Search Results for: label/homegrown evolution amazon store/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

964 results

Mulch, mulch, mulch!

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Back to the Garden, Garden Design, Gardening, Permaculture, Soil
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...n leaves. Get your neighbor’s leaves, if you can. Spread them in place, or store them in bags until you need them. Pine needles work, too. Pull weeds before they go to seed and leave them on the ground to dry up and vanish into the mulch layer. I swear, it might look strange to see them laying there at first, all green and bright, but they’ll be pretty much invisible in a few days. Practice “chop n’ drop”. When you’re pruning bushes or trees, chop...

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What I’m Growing this Winter

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Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
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...n the recommendation of Franchi’s West Coast distributor The Heirloom Seed Store, who had a booth at this year’s Heirloom Exposition. The owners of the Heirloom Seed Store, who run a farm in the Santa Cruz area, raved about this particular chicory. It’s a large-leafed variety that can be used in a salad or cooked. Radicchio and Chicory Mix: “Misticanza di Radicchi” I’ve never gone wrong with Franchi’s salad mixes. The best damn salads I’ve ever ha...

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Ten Uses for Palm Fronds

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Gardening
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...nds can be made into creepy masks. Get good at this craft and open an Etsy store. 2. Make a roof. Weave them together and you’ve got the perfect roof for your tiki hut. Warning: you’ll need a lot. 3. Make a low quality mulch. Using palm fronds as mulch is somewhat controversial. The stuff takes forever to break down. Our arborist told me that some conventional citrus growers use palm frond mulch specifically because it takes forever to break down....

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Of Gnomes and Peak Oil

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Thoughtstylings
...of canned tomatoes. At any given moment, there may be a dozen cases in the store, but that inventory is constantly being replenished with the money the customers pay for the cans they remove, and the more tomatoes that customers buy, the bigger an inventory the store will carry. Paracelsus uses a more poetic metaphor. Instead of ordering shipments of tomatoes, it’s our task to command gnomes, The earth is filled by gnomes even to its center, creat...

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Make a Rain Barrel

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Design, rainwater harvesting, Water and Power, Water Conservation
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...fitting. A few more PVC parts from the sprinkler section of your hardware store, a brass hose fitting with a valve, and you’ll have this: Glue that up with some PVC cement, wrap the threads with teflon tape, and you’re almost ready to collect rainwater. But first, turn the barrel upside down, drill a hole for the down spout another hole to insert an overflow pipe made out of a threaded 3″ waste pipe fitting: The last step is to prop the barrel up...

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