An Awareness of What is Missing

June 18, 2015

..., as this blog has lost ground to the short attention span and creepy data harvesting tentacles of Facebook and other social media platforms. So what can we do? Perhaps it’s futile, but I thought I’d devote some time in the next few weeks to developing skills that run counter to the prevailing technological winds. I’m hoping to, as George Clinton put it, “Free my mind so my ass will follow.” At the very least I’d like to enhance my own skills in t...

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Kelly and Chocineal

Mr. Homegrown

August 31, 2020

Animals, Insects

5 Comments

...cus) is a scale insect that produces carminic acid which is extracted for use as a red textile and food dye. I thought cochineal dying might make for the perfect quarantine craft project until I did some research. Like many things worth doing, harvesting and dying textiles with cochineal is a process that takes experience and skill. The Zapotec people of Oaxaca have been practicing this skill for a thousand years. In the video above you can see ho...

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Chicken of the Woods 2021

Mr. Homegrown

September 24, 2021

Food, Foraging

8 Comments

...te that should this mushroom show up on one of your trees you’ll want to hire an arborist as this fungus can cause serious structural problems. On the plus side you’ll have many gourmet meals. To review, eat the young growth, cook well and know the species of tree you’re harvesting from and you should be fine. Chicken of the woods is sort of a gateway to edible mushroom foraging as it’s one of the easiest wild mushrooms to identify. The only probl...

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Campfire Cooking: Fish in Clay (& Vegetarian Options!)

Mrs. Homegrown

December 26, 2013

Food, Foraging

1 Comment

...it doesn’t matter what kind–so go for the least expensive type. If you are harvesting your own clay, just make sure the ground in that spot you’re digging in isn’t polluted, e.g. the site of an old gas station. If you do dig your own clay, and find that it is not pure enough to hold together well, try adding an egg white to the mix. Once you have your clay and are ready to start cooking, soften up the clay by adding a little water to it and kneadi...

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Thankful for the New Rain Garden

Mr. Homegrown

November 28, 2019

Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants

7 Comments

...lf of our roughly 1,000 square foot roof. Using this handy online rainfall harvesting calculator, in an average year we could send almost 6,000 gallons of water to our backyard. We ran a pipe from the rain gutter way back into the yard along a fence. The pipe terminates at a simulated gravel filled stream bed that spills into the rain garden. Kelly has just started planting the wet lower part of the rain garden with native plants including water l...

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