Big List of Earth-Friendly (homemade, compostable, recyclable, no-plastic) Holiday Decorations

...ecide to keep. Straight from nature: Sturdy winter berries Rose hips Dried herbs and flowers Moss Feathers Cool looking seed pods ( milkweed pods, thistle heads, sweet gum tree pods, sycamore pods, star anise, Indian cigar tree pods, magnolia pods–keep your eyes open in the autumn and you’ll find lots) If you want sparkle, sugar them instead of getting out the glitter. Nuts Clusters of acorns Sticks covered with pretty moss and lichen Curls of bar...

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Thomas Pynchon on Pizza

...f the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover....

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

...mpost and healthy soil roll with that. If you’re in an apartment grow some herbs in a pot on your windowsill. If you’re a dilettante appropriate technology blogger with limited time for gardening and a long list of chores, a straw bale and a bag of urea might be the best way to keep the kitchen knee deep in pesto. If you’d like to try straw bale gardening see Washington Statue University’s instructions. Michael Tortorello also wrote a great articl...

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Wild Food Lab: Foraging Taken to the Next Level

...is also the simplest: how to prepare the ubiquitous broadleaf plantain (Plantago major). Pascal gave me a couple of ideas for ways to enhance my bread experiments with seeds and wild herbs which I’m looking forward to trying. Do you have a favorite wild food? Tell us where you live and what you like to gather and work with....

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A Tour of the Homegrown Evolution Compound

...sary staples. But, we seldom buy greens at the store, and almost never buy herbs or eggs–we’ve got that taken care of in the garden. In the summer we have lots of tomatoes, and right now we have a few avocados. When the fruit trees mature in a few years we’ll have fruit. We’re hippies. Don’t get us wrong, we love hippies. We have no problems with cob ovens shaped like psychedelic snails, but that just ain’t our style. We’ve tried to keep things lo...

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