Search Results for: label/uses for used tires

389 results

Something for Nothing – Wild Mustard Greens

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
RLeave a comment
s a noxious weed, the leaves have a pleasant and pungent flavor and can be eaten raw or cooked. From the Plants for a Future database entry: “Leaves . . . A hot pungent flavour, especially if eaten raw. Young leaves are used as a flavouring in mixed salads, whilst older leaves are used as a potherb. Seed – sprouted and eaten raw. The seed takes about 4 days to be ready. A hot flavour, it is often used in salads. A nutritional analysis...

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Till vs. No-Till

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Soil, Vegetable Gardening
31 Comments
...at, research has shown, form important symbiotic relationships with plant roots.  But what about heavily compacted soils? How do you turn a lawn or driveway into a garden? It’s in these cases that I, in the past, have used double digging. Double digging proponents would argue that the practice should be distinguished from tilling in that, unlike tilling, you don’t invert the soil structure as much when you double dig. Double diggi...

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Mud for the People! Building an Adobe Garden Wall

Mr. Homegrown
Design
6 Comments
bricks. To make both the bricks and the mortar, water is mixed with a half a coffee cup of asphalt. The asphalt helps the bricks and mortar resist water. Traditionally, prickly pear cactus soaked in water and fermented was used before the modern convenience of asphalt.   Our instructors went with a mixture of about one part clay to two parts sand for the bricks and mortar.  A couple of handfuls of straw were added to each wheelbarrow fu...

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Mandrake!

Mr. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food
2 Comments
Buhner’s book from both the geeked-out world of middle-aged home brew aficionados on the one side and the Budweiser frogs on the down-market other is his emphasis on the ancient and sacred elements of beer making which used to be, he claims, the duty of women, not men. His chapter, “Psychotropic and Highly Inebriating Beers” contains a number of recipes, including one making use of the mysterious mandrake plant, a member of the...

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How to Make a Mosaic Stepping Stone

Mr. Homegrown
Design, How-to
8 Comments
...imple box by joining the pieces with screws at the corners. If you wish, you can spray the sides of the mold with WD-40 to help release the mold later. I forgot to do this, but it released fine anyway For the mosaic itself, I used glass mosaic tile leftover from an old project. The glass picks up reflections and shimmers on a sunny day. The drawback is that it’s pretty expensive. The brand we’ve used in the past is Bisazza. You can al...

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Compost Outlaws

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Thoughtstylings
15 Comments
Yard Trimmings being used as “ADC” at the Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley Our neighborhood comrade Tara Kolla, who grows sweet peas for farmer’s markets in her urban backyard, has been busted for . . . composting! Specifically for composting fruit and vegetable scraps from a local restaurant. From last Friday’s Los Angeles Times: Tara Kolla said she was doing a good thing for her Silver Lake Farms business while doing the...

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Urine as a Fertilizer

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
17 Comments
lizer in Cultivation of Cabbage (Brassica oleracea)––Impacts on Chemical, Microbial, and Flavor Quality by Surendra K. Pradhan, Anne-Marja Nerg, Annalena Sjöblom, Jarmo K. Holopainen and Helvi Heinonen-Tanski Human urine was used as a fertilizer in cabbage cultivation and compared with industrial fertilizer and nonfertilizer treatments. Urine achieved equal fertilizer value to industrial fertilizer when both were used at a dose of 180 kg N...

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Four Ways to Preserve Prickly Pear Pads (Nopales)

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Food Preservation, How-to, Recipes
14 Comments
ling them for five minutes to remove the mucilaginous texture. After boiling I pan fry them and serve them with eggs. It’s a meal that comes, except for the salt, entirely out of the yard. What follows are the methods I used to preserve those tasty pads. Dehydrated I removed the spines, cut the pads into 3/4 inch strips and boiled them for one minute. I then marinated them for ten minutes in soy sauce and dried them until brittle in an Exc...

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How Not to Grow Potatoes

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
2 Comments
Despite doing everything wrong we had a more bountiful than expected harvest of potatoes this summer season. We grew our ‘taters in a stack of tires. Used treads, due to their ubiquity along the sides of our blighted streets, ought to be named the official city flower of Los Angeles, but we digress. The idea with ‘tater tire stacks is that you add another tire as the plant grows and in so doing encourage the plant to throw out more...

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Are Pallets Safe to Reuse?

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Design, Thoughtstylings
9 Comments
...henol (TBP) to fumigate pallets. Though, depending on if you believe the trade organizations behind wood pallets or plastic pallets (they hate each other), the Tylenol recall may have had nothing to do with TBP which is not used to fumigate pallets in the US. So, as with most issues on this blog, no easy answer. But I’m still not concerned about using pallets as a building material....

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