Search Results for: label/wheat

67 results

Bread and Transformation

Mr. Homegrown
Bread, Fermentation, Food, Thoughtstylings
7 Comments
...book Breads from the La Brea Bakery. You use a sourdough starter and at least half the flour must be white to get it to leaven properly. I’ve had great results, but would like to someday make a loaf entirely from whole wheat with a sourdough starter. Reinhart, in his book Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor claims to be able to do just that and not end up with a hockey puck. If you’ve tried his method (and gone t...

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Hay Boxes or Fireless Cookers

Mrs. Homegrown
Appropriate Technology, Food, Preparedness, Water and Power
28 Comments
Illustration from The Fireless Cook Book Mrs. Homegrown here: Jessica from Holland sent us a letter recently praising our work, but very, very gently scolding us not including the hay box, a groovy old energy saving technology, in our book. We do stand corrected! And her enthusiasm for hay boxes has reignited our interest, too. We actually considered hay boxes for Making It, but didn’t end up building one for a variety of reasons...

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Survival Gardening

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Preparedness, Thoughtstylings, Vegetable Gardening
27 Comments
...ve also got to maintain the soil fertility that you deplete by harvesting. To do that you need to grow all your own compost. For this, Jeavons suggests what he calls “carbon and calorie crops” things like corn and wheat where you get both something edible and a lot of biomass for your compost pile. In Jeavons’ 4,000 square foot “sustainable one person mini-farm” scheme, 60% of your growing area is devoted to these co...

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Chop and Drop: Leaving Plant Residues in the Garden

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
6 Comments
...1; it turns out has a number of important benefits. According to a research paper in the April-June 2012 issue of California Agriculture, In two field studies comparing no-tillage with standard tillage operations (following wheat silage harvest and before corn seeding), we estimated that 0.89 and 0.97 inches more water was retained in the no-tillage soil than in the tilled soil. In three field studies on residue coverage, we recorded that ab...

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Nopales Season

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
6 Comments
...simple recipe found in Delena Tull’s book, Edible and Useful Plants of Texas and the Southwest. First scrape off the spines with a knife and chop a pad (one pad per person). Boil for 10 minutes. Next, put 1/3 cup whole wheat flour, 2/3 cup cornmeal, 1 teaspoon chili powder, salt and pepper in a bag and shake with the boiled chopped nopales. Fry up in a pan and you’ve got a delicious side dish. One of the charms of the prickly pear ca...

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Dry Farming

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening, Water and Power, Water Conservation
19 Comments
...Farming by John Andreas Widtsoe, first published in 1911 and available as a free download in Google Books, describes how many farmers got along without the modern conveniences of supplemental irrigation. A dry farmed wheat and alfalfa field in Wyoming from Dry Farming Other than the advice to till frequently (tilling, among other things, destroys beneficial fungal networks), Dry Farming has some good tips: Maintain soil fertility  Pl...

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The Cat Poop Portal: Litter Box Composting, Installment #1

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Cats, Composting
30 Comments
...at litter is compostable–we’ve been using both Feline Pine and Yesterdays News–pine and paper, respectively. Compostable litter is made up of a true carbon source–that means plant-based material: corn, wheat, paper and sawdust are all okay. Clay litter, or anything with chemicals in it, would not be appropriate for this. Clay is not toxic, it’s just that it wouldn’t ever break down into proper compost. I don...

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Cat Poop Compost Installment #2

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Cats, Composting
17 Comments
...ing to do? The stuff works really well and is compostable. Now that we’re using it we’ll reduce our overall litter waste volume.  (Of note: our friend John, a madman with six cats, swears by Swheat Scoop, which is wheat based. I don’t find it works for me, but he blames my litter management skills. It’s an alternative.) 2) We’re offloading half-finished cat compost to My Big Fat Worm Bin. Regular readers (and Vermico...

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Fall 2012 Adobe Classes With Kurt Gardella

Mr. Homegrown
Events
RLeave a comment
...egates for mud plasters and lime plasters importance of work site and material organization for plaster work fiber (straw) preparation and chopping techniques sifting, preparing and mixing soil and aggregates for mud plasters wheat paste production for strengthening mud plasters casein production for lime paints natural exterior mud plaster stabilization techniques (lime, cactus juice) hand application techniques of mud plasters (base coats, patc...

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My mental glitch: hay vs. straw

Mrs. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
21 Comments
...outing a yard full of alfalfa or whatever. It’s also more expensive than straw, about three times as much, depending on the grass type. No one would use hay as bedding. Straw is the dried stalks of cereal plants, like wheat. It’s a by-product of harvest. If any seeds remain on the stalks, it’s by accident. Therefore, straw is nutritionally void, and is not animal feed. However, that lack of seeds makes it a fine mulch, and an...

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