What Equipment do I Need to Keep Bees?

May 12, 2017

...natural (so to speak) keeps costs way down. You could get even cheaper by making your own top bar hives but I was taught on Langstroth equipment and I’ve just decided to stick with them out of habit. Stand for the hives After a bad experience with the wooden stands that I made myself, I bought some metal stands. But you could save a lot of money by just using cinder blocks. The important thing to note is that bee boxes should be off the ground to...

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A Cheap and Easy DIY Sewing Cutting Table

Mr. Homegrown

October 10, 2016

Design, Domesticus

5 Comments

...table height around our compound needs to be higher. I ended up going with 36 inches, since that’s the size of the bathroom cabinets I scavenged for the project. I may end up raising the table, at some point, when I’m in less of a hurry to get things done. Opinions about width and length for cutting tables vary in the sewing community. At minimum, a cutting table should be at least 3 feet by 6 feet. Slightly wider and longer would be better but t...

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A viewing suggestion from the media arm of Root Simple

Mrs. Homegrown

February 11, 2014

Domesticus, Food, Gardening, Preparedness, Resources, Thoughtstylings

34 Comments

...outside world, to the electric light burning beside me. Bless the BBC for making Tudor Monastery Farm (a title which I believe would not fly on American television). This is a quiet series showing three historians/archeologists at play in the Weald & Downland Open Air History Museum, trying out some of the skills they’d need to be tenant farmers to the local monastery. It has some of the structure of a reality show, but it seems that no one reall...

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Help! I’ve got Paper Wasps

Mr. Homegrown

August 2, 2016

Animals, Insects

9 Comments

...beneficial insect. They eat beetle larvae, caterpillars, flies and nectar (making them pollinators). They are your friends in the garden. Right now I have a large colony living in the eave of our front porch right over my favorite chair. I’ve sat in that chair, with my head a mere four feet from my paper wasp buddies, for many hours and have never once been bothered. Biology Like honeybees, paper wasp are social insects. A mated queen lays eggs. B...

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Satan’s Easter Basket is Filled with Plastic Easter Grass

Mrs. Homegrown

March 29, 2016

Domesticus, Nature Awareness, Thoughtstylings

7 Comments

...al grass. I think animals may have gotten into the garbage cans overnight, making it all worse, but clearly a lot of that trash, especially the Easter grass and Silly String, was probably on the ground when the picnickers left. One lonely, overburdened city maintenance guy was already raking up the garbage, but it was a Sisyphean task, and I doubt he’ll be so fine tuned as to focus on the Easter grass, but the Easter grass may be the most problema...

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