Search Results for: label/pirate gardening/page/20/2011/04/making-it

778 results

Planting a Mini-Orchard

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Gardening, Water and Power, Water Conservation
2 Comments
...ruit trees are lush and happy. With the news that Lake Mead could go dry by 2013 we figured it was about time to figure out how to grow food with very little water in a Mediterranean climate that gets on average 15 inches of rain a year (3 inches last year). Our water worries sparked the beginnings of our draught tolerant mini-orchard. Thankfully greywater and some tough, water sipping trees make it possible. Step one was figuring out how to reuse...

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Lead in Backyard Eggs: Don’t Freak Out But Don’t Ignore the Issue

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Animals, Bees, Lead
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Image: UC Cooperative Extension. Back in 2018 UC Davis began a study of heavy metal contamination of eggs from backyard chicken flocks. The study analyzed eggs from 344 California residences using Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry to look for arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, mercury and and nickel. The overall results for the study show that the main metal to worry about is lead, though some of the samples showed elevated levels of mercury and cadm...

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Primitive Grain Storage Technique

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Appropriate Technology, Food Preservation, How-to, Preparedness
8 Comments
When thinking about technology, I like to play with the idea of what is the absolute minimum you need to get the job done. This may be because I’m not very handy at building things, but yet have survivalist tendencies. So while I’m pretty sure I’ll never actually have any need for these skills, it’s fun to think about how I’d get by in a DIY world. So I was delighted when I ran across this minimalist grain storage technique on the BBC documentary...

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What’s Your Everyday Carry?

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Preparedness
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...ebsite. Consider this blog post as an update of the pocket dump I posted in 2011. Since that time my EDC has changed, mostly via subtractions. Here’s my current EDC: 1. Leatherman Rebar This is the central and, unquestionably, most useful cornerstone of my EDC. Not a day goes by when I don’t pull out the Rebar to fix something or slice off a piece of cheese with the dull (my fault) pocket knife. The Leatherman folks have tried to anticipate every...

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