Search Results for: label/soil

220 results

Cargo Bike Roundup

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes, Transportation
9 Comments
...kes to America. We’ve found hauling cargo on a bike to be tremendously enjoyable. It’s an entertaining challenge to see how many ridiculously heavy things you can carry. Sixty pounds of dog food, bags of concrete, soil and many loads of groceries have all traveled on our Xtracyle. It’s allowed us to get rid of one of our cars and save thousands of dollars. While many of the bikes above are on the expensive side, if you replace a...

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Survival Gardening

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Preparedness, Thoughtstylings, Vegetable Gardening
27 Comments
...hand, figuring out how many calories you can squeeze from small spaces. What gets left out in the “survival garden” sales pitches is that, if you want real self-sufficiency, you’ve also got to maintain the soil fertility that you deplete by harvesting. To do that you need to grow all your own compost. For this, Jeavons suggests what he calls “carbon and calorie crops” things like corn and wheat where you get both s...

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Compost and Pharmaceuticals

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening, Humanure, Straw Bale Gardening
14 Comments
...in lettuce. The uptake of fluoroquinolones and sulfonamides by plants like lettuce does not seem to be a major human health risk, as the detected levels of the studied pharmaceuticals were relatively low, if compared to their soil concentrations. Further studies are needed to determine the uptake of different types of pharmaceuticals and other organic pollutants by various crop plants. What about hormones? A paper in the Journal of Environmental...

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Save the World–Poop in a Bucket

Mr. Homegrown
Humanure
1 Comment
...ame time: Wasteland: A Journey through the American cloaca in Harper’s Magazine. Journalist Frederick Kaufman traces sewage from New York’s North River Solid Waste Treatment Plant to . . . [spoiler here!] bags of soil at Home Depot. A Mother Earth News reader submitted a photo and description of a handsome sawdust privy made out of an old garden hose box. Very clever! Science Daily reports on Converting Sewage to Drinking Water. S...

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Reminder: Earthen Oven Workshop This Friday-Sunday at the Root Simple Compound

Mr. Homegrown
Events
4 Comments
...-selfers, and is a great introduction to adobe construction and earthen plasters covered in more depth in adobeisnotsoftware’s other classes. Topics Include: Local considerations and the siting your earthen oven Soil and material selection, sourcing and testing Foundations and oven base design and materials Sizing Sand Form and Oven Domes Natural oven plasters and finishes Firing and baking in your oven. Instruction Type:...

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World’s Largest Chard Grows in SIP

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Self Watering Containers
12 Comments
The story of SuperChard: Its origin is unknown. It might come from Bountiful Garden seed, or perhaps Franchi. It volunteered in a corner of one of our backyard beds, in a bed we were resting. We didn’t water it. It grew all summer long anyway, despite having no rain at all.  In fact, it grew huge and lush. We never harvested it, though, because it was growing in our lead contaminated soil. So we continued to ignore it and it continued to...

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Indigo 101

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Gardening, Herbs
5 Comments
...your own indigo (any seeds you buy labeled as Indigo will probably be tictorium or suffructicosa). Indigofera is a pretty plant from the legume family. That family is valuable in the garden because it draws nitrogen into the soil. It would be nice to grow just as a conversation starter. I don’t know much about making the dye from scratch, but it is quite possible if you’re not afraid of fermentation and a little chemistry. • Indigo i...

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Three Front Yard Vegetable Gardens

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening
17 Comments
I spotted some nice front yard gardens while I was out for a walk the other day. Check out these finds: Above, these gardeners have used some scrap lumber as retaining walls to allow them some extra soil depth for planting. In this small front yard bed they’re growing beautiful kohlrabi (my new favorite vegetable), some climbing beans and a few different kinds of squash. Keeping a veggie garden doesn’t have to be either complicated...

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Growing Potatoes in Tires

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
19 Comments
...17;ve planted earlier this year, to see if our potatoes will do better in Southern California’s mild spring weather. One disadvantage to this earlier planting might be all the rain we get in January and February. Soggy soil can cause the potatoes to rot before they start growing. We’ll keep our fingers crossed–we’ve had a streak of bad luck with our plantings this winter. Incidentally, Nance will be delivering a lecture...

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