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

684 results

The CDFA’s Pesticide Theater

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Pests, Thoughtstylings
13 Comments
In the fall of 2009 a citrus pest called the Asian Citrus Psylid showed up in our neighborhood. It’s a major concern to commercial citrus growers since the pest spreads an incurable and fatal plant disease called huanglongbing (HLB). The California Department of Food and Agriculture commenced a futile effort to suppress the psylid by hiring a contractor, TruGreen, to spray residential backyards in Southern California with a combination o...

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Coffee Chaff Chickens

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Composting
14 Comments
A hen checks out her fluffy new digs: coffee chaff bedding Image shamelessly stolen from Lyanda Haupt’s Tangled Nest blog Mrs. Homegrown here: Deep litter in the chicken coop is good for chicken health, general aesthetics and good neighbor relations. Chickens need to scratch, so giving them lots of stuff to scratch is kind. It also absorbs odor and protects stray eggs from breakage. Even better, their constant scratching combines their...

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Building a Makeshift Treadmill Desk

Mr. Homegrown
Fitness
1 Comment
...tte blogs at LivingSmall.com and lives in Livingston, Montana. Why did you build a treadmill desk? Because as I entered my late 40s, after working a steady day job for 10 years, I was gaining weight and having trouble getting it off. Also, was having incipient carpal tunnel issues which I thought standing might help (it did). Oh — and my dogs got too old and arthritic to walk twice a day — that was probably as much a precipitating eve...

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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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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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Our Favorite Searches

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
ng Portably for answers to that. “how to make methamphetamine using a 5 gallon bucket” Can’t help you there, but we can suggest a healthier use for a 5 gallon bucket. “pizza dough peak oil flour” It may be shameless promotion, but we think we’re the only source for a pizza recipe for peak oil fans. Of course, sticklers for detail will point out that we did not grow and grind our own flour. We’ll get to ho...

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Los Angeles Chicken Produces World’s Largest Egg

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
3 Comments
Well, I exaggerate a bit. Neighbor Lora Hall rushed over this afternoon to show us an egg as big as the Dodger Stadium parking lot produced by her hefty Cornish Cross hen who goes by the name “Chickenzilla”. It was the same day that we found a tiny shell-less egg in our chicken coop. For your amusement we’ve lined up a set of freakish and normal eggs above. From left to right, a banty egg, one of our Plymouth Rock’s eggs...

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Daikon Radish Pickles

Mr. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food
13 Comments
 Don’t cut your radishes like this!Cut them in coins. See comments. Even though we know–intellectually–that for centuries people have preserved food via lacto-fermentation, again, as with cultured milk, it is a head trip for grocery store kids like us to soak some veggies in brine for a few weeks, open them up and chow down. Lacto-Fermentation is a process in which naturally occurring lactic acid producing bacteria are...

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Advances in Gardening: The Trough of Garlic

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
7 Comments
Remember a while back I posted a picture of Erik in a manly pose, whomping our patio with his sledgehammer? He took out a strip of concrete and built this over the hole: a new planting bed.  That’s the Germinator on the right, butting up to it and my Fan behind it.  When we’re done with all this redoing, we’ll clean everything up and take some wider shots so it all begins to make sense. For now–believe me–it’...

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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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