Search Results for: label/herbs/page/3/2011/04/making-it

379 results

Build Your Own Furniture

Mr. Homegrown
Design
5 Comments
We live in a 4 by 8 world. This is why we can’t get all that excited about things like geodesic domes, straw bale and rammed earth houses. All of these innovative architectural ideas may have great potential, but when it comes time to buy supplies at the lumber yard, the overly creative builder will soon realize the difficulty of utopian designs in a world of 4 by 8 sheets of plywood and drywall. That geodesic shape is hip, but what do you...

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Be a question. Be an answer.

Mrs. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
44 Comments
Kotex Ad from 1971. Is that Susan Dey Cybill Shepherd? And what’s that oddly eroticized blur in the foreground? Okay, time to wrest the blog out of Erik’s hands. He’s gone crazy with the geek-boy subject matter of late. I’m going to bring this baby down to earth with a resounding thud. Let’s talk menstruation. We’re writing a new book, as we may have mentioned. It’s a project book focused on making som...

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Interview With Apartment Gardener Helen Kim

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Herbs
1 Comment
We got a lot of emails after posting the image above of Los Angeles based photographer Helen Kim’s astonishing windowsill garden. It’s a great example of what you can do with a small amount of space, and brings to mind William Morris’ advice, “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful”. Helen graciously sat down for an email interview to talk about her beautiful and useful garden...

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How to Cycle Safely

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes, How-to, Transportation
3 Comments
have a plan to either turn quickly or slam on the brakes. Avoid the door zone. There are rare exceptions when I will dip into the door zone briefly (only while going very slowly). But for the most part you should stay out of it. It is impossible to predict if a door will open. Lane positioning is an art not a science. It comes with experience. At any given spot on a road I might be further to the left or right depending on what time of day it is...

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New Health Food Trends at the Natural Products Food Expo West

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Thoughtstylings
17 Comments
This weekend I attended, for or the second year in a row, the Natural Products Expo West. At this massive convention, health food, natural supplement and cosmetic concerns pitch their products to retailers. And, again this year, I did a lot of intemperate sampling. For the sake of you, our dear readers, I ate every known power bar, sports beverage and processed soy/hemp/chia meat substitute so you won’t have to. It was the human equivalen...

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Teflon Coated Light Bulbs Deadly to Chickens

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
19 Comments
...ity of Teflon in cookware. Sylvania, apparently, has a warning label on their Teflon coated bulbs, “WARNING: This product contains PTFE (polytetrafluoroethylene–”Teflon” is a brand name). When heated, it creates fumes potentially fatal to confined birds.” GE does not have a warning label. I let the ladies take the winter off of laying and it never dips below 40ºF here so we do not have a light bulb in our coop. But...

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Are Pallets Safe to Reuse?

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Design, Thoughtstylings
9 Comments
Now you know. Pallet parts have names. As a fan and proponent of reusing pallets in building projects, such as chicken coops and compost containers, I’m often asked if I think they are safe to use given that shippers and manufacturers fumigate them with pesticides. In the United States quarantine regulations require that pallets be treated with methyl bromide, a pesticide being phased out due to its adverse effects on the ozone la...

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Greywater Workshops in Los Angeles

Mr. Homegrown
Events
RLeave a comment
eywater, common types of systems, what products to use, and take a tour of several existing systems. We will also be creating a mock-up of a laundry-to-landscape greywater system with all the parts and tools needed to install it. Greywater System Maintenance: Advanced Workshop When: Friday October 14, 2011 – 1:00pm – 5:00pmWhere: LA Eco Village 117 Bimini Pl Los Angeles CA 90004Cost: Sliding scale $25-50Register hereSimple greywater s...

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More on our gardening disasters

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Mistakes, Thoughtstylings
15 Comments
We need to put the heart back into our garden. (Our Heart of Flax from way back in 2011) I thought I’d chime in on the subject of this year’s garden failures. Before I do, I’d like to thank you all for your kind advice and commiseration that you left on Erik’s post. First, I will agree that it really, truly has been a terrible year in the garden. Sometimes Erik gets a little melodramatic when it comes to the crop failure...

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Moonshine

Mr. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food
RLeave a comment
...ome legal fermentation experiments, but we can’t help but feel envious of some comrades of ours in France we visited a few years ago who recounted how their families used to ferment the excess fruit in the yard and take it to a licenced farmer to distill into the French version of moonshine, eau de vie. Here in the states it’s illegal to distill anything yourself but perfectly o.k., as a recent article in the Wall Street Journal point...

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