Grow Italian!

September 2, 2006

...alian varieties. Which brings us to the source of many of our seeds at the Homegrown Evolution compound, Seeds from Italy. Italians dig vegetables, and the offerings of the Franchi Co., which the folks at Seeds from Italy import, show a tremendous diversity of species and varieties. Why grow the same boring vegetables supermarkets carry anyways? Also, Italy and California both have similar climates. We’ve been growing Franchi vegetables for severa...

Read…

A Prickly Situation

Mr. Homegrown

July 17, 2006

Food, Foraging

...know this shit. As we’ve suggested before the rule with landscaping at the Homegrown Evolution compound is, if you gotta water it you gotta be able to eat it. But there are a few miracle plants, well adapted to Southern California’s climate, that are both edible and don’t need watering. One of the most versatile is the prickly pear cactus, of which there are about a dozen varieties all under the Opuntia genus (Family Cactaceae). In the late spring...

Read…

Book Review: My Side of the Mountain

Mrs. Homegrown

November 30, 2012

Reviews

21 Comments

...me as a child, and still has strong appeal for me an adult. (I’d allow Mr. Homegrown to visit on holidays, provided he helps me pot up jam for the winter.) Of course, it is a crazy fantasy–no child’s family would just let him go live in the woods for a year by himself–and some critics complain about this aspect of the book being so unbelievable that it somehow negates the rest of the book. To that I’d say that although this book is full of specifi...

Read…

Suntracker

Mr. Homegrown

October 19, 2006

Solar

Brief linkage today. While Homegrown Revolution doesn’t like to overdo the technology thing, we think this natural light collecting skylight device called the Suntracker One has promise. Similar in principle to the Solatube, the Suntracker, as the name implies, has an additional feature that the Solatube lacks — it tracks the sun with a built-in electronic brain and mirrors. Both the Solatube and the Suntracker direct the light down a tube, thus...

Read…

Build Your Own Furniture

Mr. Homegrown

October 27, 2006

Design

5 Comments

...70s left a few highly useful and groovy how-to books on making your own suburban-workshop-modernist furniture with a humble 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. The amazing art/architecture collective Simparch tipped us off to the world of plywood modernism how-to books and we at Homegrown Evolution recommend the stunning Sunset Magazine produced Furniture You Can Build, which is sadly way out of print and very expensive on Amazon, but available at the L.A. Pu...

Read…