Straw Bale Garden Part III: Adding Fertilizer

April 30, 2013

...a, on philosophical grounds, but blood meal, a byproduct of our industrial food system, doesn’t make me feel much better. Urea would be a lot cheaper. Perhaps the best solution would be human urine. Throw a week-long party, serve a lot of beer and invite your guests to fertilize your bales! Undiluted human urine has an NPK ratio close to that of blood meal. Those of you who have experimented with straw bale gardens please leave a comment on what f...

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Initial Thoughts on the Age of Limits 2013 Conference

Mrs. Homegrown

May 30, 2013

Age of Limits, Thoughtstylings

21 Comments

...bad it’s in our interest to build community, grow gardens and eat healthy food. Back to Kelly: As Erik says, we’re both agnostics in terms of outcomes. We know it looks bad, but we won’t make bets on when, where or how the badness, or the various badnesses, will manifest. It seems a poor bet to try to predict the behavior of any enormously complex system. But just because we don’t know exactly what’s going to happen doesn’t mean that we’re not go...

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A Review of Masanobu Fukuoka’s Sowing Seeds in the Desert

Mr. Homegrown

December 4, 2012

Gardening, Miscellaneous, Permaculture, Reviews

4 Comments

...ing Seeds in the Desert: Natural Farming, Global Resotration, and Ultimate Food Security is now in English in a beautiful translation published by Chelsea Green. Fukuoka’s writing deals with the tricky practical and spiritual issues involved with our place in nature’s synergistic complexities. To intervene or not to intervene is often the question when it comes to what Fukuoka called his “natural farming” method. Fukuoka councils a humbleness befo...

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Farming: One way to try and save Detroit – Dec. 29, 2009

Homegrown Neighbor

January 1, 2010

Urban Farming

19 Comments

...ss we could do a lot of farming in the city. Land is cheap and abundant. But it sounds cold and we are weak in the face of temperatures below 50 degrees. Farming: One way to try and save Detroit – Dec. 29, 2009...

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Moldy Grapes!

Mr. Homegrown

June 24, 2008

Fermentation, Food

13 Comments

...But for a longer ferment, like sauerkraut, you really do have to keep the food below the brine with weight. Recent Failure #2: Moldy Chamomile Tea We had a bumper crop of chamomile this year, due to generous volunteerism on its part. Several large plants sprung up in unlikely spots and thrived with no help at all. I harvested lots of the flowers so I could have chamomile tea in the cupboard until next spring. The mistake I made in this case was n...

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