Search Results for: label/water conservation/page/35/2011/04/making-it

598 results

Showers to Flowers

Mr. Homegrown
Water Conservation
1 Comment
Here’s the truth, I’m lazy. So when it comes to the aforementioned greywater strategies such as bucket flushing and siphoning, while we might try them for a while we’ll most likely quickly tire of all the repetitive effort barring some apocalyptic water shortage. SurviveLA agrees with Art Ludwig, author of Create an Oasis with Greywater that the best greywater systems are the simplest, and involve the least amount of effort and...

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Mud for the People! Building an Adobe Garden Wall

Mr. Homegrown
Design
6 Comments
of the workshop, but pieced together what Kurt and Ben went over. One of the first steps is to determine the clay/sand content of your soil and to do that you do a jar test. When you mix some soil with water in a jar and let it sit, the clay settles on top, the silt below that, and the sand on bottom. You can measure the sample and determine percentages. At the workshop, held in the high desert town of Landers, CA the sand and clay were source...

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Indigo 101

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Gardening, Herbs
5 Comments
...s and notes which I hope will help other indigo beginners sort things out. Here’s a stack of stuff he’s working on : And here’s some silk he dyed with bougainvillaea flowers. The two tone effect is just how it happened to dye. You rock, Graham!: But back to the indigo. Indigo seedlings on Graham’s front step. A hint from Graham: to ensure germination, scarify the seed with sand paper and soak overnight before plan...

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Farm in a Box

Mr. Homegrown
Aquaculture, Preparedness
11 Comments
ide fertilizer for the plants as well as removing nitrogen and ammonia from the water. From the Earth Solutions website: “By integrating fish with vegetables, naturally balanced aquatic ecosystems are established making it unnecessary to add fertilizer, chemicals or remove nitrogen rich water. As in nature, plants, fish and oxygen loving bacteria create a symbiotic relationship; Fish waste is converted by bacteria to a plant loving nutrient...

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Outdoor Sink Makes Water Recycling Simple

Homegrown Neighbor
Design
12 Comments
This is my new outdoor sink. I found the cast iron sink on the side of the road in Pomona and gleefully dragged the heavy beast several hundred yards to my car. I had a frame built for it out of scrap wood lying around the yard, the faucet and pipes came from another discarded sink, and we hooked it up to the hose outlet. It drains into a simple 5 gallon bucket which I can then pour out into the nearby landscape. It is super simple grey water. N...

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Propagating herbs via cuttings

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Herbs
11 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: Say you have one lavender plant, but you’d like to have more. Or your trusty sage plant is getting old and woody and needs to be pulled, but you wish you could save a bit of it and start fresh. One way to accomplish this is to grow new plants from cuttings taken from your existing plant. This is process called taking softwood cuttings. You cut small bits of plant, dip them in a rooting hormone, then baby the cuttings...

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Thirsty bees

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
14 Comments
keeping a bird bath or even just putting a saucer of fresh water out for them. You can do this even if you don’t have a yard–try keeping a saucer of water on, say, a balcony railing or in a window box. If you keep it full, and in the same location, word will spread and the bees will come and belly up. It may take a couple of weeks for a worker to discover the water source, but once she does, she will take that information back to her...

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Mistakes we have made . . .

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings
13 Comments
There’s a kind of boastful blogging style that, I’m afraid, we here at Homegrown Evolution have been guilty of. Simply put, we’ve failed to detail all our blunders. These mistakes and accidents, some funny, others painfully disappointing, have more instructional value than our successes. And oh, how many blunders there have been in the past ten years. It’s about time to round up the top 6. I’m sure there are many mo...

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Addendum to the previous post: Nasal irrigation and pressure points

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus
7 Comments
..., so I thought I’d cover them too, real quick. Nasal irrigation is the practice of cleaning out the nasal cavities with a saline solution. This dislodges gunk, and feels really good on dry, inflamed, or swollen tissue. It’s a good technique to use to keep a cold from becoming worse, and to alleviate symptoms–it helps temporarily clear a clogged nose, and can ease sinuses. These days lots of folks use neti pots, an Indian import...

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The Making of a Great Olive Oil

Mr. Homegrown
Food
4 Comments
...e At the end of all this machinery the oil pours out of a spigot and into a steel drum: We all had the great privilege of tasting the freshly squeezed oil. I won’t soon forget that heavenly flavor. Matt told us that it takes around a ton of olives to make 25 to 30 gallons of oil. The olives come from a thousand trees that are tucked around the vineyards. If you’re ever in Northern California the Preston Vineyard is well worth a v...

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