Search Results for: label/water conservation/page/5/2011/04/making-it

598 results

Book Review: 1491

Mrs. Homegrown
Reviews
9 Comments
I’m way late to this party, because 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus came out in 2006 and was a best seller, so it’s probably not news to many of you that this is a fantastic book. For those of you who haven’t read it, though, this is the type of book that you look up from every few minutes and say, “Listen to this!” or “Did you know…?”  1491 is a depiction of the Americas...

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Barfing and Bikes: Why You Might Want Fenders

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes
5 Comments
Barf Blog reports on an unusual study that took a look at why a an outbreak of gastrointestinal illness occured at the world’s largest bike race in Norway. In short, mud from cattle grazing areas splashed up onto the faces of participants. Now I wouldn’t see the need to repeat this if I hadn’t met a cyclist here in Los Angeles that something similar happened to. In his case it was a case of giardia–his doctor theorized t...

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Root Knot Nematodes, Meliodogyne spp.

Homegrown Neighbor
Pests
12 Comments
...nds of nematodes and not all are garden pests. However, the root knot nematode is a very annoying pest indeed. Above ground, plants are stunted. Below ground, the little guys are sucking on the plant’s roots and robbing it of nutrients. This weakens the overall root system, starves the plant and allows entry points for fungus and disease. Bad stuff. I have had plants that mysteriously won’t grow. No amount of fertilizer, water or sunl...

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Deep Bedding for Chickens

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Composting
42 Comments
We’ve got about 5-6″ of loose stuff on the floor of our chicken run. Underneath that, it’s black gold. Around this time of year, folks are getting chickens. Some for the first time. So I figured it was time to talk about deep bedding again. I know we’ve written about it before, in our book, or on this blog, but this advice bears repeating: Nature abhors bare ground.  Line your chicken coop and run with a thick l...

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Cichorium intybus a.k.a. Italian Dandelion

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
3 Comments
Our illegal parkway garden has got off to a slow start this season due to low seed germination rates. We’ve compensated with a trip to the Hollywood farmer’s market to pick up some six-packs of seedlings. One plant we made sure to get is Cichorium intybus, known in Italian as “cicoria” or chicory, but somehow, in the case of leaf chicory, mistranslated as “Italian dandelion,” probably because the leaves resem...

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Nasturtium “Capers”

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
1 Comment
Nasturtium grows like a weed here at the SurviveLA compound. We don’t water it, though if we did we might have a larger crop. The nice thing about Nasturtium is that the entire plant is edible – both the leaves and flowers have a strong peppery flavor and the flowers brighten up the Spartan salads we chow down on in the late spring. Once you plant this stuff, at least here in Los Angeles, the thousands of seeds it produces guarantee...

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A New and Improved Self Irrigating Pot System

Mr. Homegrown
Self Watering Containers
10 Comments
A very cool improvement on the self irrigating pot (SIP) idea from Larry Hall of Minnesota. Rather than the two bucket system we’ve blogged about in the past (see a roundup of our SIP resources here), Hall uses one long rain gutter to supply water. He’s even got a clever double rain gutter system for growing strawberries that I’m tempted to try on our back patio. I spotted this video on Inside Urban Green always a good sourc...

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Everlasting Flower for Colds

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Foraging, Herbal Medicine
5 Comments
...of the many things I learned in this class was that the flowers of California Pearly Everlasting, Gnaphalium californicum, aka cudweed aka rabbit tobacco, are supposed to be good for colds. I’ve not had a chance to try it until this week. I’ve only had one cold since last summer, and that one hit so fast and hard I just sort of gave up on doing anything but riding it out. The one I have this week is more of a typical head cold, and ...

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