Search Results for: label/book%20reviews/page/32/2011/04/making-it/page/57/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

1138 results

Food Preservation Disasters

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Food, Food Preservation, Mistakes
16 Comments
...me preservation projects. Some of the recipes I tried were from unfamiliar books and dubious websites. Some sources I’ve come to trust: The National Center for Home Food Preservation’s website. Kevin West’s book Saving the Season: A Cook’s Guide to Home Canning, Pickling, and Preserving . Between those two sources I’ve got just about all the recipes I need. One Ring to rule them all When you’re done processing jars and they’ve cooled down, remove...

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Why You Should Avoid Staking Trees

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Fruit Trees, Gardening, Miscellaneous, Trees
6 Comments
...efits from chaos and shock. This idea is the subject of Nassim Taleb’s new book on what he calls “anti-fragility“. By contrast, natural or organic systems are antifragile: They need some dose of disorder in order to develop. Deprive your bones of stress and they become brittle. This denial of the antifragility of living or complex systems is the costliest mistake that we have made in modern times. Stifling natural fluctuations masks real problems,...

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Defining a Garden’s Purpose

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Garden Design, Gardening
13 Comments
...an one hour in each case.” – from Life at Home in the Twenty-first Century: 32 Families Open their Doors [italics mine] [italics mine] The unused yards I saw from the train and the ones in the UCLA study do serve a purpose. They are the legacy of mid 20th century suburbanization–the idea of combining country and city in a fantasy of being a petty king and queen of your own mini-real estate empire. Wouldn’t it be nice to give a better purpose to th...

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How to Bake a Traditional German Rye Bread

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Bread, Fermentation, Food, How-to, Recipes
33 Comments
...00% whole rye sourdough loaves. I’ve used as my guide a nicely illustrated book How to Make Bread by Emmanuel Hadjiandreou. His specialty is just the sort of rustic German style breads I’ve always wanted to learn to bake. What I love in particular about his caraway rye sourdough loaf (pictured above) is the crust. Unlike most other breads you don’t slash it before tossing it in the oven. The goal is a kind of perfect imperfection–a hard, thick cru...

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Happy Mayan Apocalypse!

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Thoughtstylings
9 Comments
...s doomsday thinking, I think it would be best just to quote Greer from his book Apocalypse Not: there’s at least a chance that the upcoming failure of the 2012 prophecy might encourage people to take a hard and skeptical look at the apocalypse meme itself, to recognize that longing for the annihilation of most of humanity has no place in an authentic spirituality, and accept that our happiness as human beings depends on how we choose to live our l...

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