California Dreaming

May 2, 2008

...verted every spare bit of space into a mini-farm. There were impressive rows of cabbage and other greens all planted in plowed rows. The crops took up so much room that there was, in fact, very little space left to even walk. It seemed, at first, a pleasant dream of a utopian future of efficient urban land use with an emphasis on growing tasty and healthy food. But when I awoke I realized that this idyllic vision was actually a nightmare. Those r...

3 things to do with citrus peels

Mrs. Homegrown

April 20, 2012

Cleaning, Domesticus, Food, Food Preservation, How-to

11 Comments

...7;t do, in practice. I’m too lazy. Instead, I scent my cleaning vinegar with essential oil. But we always have citrus peels laying around in piles, and the simplicity of the citrus idea is so a peeling that I had to try it. (ouch! stop throwing things!) I filled one jar with orange peels and covered it with vinegar. After only a couple of days it started smelling really nice. Now it’s about a week old and doesn’t seem to be gett...

An Echo Park Weed Salad

Mr. Homegrown

February 11, 2008

Food, Foraging

1 Comment

There’s nothing like a little urban blight to produce an excellent salad. While not impoverished (not unless you consider dilapidated $600,000 bungalows a sign of destitution), our neighborhood ain’t exactly Beverly Hills, meaning that in terms of landscaping it’s a little rough around the edges. And the edges–parkways, cracks in the asphalt, neglected plantings were, on this warm February day, overflowing with weeds. Edi...

Chicken Nipple Waterering Systems

Mr. Homegrown

October 25, 2012

Chickens

12 Comments

...s Network blogger Stephanie Dayle has instuctions for making a bucket and pipe system here. You can purchase the nipples on Amazon. And the bucket and pipe system pictured above is being sold on Amazon here (I have not tested it). Ideally all the parts should be food grade as I’m not a fan of PVC. Of course the zinc in the galvanized waterer is probably not so great either, so it’s probably another case of not letting perfection be th...

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...

Novella Carpenter Harassed by City of Oakland

Mr. Homegrown

March 30, 2011

Thoughtstylings

20 Comments

out of compliance for “agricultural activities”. I’m supposed to get a Conditional Use Permit for growing chard. The annual fee: $2500. My two cents. Get involved in local politics to change outdated planning codes. We did it in LA with the Food and Flowers Freedom Act. In the meantime let’s lend Novella our support and best wishes....

A Parvati Solar Cooker

Mr. Homegrown

March 24, 2008

Solar

4 Comments

Damn, is solar cooking easy! Put some rice in a pot, place the pot in this simple panel cooker, made with cardboard and aluminum foil, stick it out in the sun and two hours later you have lunch. We built our “Parvati” solar cooker with plans designed by Shobha Ravindra Pardeshi that can be found here. Pardeshi, who runs an “appropriate technology” company with her husband in India has another design for a similar dish-sha...

Mead!

Mr. Homegrown

January 24, 2008

Fermentation, Food

7 Comments

While we’ve tasted the Ethopian honey wine known as Tej, we’ve never had mead, so we decided to cook up a batch. It’s way too early to tell if we have a tasty beverage or a gallon of home brewed Listerine–it will be many months before the stuff is drinkable. But we thought we’d note how we made it, based on a recipe in Ken Schramm’s book The Compleat Meadmaker. We downsized the recipe from five gallons to one...

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...

Page 38 of 48
<
1
...
36
37
38
39
40
...
48
>

Root Simple

low tech home tech

Search Results for: label/self watering containers/page/4/2011/04/making-it

California Dreaming

3 things to do with citrus peels

An Echo Park Weed Salad

Chicken Nipple Waterering Systems

More On Preventing Plants From Falling Over

Novella Carpenter Harassed by City of Oakland

A Parvati Solar Cooker

Mead!

Prickly Pear Fruit Chips

Power of the Patch