Search Results for: label/native plants/page/9/2011/04/making-it

573 results

How to start a chicken retirement community

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
34 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: So–here’s the story of another mistake we made. When Erik and I first got chickens we didn’t lay out a plan for dealing with the chickens as they aged. That was the mistake. Simple as that. Make your plans, people! We learned how to slaughter chickens–we knew we could do it if we needed to–but we never really sat down and decided what would happen to our ladies when they stopped laying. We̵...

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Homegrown Evolution Visits the Los Angeles County Fair

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
2 Comments
...the return of draft horses to Los Angeles. To preview that possibility and experience the fading agricultural glory of Los Angeles County we headed to the Los Angeles County Fair this past week. Here’s a pictorial tour: It was a real pleasure to view the elegant moves of the draft horses and their handlers. The competition we watched involved maneuvering a carriage around obstacles, backing up into a tight space, stopping at a mail box and...

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Summer of Solar Cookin’

Homegrown Neighbor
Solar
11 Comments
Homegrown Neighbor here: I was lucky to recently receive a really nice solar cooker from a family friend. Apparently it had been sitting in her garage for a while, and I was happy to take it off of her hands. The model is called an SOS Sport. It is a box style cooker with a black interior and clear, insulated lid. It also has a removable reflector to help concentrate the light in the box. The reflector is helpful, but I’ve seen the tempe...

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Media Fasting

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
19 Comments
Ant Farm’s Media Burn For the last year I’ve been trying, as an experiment, to see what it would be like to cut off the news. That means no newspaper, no Google news, no NPR, no broadcast television of any kind. At the beginning of my media fast, I was concerned that I would somehow lose touch with reality, with important details of what’s going on in the world. In fact, some news does reach me, filtered through conve...

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Solar Light Hack

Mr. Homegrown
Design
10 Comments
We wanted a solar powered light over our new entrance arbor. The problem is that most of the lights available are just plain ugly. And the solar panels on the cheaper models are usually mounted on the light itself making it impossible to place them in a shady spot. I came up with a simple solution. First, I bought an inexpensive solar light intended to be mounted on a fence. I took it apart and desoldered the LEDs off the circuit board. Nex...

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Did Kelly follow her 2012 resolutions?

Mrs. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
11 Comments
I cringed when Erik said he’d be reviewing his resolutions today, which meant I’d have to take the walk of shame and review mine. Actually, I couldn’t even remember what I’d said I’d do, but at the same time, I was pretty sure I’d not done any of it. If 2012 had a theme, it would be “wheel-spinning” — or at least that’s how it felt to me. Now that I’ve read over what I wrote last...

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California Homemade Food Act Signed Into Law!

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
17 Comments
...rates that thinking locally and picking a fight that can be won, can really make a difference. Correction: the first version of this post had a picture of canned citrus with the caption “soon to be legal to sell.” It seems that whole canned fruit is not on this approved list for this bill. I”m looking into this issue, as canned citrus is considered by the USDA to be a non-hazardous food....

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Return of Recipe Friday! Spicy Korean Tofu

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
7 Comments
Ummm…Our food stylist is on vacation! This was lunch today. It would look much better if the tofu sheets were reclining whole on snowy rice and artfully sprinkled with green. We’ve been eating a lot of this lately. It’s Erik’s favorite meal these days, in fact. I make it for him whenever he’s grumpy and he perks right up. I like it too, and I especially like that it’s fast cooking and I usually have a...

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The Sound of One Hand Snapping

Mr. Homegrown
Tools
1 Comment
...as a spring connecting the two ends which consist of a center punch and a nail set. You hold one end against a nail and pull the spring back. The spring bangs one end into the other, thereby driving the nail. We’ve used it for years, and driven hundreds of nails with it, hanging molding, fixing windows, making furniture, and countless other tasks. It’s possible, in fact, to drive nails with this thing without using a hammer and itR...

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Seedling Disaster!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Mistakes, Seeds, Vegetable Gardening
33 Comments
“No one talks of failure as anything but shameful; this is wrongheaded and foolish . . . Mistakes are synonymous with learning. Failing is unavoidable. Making is a process, not an end. It is true that deep experience helps avoid problems, but mainly it gives you mental tools with which to solve inevitable problems when they come up.” -Tom Jennings, as quoted in Mark Frauenfelder’s excellent new book, Made by Hand: Searching f...

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