New Project: Making Bitters

...I’ll share the recipes I develop as I follow this path. In the meanwhile, making your own bitters is really easy. You may be able to throw a few experiments together just using things you find in your spice cabinet. Since these are flavoring, not medicine, you don’t have to be as careful with the quantities and timing as you must be when tincturing herbs for medicine. Yet at the same time, it’s a great introduction to that essential herbalist’s c...

Read…

Why Urban Farm?

...r total up to four. Such are the cycles of life and death on the new urban homestead. Bryan Welch, who raises livestock and is also the publisher and editor of the always informative Mother Earth News, wrote an editorial in the February issue called “Why I Farm” in which he says, “There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as the liv...

Read…

A Homemade Mattress?

...the wool. It took her about 6 hours to fill the mattress. 3) Here is a webpage, in French, showing the mattress making process. Lots of useful pictures. I have to run it through Google Translate for more clues. 4) Do not fall for the eHow result if you search for how to make a wool mattress. It gets off to a great start by recommending you use glue, rather than stitching, to construct your mattress tick . (They call the tick a “fabric sheet pouch...

Read…

Looking for the Union Label

...d a highly catchy ad jingle from the roller disco era, “Look for the Union Label” (youngsters can watch it on youtube here). We looked for the union label and we were surprised to find it via a company called Union House which carries a functional, if unexciting line of apparel. Unless hipsters take to golf shirts in an ironic fashion judo move, these offerings will never be cool like the domestically made clothes made by the union busting folks o...

Read…