Search Results for: label/time banking/page/2/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

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Los Angeles Bread Bakers Blog

Mr. Homegrown
Bread, Food
RLeave a comment
Just a short time after planting–a field of wheat sprouts in Los Angeles County. The Los Angeles Bread Bakers, that I helped co-found along with Mark Stambler and Teresa Sitz, now has a blog: losangelesbreadbakers.blogspot.com. A big thanks to Saul Alpert-Abrams for putting it together and to Paul Morgan for blogging! Paul has been writing about the wheat we helped plant at Maggie’s Farm in Agoura Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles on t...

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Pee on your Compost

Mr. Homegrown
Composting
RLeave a comment
Judging from comments and our web statistics you people out there love discussing poo. So it’s about time that we move on to pee. Why waste your perfectly good urine? Indeed, both Ghandi and Jim Morrison drank their own urine for it’s reputed health benefits. But we ain’t gonna go there. Our suggestion for the day is to save that piss for your plants. Urine is a fantastic source of nitrogen and it’s estimated that we all...

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3D Greetings

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
6 Comments
Homegrown Evolution’s holiday gift to our readers is a headache. Well, to be precise, we offer you three dimensional images of two of our favorite garden plants. Above, the prickly pear cactus (Opuntia ficus-indica) and, below, spearmint (Mentha Spicata). To view these two images in three dimensions follow these instructions, specifically the bit about “parallel viewing”. Be persistent, like all good things it might take some p...

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Moving Bees Out of a Meter Box

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
3 Comments
Nuc box (new home) on left–utility box enclosure (old home) on right. I got an email the other day from someone who had a beehive in his electric meter box, a popular destination for bees in this area. It was a very small hive that had taken up residence just a few weeks ago. The house was about to be put up for sale so I had to get them out pronto. I brought along a cardboard nuc box–a temporary hive box used to transport b...

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Fading into the Soft White

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Bees, Thoughtstylings
11 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: Honeybees congregate on our floating row covers to die. Every day, two, three, four or five will choose to land one last time on this billowing white fabric that covers one of our garden beds. There they will cling while their strength wanes, until they fall off to be lost in the mulch. I know worker bees don’t live very long. They work so hard that by the end of their lives, their wings hang in shreds. Their little b...

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Gideon Lincecum Virtual Herbarium

Mrs. Homegrown
Herbs
1 Comment
–click to biggify– (If you still can’t read it, it says “Erigeron canadensis, the common hogsweed, bruise and press out the juice from the green plant and take it in tablespoonful dose as often as the stomach will bear, for bleeding lungs, bleeding from the stomach, bowels or womb. It is a powerful agent in stopping hemorrhage from any organ.”) Mrs. Homegrown here: Our friend Nancy gave us some salve made up o...

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Make a Brigid’s Cross

Mrs. Homegrown
Design, Domesticus, How-to
6 Comments
A little cross hanging on our chicken coop Spring is here. In LA, it’s definitely in full swing, but I suspect even in more northerly places folks may notice a slight change in the air, or find early flowers like snowdrops or crocuses pushing their way through the snow. Spring is stirring. To celebrate spring this year, I made a few Brigid’s crosses to hang in the house and out on the chicken coop. They’re protective s...

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How To Design a Garden Step III: Pathways

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
14 Comments
So you’ve set your goals and have a scale drawing of the land you plan to garden. What’s next? Paths! Paths keep you from compacting soil and lend visual interest to your garden. Some tips: Establish a path hierarchy Create wide paths with smaller branching paths. Think of the human circulatory system: Or fractal patterns found in nature, like tree branches: Now our property is so small that, when I’m done re-doing the back...

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Bulk Bin Microgreens

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
17 Comments
Sunflower seed germination test An admission: both Mrs. Homegrown and I are sprout haters. We love the people who sprout, but not the sprouts. Perhaps it’s just the association with 1970s era health food restaurants or macramé. Sprout lovers out there are welcome to try to convince us otherwise, but I’ll warn you that numerous good-hearted attempts have already failed. But we’re both open to the microgreen idea. Microgreens ar...

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How to Process Carob

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Recipes
6 Comments
Before. Photo by Bill Wheelock. Our neighborhood has an abundance of carob (Ceratonia siliqua) trees that, around this time of year, drop thousands of pounds of pods. Now many of us may have unpleasant associations with carob as a 1970s era chocolate substitute, but the tree has a long history in the Middle East, where it’s used to make a tea, as a source of molasses, as a vegetable and as animal feed. The “locusts” th...

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