Garden Design: Working With Pre-existing Conditions

...isguided Sketchup session. Yes, that is Princess Leia standing in for Mrs. Homegrown. I guess that makes me Jabba the Hut, which I resemble while blogging on the couch. But I digress. I emailed this rendering to our architect pal John Zapf for review. He responded in two words, “April Fools?” I didn’t admit that I was kinda serious. I called Mrs. Homegrown in to look at my rendering and to her credit she didn’t dismiss it immediately (she knows th...

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Make Your Own Damn Cheese

...le rennet rather than the animal based rennet that is used in most cheese. Homegrown Revolution recommends that you start your cheese experiments with soft cheeses which are easier to produce. The Neufchâtel recipe that we used to produce the cheese pictured above can be found on the nicely illustrated cheese making website of biology and chemistry professor David B. Frankhauser. Frankhauser’s website is an excellent introduction to cheesemaking....

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From the Archives: Loquat Leather

Judging from the reaction to Mrs. Homegrown’s post yesterday it looks like some folks have a loquat obsession. Welcome home brothers and sisters. At the risk of tooting my own loquat horn and repeating an old blog post, Mrs. H neglected to mention my controversial 2012 loquat leather experiment and recipe. You’ve still got to de-seed the damn things but at least there’s no need to skin them. Plus it makes use of booze. I’ll admit it’s not a thril...

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Ways to Critter Proof Your Vegetable Beds: A Competition

...be particularly stringent in judging the aesthetics of the solution. Mrs. Homegrown has an M.F.A., and is a blistering in-house art and design critic around our little homestead. Participants can leave a comment on this post linking to an image, or send us an email at [email protected]. The winner will get a package of our newest publication–a series of booklets we wrote in collaboration with the Ecology Center in San Juan Capistrano. I will a...

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