New Project: Making Bitters

...I’ll share the recipes I develop as I follow this path. In the meanwhile, making your own bitters is really easy. You may be able to throw a few experiments together just using things you find in your spice cabinet. Since these are flavoring, not medicine, you don’t have to be as careful with the quantities and timing as you must be when tincturing herbs for medicine. Yet at the same time, it’s a great introduction to that essential herbalist’s c...

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The Homegrown Mailbox: How and Where Do I Get My Soil Tested?

...Santa Paula, CA (805) 525-3824 USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service 44811 N. Date Avenue Lancaster, CA 93534-3136 (661) 945-2604 Here’s a dirt cheap (pun intended) test for soil ph that you can do yourself. UPDATE: 7/7/09: Visiting journalist Michael Tortorello tipped us off to the University of Minnesota’s soil testing lab will test out of state samples for their regular (low) fee. It’s much cheaper than the services listed above. Their s...

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Homegrown Evolution on WAMC

Kelly and I will be on WAMC, Northeast Public Radio’s Roundtable show on Earth Day, April 22nd at 9:15 am EST. You can listen in online here. Earth Day will be a busy one for us as Erik will also be on a panel for the National Conversation on Climate Action at 2 pm PST at MTA headquarters. More info here. We’ll close the day with a book signing at an innovative new neighborhood market called Locali. We’ll be there at 7 pm PST and hope to see some...

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Homegrown Evolution in the LA Times

Today’s Los Angeles Times Home and Garden section has a story on Guerrilla gardening, “Guerrilla gardener movement takes root in L.A. area”. The article mentions our parkway vegetable garden, which consists of two 6-foot square raised beds with two wire obelisks to support beans and tomatoes. We constructed it in October of 2005 and have grown a few season’s worth of crops. Here’s our parkway garden just after putting it in. We installed raised b...

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