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

719 results

Compost and Pharmaceuticals

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Composting, Gardening, Humanure, Straw Bale Gardening
17 Comments
...s of the studied pharmaceuticals were relatively low, if compared to their soil concentrations. Further studies are needed to determine the uptake of different types of pharmaceuticals and other organic pollutants by various crop plants. What about hormones? A paper in the Journal of Environmental Quality concludes, composting may be an environmentally friendly technology suitable for reducing, but not eliminating, the concentrations of these endo...

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Fava Fava Fava

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Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
8 Comments
...ava beans (Vicia fava): they taste good, the plant fixes nitrogen into the soil, making it an ideal cover crop, and it’s attractive. If harvested small you can eat fava raw but I prefer to remove the skins and briefly boil the seeds (around five minutes). Once boiled, fava can be used in a variety of dishes from soups to salads. We just toss them with olive oil, white wine vinegar, mint, garlic and feta cheese. Curiously, some folks (mostly male a...

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Cargo Bike Roundup

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Bikes, Transportation
9 Comments
...cargo trike in L.A. With the Xtracycle, cargo cinches up tight in the back making for a narrow profile. This allows passage through tight spaces, such as our substandard bike lanes and busy traffic. You pretty much ride it like you would any other regular bike. Surly has recently come out with a sturdy frame/Xtracycle combination. Local biking comrade Josef Bray-Ali just picked up a Dutch cargo bike called a bakfiet similar to the one pictured abo...

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Biodynamic Composting Workshop

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Events
...utzen is the author, with his wife Kelly Coyne, of The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post Consumer World. He blogs and produces a podcast at www.rootsimple.com. Cost: $20 per person. Space is limited to 20 attendees. Children are free and welcome to participate under the supervision of their parents. Register in advance here. What to bring: hat, gloves, sturdy shoes – be prepared to get your hands dirty! Refreshments will be...

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Maggots!

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Composting, Gardening
2 Comments
...e and creating room for additional materials. This aeration, combined with making sure to keep the pile moist produced a hot pile that kept the pests away and produced a high quality compost in a relatively short period of time – a few months. You can find instructions on how to build this type of compost system with used pallets on this web site. Other composting systems include the lazy person’s single plastic bin, which you can make out of a ga...

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