Search Results for: label/native plants/page/4/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

636 results

Saturday Linkages: Audio Jars, Cutting Glass Bottles and Assorted Rants

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
4 Comments
E.B. White’s letter to the ASPCA responding to his failure to pay a dog tax: http://bit.ly/wKIq9L Audio Jar – Open Source Speaker Housings: http://bit.ly/xV7II6 Bread geeks bring native wheat species back to Los Angeles | 89.3 KPCC http://www.scpr.org/programs/madeleine-brand/2012/03/08/25511/la-wheat via @ KPCC Working Undercover in a Slaughterhouse: an interview with Timothy Pachirat http://boingboing.net/2012/03/08/working-unde...

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Is Our Furniture Killing Us?

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
Architects Arakawa and Madeline Gins have the radical idea that our addiction to comfort and safety is killing us. Their solution: designing houses and apartments where no surface is even, with awkward and even dangerous passages between rooms, where buying your own furniture is impossible. Living in their buildings forces the occupant to think about each and every step.They promise eternal life (an exaggeration for the sake of making a point)...

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All is Fire

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
6 Comments
Photo by Olivier Ffrench Scholar, former Wall Street trader and author Nassim Nicholas Taleb is in his native Lebanon this week shopping for olive groves, according to an article in today’s Wall Street Journal (enter “Taleb’s Pessimism Lures CIC” in Google to get around the pay wall). Taleb explains, “Healthy investments are those that produce goods that humans need to consume, not flat-screen TVs. Sto...

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Saturday Linkages: Cave Living, Chocolate Sourdough, Persian Marmalade and Much More . . .

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
RLeave a comment
@ericmiller built the native pollinator house from Making It and tweeted the result! Farine: Chocolate and Currant Sourdough recipe http://www.farine-mc.com/2012/04/chocolate-and-currant-sourdough.html?spref=tw The American who quit money to live in a cave: http://boingboing.net/2012/04/26/the-american-who-quit-money-to.html A Place for Old Chickens, Outside the Pot http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/26/us/new-homes-beckon-for-city-chick...

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Why we love fennel

Mrs. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
10 Comments
Fennel is an invasive plant, and there are plenty of fennel haters out there, many of them our friends, but every year we let a stand or two of wild fennel take root in our yard anyway. We just had to pause now, while the fennel is high, to say that we love it, because it is hardy and beautiful and grows with no water and no encouragement. Feral fennel bulbs aren’t as good as cultivated bulbs for eating, but we eat the flowers, the fronds...

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Homemade Teeccino

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Herbs, Recipes
13 Comments
A carob tree heavy with pods Mrs. Homegrown here: A while back I kicked coffee, and reduced my caffeine intake down to maybe one cup of green tea a day, and it’s been a really good thing. At that time, Root Simple readers wrote in to suggest all sorts of coffee alternatives for me, and I tried a bunch of them. One of them was Teeccino, with which I quickly developed a love-hate relationship. Teeccino is a line of coffee substit...

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Miner’s lettuce

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
18 Comments
Miner’s lettuce reminds me of tiny lily pads I was delighted to find a specimen of this delicious little weed growing in our yard among the poppies: miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata), but I don’t think it will thrive. This plant is native to the West coast of the U.S. (and down into S. America, I believe) but it doesn’t do well in LA.* I never see it on the streets in my neighborhood, it’s too hot and...

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Karp’s Sweet Quince

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Gardening
11 Comments
Our good friends Nance Klehm and neighborhood fruit guru Lora Hall both had the same suggestion for our small, steeply banked and awkward front yard: plant lots of fruit trees and keep them pruned. Thus began our mini-orchard, delayed for many years by messy foundation work. One of the newest additions to the mini orchard is a bare root tree we ordered from the Raintree Nursery, Karp’s Sweet quince. As you can see from the photo above it&...

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Compost Field Trip

Homegrown Neighbor
Composting
9 Comments
Homegrown Neighbor Here: I recently had the opportunity to tour an industrial scale composting operation. I am a huge compost geek so I was pretty excited. I’ve seen a lot of piles in my day, but nothing like this. This facility, Community Recycling (a division of Crown Disposal), processes food scraps and organic wastes from most of the major grocery store chains in Southern California. They also collect food scraps from restaurants and...

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