Butter Making Demo at the Natural History Museum

Join us for what I promise will be the Burning Man of butter making this Friday evening at the Natural History Museum. We’ll be doing a hands-on shake your own butter demo with live drummers. Best of all it’s freeeeeeeeeeeee, but you need to RSVP. And there’s more: MUSIC with COASTIN (5-7 pm) and Evan Weiss from Junk (7-9pm) BUTTER MAKING with authors, Erik Knutzen & Kelly Coyne (*timed-ticket required) POTTING SUCCULENTS (*timed-ticket required)...

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Making Tofu From Scratch at the Institute of Domestic Technology

...coffee roasting, bacon curing, bread baking, jam and exotic projects like making your own nocino and toothpaste. One of the perks of teaching at the IDT is getting to sit in on some of the other classes. The coffee roasting class changed my life. Now, every morning, I look forward to fresh coffee I roasted myself in a Whirley-Pop Popcorn maker. This past weekend I sat in a new IDT class taught by author Andrea Nguyen on how to make tofu from scra...

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Making Beer in Plain Language

...via the Bad Writing Contest Huh? At least the terminology surrounding beer making ain’t that obtuse, but it certainly could use some simplification. For novice home brewers, such as us here at Homegrown Evolution, the terminology creates an unnecessary barrier as impenetrable as a graduate school seminar in the humanities. Let’s see, there’s a mash, a mash tun, a wort, some sparging, malting, all the while specific gravities are measured and hopsi...

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Vertical Micro-Farming

...m store. From looking at it I can tell that this setup is meant to utilize vertical space and grow vegetables in a small footprint. Water drips down from the top, irrigating multiple plants on its way down. The plants are not only stacked vertically, but radiate around the central axis, maximizing horizontal space as well. In this photo they are growing hot chili peppers. I also saw basil and sweet peppers and there were others I can’t recall righ...

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Planting in a Post-Wild World

...ither, as the community forms its own green mulch. Every planting has four vertical layers: the structural layer, the seasonal theme layer, the ground cover layer, and the filler layer. Plants stacked on top of plants. Plants intertwining. Plants giving way to other plants as the seasons progress. Another pic from the book showing the system of vertical layering in the design process. They give concrete examples for how this would work in three di...

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