Search Results for: label/time banking/page/3/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

741 results

Don’t be so quick to clean up

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
5 Comments
A lot of magic happens in the “dead” parts of a garden. Flowers gone to seed feed birds. Dead stalks support important insect life–from spiders to pollinators. Fallen leaves and sticks give habitat to lizards and toads and mushrooms and myriads of invisible creatures. Yet dead growth is not attractive to the human eye, and around about this time of year we’re all itching to make a clean sweep of all that brown stuff. I...

Continue reading…

How to Stake Tomatoes

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, How-to, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening
5 Comments
Our tomato staking method around the Homegrown Evolution compound is simple and lazy. We plant our tomatoes and then surround them with rolled up concrete reinforcing wire. Normally used to reinforce concrete slabs, reinforcing wire comes in 3 1/2′ by 7′ sections. We use a circular saw with a metal blade on it to cut off the bottom rung, so as to leave spiky wires with which to stick the reinforcing wire tubes into the ground, but th...

Continue reading…

Homegrown Revolution Visits SF

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
1 Comment
Homegrown Revolution will be heading up to San Francisco this week in search of tales of fermentation, backyard chickens, humanure and bikes. We’ll be back in LA just in time for mycologist Paul Stamets‘ lecture “How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World” at the Farmlab. The lecture will be on Friday April 13, at 7:30 pm at 1745 N. Spring Street #4 Los Angeles, CA 90012....

Continue reading…

Do Something Day

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
In honor of Buy Nothing Day, we present a memorable Craigslist ad found by our comrade, neighbor and art blogger Doug Harvey while looking for a refrigerator to replace the one that got fried in a freak electric storm the other night, “Never used, brand new 2008 GE Energystar fridge in original box. Blessed by his Holiness the Dalai Lama upon his last visit to Los Angeles, this fridge is sure to maintain the temperature and spiritual balan...

Continue reading…

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...

Continue reading…

Seaching for Seeds

Mr. Homegrown
Seeds
3 Comments
Old school seed searching: order assembler standing next to racks containing packages at the W. Atlee Burpee Company, 1943 It’s never too early to start planning that garden. And towards that goal, Mother Earth News has created a nice custom Google search engine that scours over 600 seed suppliers. It’s the perfect way to find those obscure plants and varieties not at the local nursery. The search engine even includes our favorite s...

Continue reading…

Lessons In Beekeeping: Remember To Wear Boots

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
4 Comments
 Bees in a wall This weekend I assisted beekeepers Maurice and Roger in relocating a very large beehive from a wall in an abandoned shed in the Hollywood hills. First we had to do quite a bit of demolition work, removing shelves and an old workbench. Then we carefully peeled back the wall paneling, to expose the bee’s comb. We smoked the bees to calm them down and proceeded to cut the comb out, putting the honeycomb into a five gallon bu...

Continue reading…

Is Cycling Too Dangerous?

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes, Fitness, Miscellaneous, Thoughtstylings, Transportation
35 Comments
Photo by Dru Marland. I’ve been hit by cars twice cycling around Los Angeles. In the first accident a medical delivery driver made a left turn in front of me and I collided with the rear panel of his car. It was his fault but, initially, the driver’s employer tried to come after me for $900 worth of damage. Fortunately, their insurance company took my side in the matter and even replaced my bent fork. In the second accident, a motori...

Continue reading…

Nasturtium Powder

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation, Foraging
15 Comments
Around this time of year Nasturtium becomes a kind of massive monocrop in our yard. We’re always trying to figure out uses for it. Of course it does well in salads, both the greens and the flowers, and we’ve made capers of the pods. Also, the flowers make a particularly beautiful pesto. But this year, inspired by the culinary experiments of forager Pascal Baudar and his partner Mia Wasilevich (friend them in Facebook if you want a d...

Continue reading…

Seaweed, Salmon and Manzanita Cider

Mrs. Homegrown
Reviews
4 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: I fell into temptation and bought Seaweed, Salmon and Manzanita Cider: A California Indian Feast at the Theodore Payne Foundation this week. I should know by now not to look around that book store. Like Ulysses, I should tie myself to the mast–pay for my native plants and get out. Somehow it never works. Seaweed, Salmon is a pretty little book. Paperback, thin, but coffee table worthy, because it’s so interesti...

Continue reading…