Search Results for: label/seeds

180 results

A Time Out Box for Quail

Nancy Klehm
Animals, Design
5 Comments
...e exceedingly aggressive towards the others. She was chasing them and pulling their back feathers out causing periodic frantic scurrying and distressing calls from the others. I checked her body and health. I stepped up their seeds and protein in case it was a protein deficiency causing this. I created visual baffles with extra flower pots (quails love to niche themselves). And so, after nearly a week of this behavior, my friend Sarah built...

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A Warning About Straw

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
10 Comments
Claude Monet used straw (or is that hay?) for art. We use straw to catch chicken droppings! Straw is a very inexpensive and useful material for composting, mulching and animal bedding (we use it for all of these purposes). If you use it for mulch you’ll probably get some seeds that will germinate, but I’ve never found it to be a big problem in a small vegetable garden. I get my straw from the feed store, but you can often get it fo...

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Arundo dorax

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
3 Comments
...dd to these parallels, an abundance of Arundo dorax, a giant invasive reed known by the popular name, Carrizo. According to Delena Tull’s excellent book, Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest, Arundo dorax seeds can be ground into a flour, the young shoots are edible and a kind of candy can be made from the stems. Just like bamboo, the tough stems make excellent building materials, which is why the plant was originally importe...

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The Pinnacle of Permaculture: Tending the Wild

Mrs. Homegrown
Foraging, Permaculture
10 Comments
...ring.” Our favorite idea to come out of this book is the notion that plants and animals need people. This is the philosophy of the Native American elders Anderson interviews. Rather as plants need birds to scatter their seeds, plants rely on humans to thin and prune them, protect them and spread them. The elders imagined an active, reciprocal relationship of use between humans, plants and animals. For them, “wilderness” is a pe...

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Is Urban Homesteading Over With?

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bread, Chickens, Food, Gardening, Thoughtstylings, Transportation
23 Comments
...o think that it reflects a growing dissatisfaction with our industrial agriculture system. Gardening It seems that searches for gardening of all kinds–I tried “vegetable gardening,” “vegetable seeds,” “rose pruning” and “lawn care,” are down. I think this may reflect a demographic shift–an older generation dying off. We need to get young people gardening! Bread Baking No wond...

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Thyrsus: the new hipster accessory

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
15 Comments
...tion of a pine cone and fennel stalk symbolizes the unity of farm and forest, of the cultivated and the wild. And you don’t need to be a Freudian to grasp, shall we say, the meaning of a long shaft topped by a bunch of seeds. Roman homes and gardens were, in fact, full of phallic fertility symbols that seem crass to our modern eyes. Exhibitions like Pompeii and the Roman Villa, sadly, censor this imagery. You’ve got to visit the secr...

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How To Manage a Compost Pile Using Temperature

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening, How-to
5 Comments
.... Washington State University recommends subjecting all of the pile to temperatures above 150° F to kill potential pathogens. I’m fairly certain that, with the turn I did at day 14, all of the pile got up to 150°F. Weed seeds are killed above 130°F–another reason to watch temperature. Failing to get high temperatures can be an indication of too much carbon or a lack of water. To correct, add more nitrogen and water and turn. A loss of...

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Fermenting culture wih Sandor Katz

Mrs. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food
5 Comments
...temperature. 3 day old kraut is very different than 3 month old kraut, but both are delicious living foods.  I’d add that I agree. One of my favorite forms of kraut is a blend of red cabbage and green apples and caraway seeds which is fermented only for a few days. It’s still crisp and bright when you eat it, sort of like a fermented salad. • One thing he said surprised me: he doesn’t think it matters at all what kind of salt yo...

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Growing and Preparing Cardoons (Cynara cardunculus)

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
20 Comments
...garden she read me the riot act. Cardoons are remarkably resilient and invasive. Hailing from the Mediterranean, they’ve taken over large parts of the New World. The brilliant purple flowers release thousands of tiny seeds, each with their own fibrous parachute that caries them hundreds of feet in the slightest of breezes. Charles Darwin mentions cardoon in The Voyage of the Beagle, “In the latter country alone [Uruguay], very...

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