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

741 results

Extra Virgin Olive Oil: Buyer Beware

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
10 Comments
From the University of California Food Blog, a warning about fraud in the olive oil business: “Researchers at UC Davis and in Australia discovered that 69 percent of the imported oils sampled, compared to just 10 percent of the California-produced oils sampled, failed to meet internationally accepted standards for extra virgin olive oil. The imported oils tested were purchased from supermarkets and “big box” stores in three Californi...

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Kelly’s 2012 To-Do List

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
20 Comments
Even the kittens will help, not hinder, the New Productivity of 2012. I feel like Erik really threw down a challenge with his mammoth resolution list, so here’s my to-do list for 2012. It’s much less ambitious. I think I’ll schedule the concrete activities for certain weeks and months, and post a calender to keep me on track: -No lingering over breakfast, no excuses such as “just one more cup of tea” or &#...

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Compost Bin Project From Our New Book

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Design, Gardening
20 Comments
Natural Home and Garden magazine has excerpted a shipping pallet compost bin project from our new book Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World . I’ve been using shipping pallets as a compost bin for a few years now and they work great. A compost pile, in my humble opinion, should be a minimum of a cubic yard in order to jump start the heat and microbial life that makes for good compost. Nail together a couple of pallets a...

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Poultry Houses of the Ultra Wealthy: Part 2

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Design, Thoughtstylings
15 Comments
Are $100,000 chicken coops a sign of an empire on the verge of a decadent downward spiral? If so it’s time to get that bug-out location ready because Neiman Marcus publicity flacks just announced a $100,000 “Heritage Hen Mini-Farm.” From the description on their website: Dawn breaks. The hens descend from their bespoke Versailles-inspired Le Petit Trianon house to their playground below for a morning wing stretch. Slipping on...

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Dome Building

Mr. Homegrown
Design
2 Comments
Drop City Chicken Coop Whenever the entwined notions of sustainability, green building, environmentalism and the lingering remains of the 60s counterculture address architecture and the places we live in, inevitably Buckminster Fuller influenced forms seem to just spring from the landscape like mushrooms after a particularly wet winter. Perhaps the idealism of folks interested in saving the world, especially do-it-yourself types, lends itself...

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Shiitake Happens

Mr. Homegrown
Mushrooms
11 Comments
Well, actually, shiitake doesn’t happen. It’s back to the drawing board for our first experiment in mushroom growing. We ordered a kit and dutifully followed the directions, but a combination of high temperatures and too much or too little water resulted in the result you see above, what looks like a cake with a skin disease. And even if we got a crop the cost of the kit was too high to make the process economical. The kit came pre-...

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When It Gets Hot in Chicago: Make Tempeh!

Nancy Klehm
Fermentation, Food, Recipes
4 Comments
Tempeh image from Wikipedia. Today, a guest post from Nancy Klehm, writing to us from Chicago, in the midst of an epic drought and heat wave. Here’s Nancy: A Drought of Inspiration Until last week, we were at 12% of our normal precipitation for our eight month growing season. This, plus extreme temperatures, made us delirious when some humidity blew south from Canada and was sticky enough to grab ahold of some clouds and build th...

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Edible and Tasty Arugula Flowers

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
11 Comments
Our winter vegetable garden is just about finished. This week I’m going to tear out most of it and plant tomatoes and a few other summer veggies. I may keep some of the arugula that has gone to flower a little longer. Why? arugula flower taste great in salads bees love them arugula self seeds readily The flowers, which taste like the leaves, are a reminder of my favorite time of year: arugula season. Each year I curse myself for not pla...

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Media Fasting

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
19 Comments
Ant Farm’s Media Burn For the last year I’ve been trying, as an experiment, to see what it would be like to cut off the news. That means no newspaper, no Google news, no NPR, no broadcast television of any kind. At the beginning of my media fast, I was concerned that I would somehow lose touch with reality, with important details of what’s going on in the world. In fact, some news does reach me, filtered through conve...

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Our favorite way to cook zucchini

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
26 Comments
It’s that time of year again. Put aside those zucchini bread recipes and try this instead. This recipe–or technique, rather– sounds too simple to be good, but it really works. As one friend said of the dish, “It tastes like there’s a lot going on, but there’s not.” All you’ve got to do is shred your zucchini up on the large holes of your kitchen grater. Saute the shreds in an uncovered s...

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