Tomato Can Stove

July 18, 2006

Here’s another stove based on the Penny Wood Stove by Mark Jurey for heating up that pot of coffee when the gas and electricity go out. It’s a bit simpler than the Pepsi can stove and doesn’t require fuel other than some sticks or small scraps of wood. The stove works on the same principle as a charcoal chimney starter and it is simple to build.1. Use a 28 ounce can – I used a Trader Joes tomato can. First, drill a bu...

The Fine Art of Worm Grunting

Mr. Homegrown

October 15, 2012

Vermiculture

6 Comments

For your Monday viewing pleasure we have two videos showing worm grunting in Florida. Worm grunting is a technique used to lure worms out of the soil to collect as fishing bait. Basically, you take a stick (called a “stob”), pound it into the ground and rub a metal rod (known as a “rooping iron”) against the top of the stob. The deep vibrations are said to mimic the sound of burrowing moles, the natural predator of wor...

Mellow Yellow: How to Make Dandelion Wine

Nancy Klehm

April 17, 2012

Fermentation, Food, Foraging, Recipes

38 Comments

Today on Root Simple we welcome another guest post from our Midwest correspondent Nancy Klehm: In the past week, we Midwesterners have experienced three hard frosts – killing back the growth, that emerged too early of my grapes and hardy kiwis and zapping peach blossoms. We will see if there is any fruit onset and if my vines recover. Meanwhile, it is dandelion wine time! I first tasted dandelion wine when I bought a bottle of it at a folksy gi...

Social Media as a Homesteading Tool

Mr. Homegrown

October 18, 2012

Thoughtstylings

34 Comments

sions. I’ve used it to solicit gardening advice, find a place to celebrate a birthday, borrow a guitar and keep up with friends and family. And I’ve learned a lot from what Facebook friends have posted about their homesteading adventures. Yes, the privacy issues are alarming but, having written two books now, our life is public anyways. I think that it’s healthy to look at new technology critically and to take a break both dail...

How to Roast Your Own Coffee in a Stovetop Popcorn Maker

Mr. Homegrown

April 30, 2012

Food, How-to

12 Comments

Thanks to the Institute for Domestic Technology, I learned roast my own coffee at home in a Whirley-Pop Stovetop Popcorn Popper. It’s a simple, if smokey, process. You heat up the popper on your stove top over a medium/high heat and dump in 10 ounces of green coffee beans. The beans we used were ordered from Sweet Maria’s who carry a wide selection of high-end beans at inexpensive prices. The only trick with the Whirley-Po...

Return of Recipe Friday! Carrot Soup

Mrs. Homegrown

October 28, 2011

Food, Recipes

12 Comments

We had a party at our house last week and lots of people brought baby carrots. And no one took their baby carrots home with them when they left. So I took the pile of baby carrots and made a pureed carrot soup with them–one of my all-time favorite soups, in fact. Working with baby carrots was kind of fantastic. No chopping! No peeling! Doing this reminded me that I haven’t shared this recipe on the blog, so I dug up the original re...

Planting a Mini-Orchard

Mr. Homegrown

March 19, 2008

Gardening, Water and Power, Water Conservation

2 Comments

Ignore the bucket in this illustration! See update below. Update 3/13/2011: I met Brad Lancaster last night and he told me that he and Art Ludwig no longer use the upside down bucket described in this post. The reason is that detergents can build up in the hole. In my experience the bucket was also an unnecessary step. While I have a clay soil, the hillside drains fairly well. A properly sized mulch basin should suffice to allow greywat...

Using Kosher Salt for Making Pickles

Mr. Homegrown

May 10, 2012

Food, Food Preservation

19 Comments

Naive me, I purchased a box of Morton’s kosher salt for a pickling project. I thought that kosher salt lacks the anti-caking agents that cause cloudy and sediment filled jars of pickles. No blue ribbon for me at the county fair: Morton salt has anti-caking agents. But I can follow them on Facebook (why I would want to do that would be the topic of another post). Diamond Salt, on the other hand does not have anti-caking agents: So, when...

A Parvati Solar Cooker

Mr. Homegrown

March 24, 2008

Solar

4 Comments

Damn, is solar cooking easy! Put some rice in a pot, place the pot in this simple panel cooker, made with cardboard and aluminum foil, stick it out in the sun and two hours later you have lunch. We built our “Parvati” solar cooker with plans designed by Shobha Ravindra Pardeshi that can be found here. Pardeshi, who runs an “appropriate technology” company with her husband in India has another design for a similar dish-sha...

Without Merit: poison in your compost

Mr. Homegrown

December 7, 2009

Composting, Gardening, Thoughtstylings, Vegetable Gardening

7 Comments

An image from Washington State University’s aminopyralid bioassay instructions. Another thing to worry about! In the past two years farmers and gardeners in the UK and US have experienced the unintended effects of a powerful herbicide called aminopyralid, sold by Dow Chemical under the brand names Merit and Forefront. This herbicide is used to control weeds such as thistle, knapweed and yellow starthistle. The problem is that aminopyral...

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Root Simple

low tech home tech

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Tomato Can Stove

The Fine Art of Worm Grunting

Mellow Yellow: How to Make Dandelion Wine

Social Media as a Homesteading Tool

How to Roast Your Own Coffee in a Stovetop Popcorn Maker

Return of Recipe Friday! Carrot Soup

Planting a Mini-Orchard

Using Kosher Salt for Making Pickles

A Parvati Solar Cooker

Without Merit: poison in your compost