Kitchen Alchemy

November 6, 2008

...iting enough about what people in apartments who can’t keep gardens or chickens can do. It’s our contention that all of the activities profiled on this blog are a kind of alchemy, symbolic gestures that ultimately lead to the kind of societal transformations that Pinchbeck writes about. These symbolic gestures need not be over sized, nor do all of them require land. Cooking homemade meals from scratch, as often as possible, is just th...

New Zealand Spinach is the New . . . Spinach

Mr. Homegrown

August 31, 2012

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

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Spotted in a neglected corner of our backyard: New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides). What’s interesting is that it self-seeded and grew with no supplemental water in the middle of summer in lead and zinc contaminated soil. We’ve never been able to grow regular (and unrelated) spinach here. But there’s no stopping the New Zealand spinach. Due to the heavy metal problem we won’t be eating this particular specim...

More On the National Heirloom Exposition

Mr. Homegrown

September 17, 2012

Thoughtstylings

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Squash tower at the National Heirloom Exposition Quite honestly, between the lead and zinc in our soil and an endless heat wave that seems to portend climactic disaster, I’ve been a bit dispirited with our little urban homestead project this summer. The Heirloom Exposition up in Santa Rosa lifted me out of my petty depression. The amazing speakers, exhibits and vendors, left me inspired and ready to get back to work. This week I...

Block Party Weekend

Mr. Homegrown

September 11, 2006

Thoughtstylings

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...ades and take public transit. SurviveLA wishes the best of luck to the Eco-Villagers in implementing this plan and we hope that the SNAP concept will spread to the rest of the city. It’s time for all of us to follow the lead of the Eco-Villagers and throw our own block parties and make our streets fit places to meet each other face to face. Community building, i.e. breaking the walls that stand between us, is the first step in the transform...

Roundup

Mr. Homegrown

November 9, 2006

Thoughtstylings

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..., a scientific team led by Robert Belle of the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) biological station in Roscoff, France showed that Roundup activates one of the key stages of cellular division that can potentially lead to cancer. Belle and his team have been studying the impact of glyphosate formulations on sea urchin cells for several years. The team has recently demonstrated in Toxicological Science (December 2004) that a “control p...

Comopost, Compost, Compost

Mr. Homegrown

September 7, 2012

Composting, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

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As if I didn’t need a reminder of how important compost is to a vegetable garden, note the tomato above. It’s on its way out, but it grew with no supplemental water in hard-packed clay soil contaminated with lead and zinc in a hot side yard. Why did it do well while the rest of my vegetable garden did not do as so good this summer? Homemade compost. I didn’t have enough compost for the rest of the veggie garden so I bought som...

Fading into the Soft White

Mrs. Homegrown

December 8, 2010

Animals, Bees, Thoughtstylings

11 Comments

...give out. And I know that I should not think of them as individuals, but as expression of the will of the Hive. Still, there’s something melancholy about the way they ride these white waves. Perhaps their fading senses lead them to the brightest place they can find....