4 Vermicomposting Tips

October 17, 2011

...terested. Click here for details). Darren dropped a few vermicomposting tips during the beginning class that we thought we’d share: 1) Worms don’t like empty space in their bin. They dislike voids. They appreciate it very much if you bury their entire working area under a very thick layer of light dry carbon material, like shredded newspaper or chopped straw. Yes, it’s standard practice to put a layer of cover material over the...

More On Preventing Plants From Falling Over

Mr. Homegrown

March 22, 2011

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

2 Comments

Mrs. Homegrown’s post on her storm-flattened flax patch reminded me that I had a photo I took while taking John Jeavons’ Biointensive workshop earlier this month. In front of Jeavons is a bed of fava beans, also notorious for falling over in the slightest breeze. The randomly strung network of twine will support the fava as it grows. You can see from my own fava bed below that I could have benefited from this low tech solution: Whi...

The kids are all bikin’

Mr. Homegrown

May 17, 2008

Bikes

1 Comment

...tails of biking in L.A. (hint–route choice!) and pitched the notion of changing our built environment to encourage walking and cycling. Here in Los Angeles, with the majority of bike commuters being poor folks of color, making our city more bikable is a civil rights issue. For an overview of the bike to work day festivities (which ironically, since they take place in the middle of a weekday, tend to involve mostly the self-employed or unemp...

Cargo Bike Roundup

Mr. Homegrown

May 5, 2008

Bikes, Transportation

9 Comments

...n has forgotten every word of his college German, so all we can make out is that this bike represents the Grüne Liga, some sort of environmental organization. Don’t know if this trike is an ad, or if the Grüne Liga uses it to distribute literature or environmentally correct currywurst. We imagine this bike belongs to some way eurotrashy DJ dude who uses it to shuttle his 100 kilo collection of Eurodisco hits to all the hot Berlin nightclu...

Land Girls

Mrs. Homegrown

December 2, 2009

Thoughtstylings

7 Comments

Mrs. Homegrown here: During WWI, Great Britain instituted The Women’s Land Army, a civilian corps created to replace male agricultural workers called into military service. These women were generally known as “Land Girls.” Yep, the rural version of Rosie the Riveter. By WWII, both Australia and the U.S. had their own Women’s Land Armies, too. It seems in some cases the women took on full-time waged agricultural work, an...

Damned Figs!

Mr. Homegrown

March 14, 2008

Gardening

4 Comments

“In the morning, as he was returning to the city, he became hungry. And seeing a fig tree by the wayside, he went to it and found nothing on it but only leaves. And he said to it, “May no fruit ever come from you again!” And the fig tree withered at once.”-Matthew 21:18-19 We find it hard to cut down a mature tree, especially a fruit tree. But after living with a substandard fig tree for ten years we finally understood t...

Prickly Pear Fruit Chips

Mr. Homegrown

September 7, 2009

Food, Recipes

13 Comments

Prickly pear fruit chip–some specimens are purple, our produces orange fruit It’s prickly pear fruit season. I know this both by the view out our front window and from the comments trickling in on an old post on how to make prickly pear fruit jelly. Thanks to a tip from Oliva Chumacero at the Farmlab, I now have another way of dealing with an over-abundance of this spiny fruit: slice it and dry it to make prickly pear fruit chips....

Power of the Patch

Julia Posey

April 8, 2011

Domesticus

7 Comments

Our littlest Ramshackler sits on a hand-me-down car seat whenever we venture for a drive. After six years of use, the cover started to show some wear. I thought about buying a seat cover or making one from scratch. I decided against both. We don’t need a new $50 seat cover. And I would prefer to sew something else, like pants for the kids or even some skirts for me, rather than the intricate seat cover. Then I realized a patch w...

Picture Sundays: US Postal Service Creates World’s Ugliest Stamp

Mr. Homegrown

November 18, 2012

Miscellaneous, Picture Sundays

6 Comments

I got some stamps out of a machine at the post office yesterday and this is what got barfed out. Is this a sign of the imminent collapse of the US empire or just evidence that the email thing is making the post office go broke? Either way, you’d think the Postal Service would be embarrassed by this graphic design nightmare. How do we get them to reissue this one? I may not be a big fan of the American Poultry Industry, but that sure is a...

California poppy tea

Mrs. Homegrown

April 12, 2011

Domesticus, Herbal Medicine, Herbs

22 Comments

...ly in your yard or general area, rather than trying to coax more exotic species along. There are many herbs that can be used to make relaxing teas (valerian, catnip, linden, chamomile, etc.), but this one intrigues me because it’s essentially a weed where I live. If it doesn’t grow readily where you live, I’d encourage you to investigate other herbs which grow more easily in your area. But for those of you who can grow Californ...

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low tech home tech

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4 Vermicomposting Tips

More On Preventing Plants From Falling Over

The kids are all bikin’

Cargo Bike Roundup

Land Girls

Damned Figs!

Prickly Pear Fruit Chips

Power of the Patch

Picture Sundays: US Postal Service Creates World’s Ugliest Stamp

California poppy tea