The Wonder of Worms

May 21, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening, Vermiculture

...oil. Every time you water your plant, the castings will release nutrients. Making tea is just extra work for you. Humans like to complicate things. Worms leave their castings in or on the soil. We should, too. (Leave the worms’ castings, that is, not our own castings. We needn’t alarm the neighbors.) Third, there’s aerated compost tea (ACT), as popularized by Elaine Ingham. This is made by brewing a tea from castings with the help of an air pump,...

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Learn to Build with Adobe

Mr. Homegrown

August 10, 2016

Events

...town headquarters: Making Adobe: The next session of our monthly, half day Making Adobe class in Pioneertown is coming up on Sunday, August 21st. Just a couple minutes from both Sand to Snow National Monument and Joshua Tree National Park, we’ll spend Sunday providing a condensed introduction to making and building with adobe brick. Our final two session this year will be on September 25 and October 23th. Register here, bring your friends, make so...

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George Rector: M.F.K. Fisher’s Dirty Old Uncle

Mrs. Homegrown

February 11, 2016

Recipes, Reviews

5 Comments

...p. Speaking of befuddled menfolk, Erik is quite fond of this passage about making Hollandaise sauce (from the chapter titled “A Touch of Eggomania”), not least because it has introduced the term “hen fruit” into our lives: For eggs Benedict, you need Hollandaise sauce, an additional contribution of the hen fruit to the pleasures of the palate, and to the confusion of cooks. Hold on to your hats and we’ll round that curve. Add four egg yolks, beate...

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Planting in a Post-Wild World

Mrs. Homegrown

October 19, 2015

Back to the Garden, Garden Design, Gardening

25 Comments

...re”) which are basically man-made elements which neaten the wilder spaces, making the viewer understand that this is a cared-for space. Pic from the book. An unidentified rooftop garden showing good use of “frames”: design elements which make spontaneity palatable. I want to live there. But the real challenge in this process is designing a plant community which is attractive and functions in a sustainable, self-supporting way. These landscapes are...

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Stirred, Not Shaken

Mr. Homegrown

October 23, 2009

Biodynamics, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

27 Comments

...ties us to nature and I look forward to stirring preparations and perhaps making them with a few close friends. In fact, I’m much more excited about making preparations than it buying a package through the mail. Steiner’s set of herbs all grow well here and many of them I have already. But a cow is kinda hard to come by in Los Angeles. While it may be heresy to some, perhaps we’ll have to come up with some modifications to the rituals that make s...

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