Search Results for: label/mistakes

52 results

Rearranging the yard, yet again!

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
11 Comments
Backyard redesign, in progress. Mrs. Homegrown here: This is all my fault. Last fall we re-did the back yard, but I decided it still needed a few refinements. I feel a little like a sitcom wife who can’t make her mind up about the draperies (cue Erik, the long-suffering husband, moaning in the background)–but we can’t be afraid to fix our mistakes. Perhaps I shouldn’t say mistake. There was nothing wrong with the...

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Moldy Grapes!

Mr. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food
13 Comments
We had a nice conversation with BoingBoing blogger and Make Magazine editor Mark Frauenfelder about how important mistakes are in the DIY life, so here’s two more recent blunders for ya’ll, courtesy of Mrs. Homegrown Evolution. Recent failure #1: Inedible Pickled Grape Leaves We have grape leaves. Lots of them. Our two table grape vines are a little hesitant to really bust out, but our native grape (Vitus californica) has taken over...

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Homesteading Disasters: The Skunk Menace

Mr. Homegrown
Mistakes
RLeave a comment
Franky, I think our mistakes are more interesting and educational than the high-horse blog posts we typically churn out. I’m hoping, in fact, to collect our misadventures into a little booklet of homesteading disasters. To that end, I’ll periodically write about the latest problem around the Root Simple Compound starting today with how fun it is to garden with skunks. Angry red arrows mark skunk dig sites in our new keyhole be...

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A Tour of the Homegrown Evolution Compound

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
7 Comments
...to put into it. It looks good now, but in December it looked like crap. We try to plant things that do well in our climate and provide food, medicine or habitat for birds and beneficial insects. But we’ve made plenty of mistakes, and continue to do so. We’re survivalists. Can we live off our yard? No. Can we make a meal with stuff from the yard? Yes, but we go to the supermarket just like everybody else–there’s no room for...

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Book Review: My Side of the Mountain

Mrs. Homegrown
Reviews
20 Comments
...ination to how-to and survival manuals. What struck me most on this re-read is the way Sam learns. He comes up against tough problems, tries various solutions, and most often fails on the first two or three attempts. He makes mistakes and learns from them. More significantly, he often finds his solutions in the library or from helpful mentors. For instance, he could not make fire with flint and book-learning alone. He needs a kindly old man to de...

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Trapping bees out of a kitchen vent

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
3 Comments
With a growing awareness of the plight of honeybees more people are calling on the services of beekeepers rather than exterminators. And, thanks to a crash course in bee removal and relocation from Backwards Beekeeping guru Kirk Anderson, I’ve managed to help relocate about ten or so hives, giving them new homes with Los Angeles’ hobby beekeepers. Each removal has been different and I’ve made plenty of mistakes. But with each...

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Home Food Preservation Resources

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation, Resources
10 Comments
...sues, I like these carefully researched food preservation guides for their reliability. If I’m going to commit the time to doing a food preservation project I like a reasonable chance of success. While we learn from our mistakes, I’d prefer to have a few more jellies and a few less accidental “syrups”. You can connect with the Los Angeles Master Food Preservers on Facebook and via their blog....

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Made By Hand

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
7 Comments
...necessary step you have to take–the courage to screw things up.” I picked up Made by Hand and couldn’t put it down. I’ve done most of the activities Frauenfelder writes about and made many of the same mistakes. In the past month I’ve had an especially frustrating series of DIY setbacks. I’ve also, directly because of reading this book, faced my fear of failure and had a series of creative breakthroughs. The w...

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Problems Part I

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
16 Comments
The road to urban homesteading ain’t smooth and involves more than a few potholes along the way. Some of those potholes will swallow a bike tire while others are big enough for a Hummer. But with persistence it becomes easier to deal with the occasional bump, lessons can be learned and future mistakes avoided. With the popularity of our earlier blunders post, I’d like to begin regularly sharing problems as they develop. Here’s...

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The Practical Beekeeper by Michael Bush

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees, Reviews
14 Comments
...as easily apply to gardening or many other areas of our lives. Yet doing nothing is one of the hardest things for us Homo sapiens to wrap our busy heads around. Nassim Taleb is fond of pointing out the huge number of medical mistakes that could easily have been avoided by the doctor having the courage to not intervene with some needless procedure or pharmaceutical. Up until some time in the 20th century, in fact, you were actually better off not...

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