Search Results for: label/fruits and veg

74 results

Deep Bedding for Chickens

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Composting
40 Comments
en, it will look like you spread it yourself. Start to think about your chicken coop/run as a compost pile rather than as an animal enclosure. That is what it will become. The chickens break down the bedding material, all the veg scraps you give them, and their own manure, through their constant scratching. Over time, the floor of the coop and/or run becomes a deep soft deposit of compost. Ours is sort of like quicksand. We throw all sorts of stu...

Continue reading…

Goat Worship: A Halloween Exclusive!

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Domesticus, Events, Goats
20 Comments
t kind of food? Milkers eat 2 flakes of hay each per day. The non-milkers eat 1 flake. (There are 10-12 flakes per bale, roughly.) Goats eat hay, but would prefer some nice foraged tree branches. They also get a little grain, veg scraps, and access to the condiment bar. See the next pic… This surprised me as a goat newbie: the goats get constant access to three nutritional supplements: kelp, mineral salts and baking soda. They nibb...

Continue reading…

Beans 101 (Return of Bean Friday!)

Mrs. Homegrown
Bean Fest, Food, How-to
16 Comments
s, of course. Keep a big pack of corn tortillas in the fridge and deploy for fast, cheap eating. Cheapo corn tortillas taste best if they’re toasted in skillet before serving. Fancy them up by chopping up whatever fresh vegetables and herbs you happen to have on hand (radish, cabbage, carrot, green onion, parsley, cilantro etc.) and sprinkling that on top. Add cheese and hot sauce and you are good to go. Warm the beans up and toss them with...

Continue reading…

The Barrier Method

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Pests
6 Comments
ld down around the edges with a variety of anchors, anything from bricks and boards to U shaped wire stakes. This keeps critters like digging skunks and birds out–but not insects. Sometimes we cover our veg beds with a very light floating row cover (Agribon 15) instead of aviary netting. This not only keeps out critters, but also blocks many insects, particularly the cabbage worms that harass our brassica crops. It’s...

Continue reading…

I like my chamomile stressed

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Herbs, Mistakes
22 Comments
This poor, abused little seedling is flowering like crazy. Mrs. Homegrown here: I made a mistake–I predicted a while ago that this would happen, and here it is. When we remodeled the yard and I set aside space for The Phan of Pharmacy ™ my goal was to maximize the production of herbs and flowers.  I prepped the ground in the fan like a fine flower or veg bed: double dug and richly amended. It was only aft...

Continue reading…

Fermenting culture wih Sandor Katz

Mrs. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food
4 Comments
e! His first book, Wild Fermentation, was one of those really important, life-changing books for me. It might sound strange to say this about a book on pickling, but it opened my eyes in many ways. And it taught me how to do vegetable and salt ferments, which are the backbone of my pickling practice. The daikon pickles we wrote about in The Urban Homestead are due to Wild Fermentation. Now he’s got a new book out, The Art of Fermentation,...

Continue reading…

Cat Poop Compost Installment #2

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Cats, Composting
15 Comments
need tons of nitrogen to balance them. So my preliminary finding on this point is that it might be help to add extra nitrogen when you add a new layer of litter. Extra nitrogen could come in the form of green yard trimmings, veg scraps, urine, fresh horse manure, etc. Today, though, I decided to add alfalfa meal because we had some wasting away in the garage. Alfalfa meal is ground up alfalfa. It’s used as a natural fertilizer and top dres...

Continue reading…

Noodler’s Ink Reusable Fountain Pen

Eric Thomason
Domesticus, Reviews
12 Comments
Julia just wrote a post on Ramshackle Solid about our newest solution to the frustration of disposable pens: Noodler’s Ink and fountain pens. From the Noodler’s website: Why Noodler’s? “Noodler’s Ink” has the lowest cost per volume in stores that carry it and it’s 100% made in the USA from cap to glass to ink. The ink with the catfish on the label symbolizes a southern sport that attempts to equalize the struggle between man a...

Continue reading…

Grassfed Turkey Cooking Tips from Shannon Hayes

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
4 Comments
Thinking of cooking a grass-fed turkey for Thanksgiving? Just in time for the holidays, grassfed cooking expert and farmer Shannon Hayes has a blog post with pastured turkey cooking and purchasing tips that you can read on her blog grassfedcooking.com. We’re honored to have been included in Shannon’s book Radical Homemakers . One of her most important tips is to know what you are buying, “If you don’t personally know the farme...

Continue reading…

Advances in Gardening Series: A Progress Report

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
13 Comments
rminator ™, both of which are also part of the redesign. The birdbath has always been part of our yard, but it used to sit somewhere else. In the background you can make out The Screens of Discretion (tm) and two raised vegetable beds. Right now they’re mostly full of salad stuff. That’s the chicken coop in the rear left. In the dead center is what I call The Hippie Heart (and yes, that’s tm’d too.). I’ll come...

Continue reading…