Search Results for: label/time banking/page/48/2011/04/making-it

686 results

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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Radical Homemakers

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
9 Comments
Last year we had the great privilege of meeting and being interviewed by farmer and author Shannon Hayes for her new book Radical Homemakers. Hayes is well known as an expert on cooking grass fed meat–see her website grassfedcooking.com for more on that. Radical Homemakers takes a look at the new domesticity of the past decade through a series of interviews with its practitioners. Touching on issues such as gender roles, food choices and f...

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Compost Outlaws

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Thoughtstylings
15 Comments
ood thing for her Silver Lake Farms business while doing the right thing for the planet by filling a garbage can each week with produce scraps from a nearby restaurant and dumping them into her compost. A neighbor did not see it that way and complained about the compost, which Kolla has in two wood boxes covered with black plastic. “I didn’t put it here to offend anyone. I put it here because it’s a work area,” Kolla said...

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Italy Questions Neonicotinoid Pesticides, California Department of Food and Agriculture Loves Them

Mr. Homegrown
Pests, Thoughtstylings
8 Comments
Can I report the CDFA as a pest? Responding to concerns about the safety of nicotine based pesticides, such as imidacloprid, the Italian government, last year, banned them as a seed treatment. According to the Institute of Science in Society, Researchers with the National Institute of Beekeeping in Bologna, Italy discovered that “pollen obtained from seeds dressed with imidacloprid contains significant levels of the insecticide, and sugg...

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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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The Perfect Chicken Coop?

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
7 Comments
Do a Google image search for “chicken coop” and a solid majority of the results will look very much like this nearly 100 year old coop featured in The Gardener’s and Poultry Keeper’s Guide and Illustrated Catalog. Why is this basic design still with us? The attached run gives chickens some space to scratch around in while keeping them safe from predators if you can’t make it home by dark. You can hang a feeder in...

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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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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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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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