Search Results for: label/seeds/page/3/2011/04/making-it

475 results

Free Preparedness E-Books

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness, Resources
10 Comments
Camp loom, for making mats and mattresses from the 1911 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook Through a circuitous bit of aimless interweb searching I came across a huge list of downloadable urban homesteading/gardening/survivalist manuals on a site called hardcorepreppers.com. Unfortunately, this site is so popular that it seems to be down every time I’ve checked. But thanks to Google’s caching feature I was able to access a li...

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The Skunk Whisperer

Mr. Homegrown
Pests
5 Comments
...wing the IPM approach, just like the Skunk Whisperer, I made sure the chicken coop was well fortified and I got rid of a water feature that was a nightly raccoon attractant. Our Doberman is the icing on the anti-raccoon cake. It’s easy to see how preventing points of entry into our homes is one important part of fending off critters. Judging from the voluminous photos on the Skunk Whisperer’s facebook page they focus on screening out...

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December Homegrown Evolution Events

Mr. Homegrown
Events
2 Comments
Bread Making If you’re in the Southern California area, come on down to Good Magazine’s splashy digs for a bread making demo we’ll be doing on Monday December 15th at 12:30 p.m. We’ll be showing how to bake our favorite wild yeast bread (in our book and on our website here). Come at 11:30 a.m. and catch our organic gardening pals at Silver Lake Farms do a talk on winter vegetable crops. Stick around for puppets! Good Mag...

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Tolosna Bean

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
4 Comments
The beautiful beans pictured above are some sort of Spanish bean called “Tolosna”. Our occasional houseguest, Nance Klehm, gave us these beans from her personal seed archive, along with a few other remarkable seeds we’ll profile as we plant them over the next few months. We’ve promised to save some of the seeds we harvest to return to her archive. Unfortunately we’ve been unable to find any information on this vari...

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The Art of Memory

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
6 Comments
...bards of the past who could recite thousands of lines of poetry, or the Greek rhetoricians who could speak for hours at a time without notes? Thankfully the basics of the lost art of memory can be mastered in an evening. And  it’s all in a short section of a 2,100 year old document called the Rhetorica ad Herennium. Here’s the memory trick the ad Herennium describes in two easy steps. Step one. Say, for example, you want to memorize...

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Processing and Winnowing Flax

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, How-to, Vegetable Gardening
18 Comments
We grew a five foot circle of flax this winter in the center of our yard. When it came time to harvest said flax I pondered creating the world’s smallest piece of linen. Lacking the time for that process, I opted to simply harvest the seeds. I used a block of coconut coir to smash the seed heads against a piece of newspaper. Next came time for winnowing the flax. I used a fan and had to winnow multiple times to get the chaff out. Alas,...

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Composting at the NATO Protests in Chicago

Nancy Klehm
Composting, Gardening
6 Comments
...in Chicago to set up a free community kitchen to serve thousands of NATO conference protestors. Steven said they needed my assistance with their food waste as they had already overwhelmed a small urban garden’s compost bin. It was late, so I waited until morning and drove my pickup to their site – a parking lot between a community center and an auto parts store. The scene was impressive: a maroon biodiesel school bus with windows dressed in cur...

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Seeding Change

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
5 Comments
...rests using the link on the right side of this blog, 40% of your purchases will go to supporting the ag program at North Hollywood High. Let’s get that chicken coop paid for! Fellow Angelino Caitlin Flanagan be damned! It’s also a good moment to point out the reasons it’s best to grow from seed rather than buying seedlings at your local nursery. You get many orders of magnitude more selection, it’s much cheaper and you pr...

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A Seed Pokin’ Thingy

Mr. Homegrown
Seeds
3 Comments
Planting seeds seems like a simple task, and yet when you’re faced with hundreds of tiny seeds and dozens of pots it can take a surprising amount of time. Thankfully there’s an elegant and simple tool that can make life easier during planting season. To make this handy tool all you need to do is take a sick (something smaller than a chopstick is ideal) and stick it into a wine cork. You use the cork end to gently tamp down the soil a...

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