upon the materials you have available to compost. Becky had lots of grass and leaves on a fairly large piece of property and the three pile system seemed the best to deal with a large amount of materials. We purchased our bin from the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Sanitation which hosts infor...

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Boozing Bees

Mr. Homegrown

January 20, 2020

Animals, Bees

1 Comment

...issue, there’s an article about an attempt to reconcile the need to spray fruit trees with pesticide and the impact of those chemicals on bees. Another talk at the conference by Dr. May Berenbaum of Cornell, that I was only able to hear part of, looked at the history of the use of pesticides. Honeybees are a complex organism and their interaction with pesticides can often work in counter-intuitive ways, as Berenbaum showed in a study that proved...

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

Mr. Homegrown

May 29, 2019

Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

10 Comments

...ecause his philosophy demands that you to focus intent on the garden, thus making the act of gardening a kind of sacred duty. But, this winter, I’ve still got a lot of tasks to complete and don’t have time to develop either a biodynamic compost pile or, gasp, thoughtstyle my way to some new, alternative method of sacramental gardening. So I decided to try straw bale gardening again. My last attempt, that I blogged about and even did a video of, wo...

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