Search Results for: label/lawns/2011/04/making-it

311 results

Greywater Precautions

Mr. Homegrown
Water Conservation
2 Comments
Before we continue our greywater series, we have a few precautions to lay down. The dangers of greywater have been exaggerated in the past and it’s important to remember that nobody in the US has ever gotten sick from exposure to greywater. The plumbing codes in this country are overly cautious in their restrictions on greywater use, as the Man, quite simply, wants you to throw perfectly good water down the sewer. On the other hand, a lot...

Continue reading…

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...

Continue reading…

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...

Continue reading…

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...

Continue reading…

Make a Spore Print

Mr. Homegrown
Mushrooms
5 Comments
Making a mushroom spore print is a fun activity for the kidlings and it’s simple: 1. Pick a mushroom (from the wild or the supermarket) and break off the stem. 2. Put your mushroom, spore side down, on a piece of white paper (or a 50/50 split of of dark paper and white paper to check subtleties in the color). 3. Put a glass over the mushroom and wait 24 hours. The next day you should have something that looks like the picture above. Spore...

Continue reading…

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...

Continue reading…

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...

Continue reading…

Plum Lemon Tomato Power’s Heirloom Tomato

Mr. Homegrown
Vegetable Gardening
1 Comment
...sh gardening efforts, we somehow mislaid the names of the tomatoes we planted making our reporting efforts incomplete. We do know the name of the wondrous plum lemon tomato pictured above, well worth planting again next year. It’s a meaty, sweet, yellow tomato delicious both fresh and dried. Allegedly the seeds for this tomato originally came from an elderly seed seller in a bird market in eastern Moscow which the Russian police have since...

Continue reading…

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...

Continue reading…

There Will Be Kraut Part II–Full Day Hands-On Fermentation Workshop at the Greystone Mansion

Mr. Homegrown
Events
2 Comments
...™ packed full of spices and flavorings to make your pickle unique. SPECIAL OFFER!  Purchase Together: Friday Evening Lecture + Full-Day Workshop for only $200 ! Erik Knutzen:  Co-author of The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, co-founder of the Los Angeles Bead Bakers collective. Hae Jung Cho: After recovering from a career in nonprofit management, Hae Jung has been working in the food industry since...

Continue reading…