Tools for Conquering Internet Addiction

May 22, 2015

...as Carr observed in his prescient 2008 article in the Atlantic, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?,” I’ve noticed that my attention span seems to be shrinking and that I’m less able to sit down and read books without the temptation to jump on the Internet and look stuff up. I’ve also noticed that I’m having a harder time initiating and completing the sort of gardening, cooking, food preservation and general DIY projects that provide fodder for this blog...

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Our Phoebe is gone

Mrs. Homegrown

June 9, 2015

Cats

49 Comments

...till burned in her eyes, and it killed a part of us to have to put it out. Making the decision to euthanize a pet is one of the most difficult of decisions to make. We’ve never had to do it before, because our previous pets having been lost in other ways. My heart goes out to all of you who are now remembering putting down your own pets, or who are contemplating that future possibility. Ending suffering is the right thing to do, but oh, it is a ha...

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Does Compost Tea Work?

Mr. Homegrown

November 16, 2015

Composting, Gardening

5 Comments

...D3Kx7I4d4hU If you’d like to pick an argument in the mostly staid world of gardening, I can’t think of a better subject than compost tea. I’ve, somewhat cowardly, tried to stay out of the fray and leave the debate to Linda Chalker-Scott and Jeff Lowenfels. If you forced me to pick a side I’d lean towards Chalker-Scott’s skepticism. Thankfully, I can now point towards the eXtension.org webinar on making and using compost teas that I’ve embedded abo...

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I Can’t Get Adam Curtis Out of My Head

Mr. Homegrown

February 12, 2021

Thoughtstylings

1 Comment

...e that this entire multi-thousand post blog, with all those canning, bread making, gardening, squirrel complaining ramblings are just an excuse for those few times I get to implore readers to watch the latest Adam Curtis documentary? Methinks yes and so I must note that a new Curtis just dropped on the BBC yesterday. “Can’t Get You Out of My Head” is Curtis at his most sprawling and complex. We watched the first episode last night which covers, am...

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A Sasquatch in the Garden?

Mr. Homegrown

November 6, 2020

Gardening

8 Comments

I keep a mental note of all the objects I’ve dug up while gardening over the years. The soil surrounding our house has mostly thrown up broken milk bottles from the days of the milkman. I’ve also found a lot of what I think are perfume bottles. Mostly though my shovel hits chunks of long buried concrete. Then I curse. But this week, while we’ve been working on version 5.3 of our difficult to garden steep front slope, I uncovered the strangest obj...

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