The recyclable/compostable Christmas tree

December 9, 2014

...inexpensively made, and don’t have to be stored from year to year. Sturdy fruits and berries Popcorn/cranberry strings Paper chains Dried herbs and flowers Moss Feathers Cool looking seed pods Nuts Origami Paper snowflakes Homemade rock candy Gingerbread figures There’s tons more possibilities. What have I forgotten? Some of my ornaments This is a sugared white sage leaf. I added sugar because I decided the tree needed a little bling. Ditto with...

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Renting and Homesteading

Mr. Homegrown

April 27, 2015

Animals, Bees, Chickens, Fruit Trees, Garden Design, Gardening, Urban Farming, Vegetable Gardening

4 Comments

...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYpDlwx44pI College student Sheila Cassani transformed her rental unit in Oakland California into a beautiful garden space she calls Kansas Street Farm. She’s turned a small space into a productive paradise with fruits, vegetables, chickens and bees....

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Composting: Nothing is Wasted

Mrs. Homegrown

May 7, 2015

Back to the Garden, Composting, Gardening

23 Comments

...dress our needs, everything from smart refrigerators which promise to keep veggies longer, to plastic storage containers with replaceable charcoal filters in the lids. My response, as you probably predicted, is to suggest that we deal with our guilt and our rotten vegetables by first, trying not to be so wasteful, and second, by composting, because spoiled food is not the end of a journey, it’s simply the beginning of a new journey. O, Compost, my...

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A NSFW Mushroom

Mr. Homegrown

June 3, 2024

Gardening, Mushrooms

4 Comments

...t enjoy looking at them (and occasionally eating chicken of the woods, the only one I feel confident enough to identity). This weekend in Pomona I spotted the notoriously NSFW stinkhorn mushroom which I’m pretty sure is Phallus hadriani. It fruits quickly with the tip oozing a slimy substance attractive to insects. I witnessed a pill bug and some gnats circling the morel-like tip. Stinkhorns use these insects to distribute spores. In short, a very...

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Ill advised grafting projects

Mr. Homegrown

January 21, 2016

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

4 Comments

...the level of nicotine was within acceptable ranges, tobacco-grafted tomato fruits were considered to be safe for consumption. Self-grafted tomato cultivars also had flowering time onsets almost 11 days earlier. However, self-grafting caused 6.0% and 7.6% less total fruit yield per cv. It does remind me of the unsuccessful attempt back in the 1970s to graft hops onto cannabis root stock with the goal of creating a legal looking plant containing THC...

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