CritterCam Reveals Yet More Rats and a Plea to Not Use Poison

September 5, 2014

...he weekend. It reveals two rats peeking out from under the shed. It may be time to consider locking up the chicken feed at night. That and a little cleanup behind and around the shed are the only things I feel the need to do. A rant on rat poison Thankfully, the general public can no longer buy d-CON rat poison in California. Unfortunately, professionals still have access to even more toxic chemicals. These poisons have been linked to the recent i...

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Hollywood always gets gardens wrong (I’m talking to you, Maze Runner)

Mrs. Homegrown

September 25, 2014

Thoughtstylings

19 Comments

...my friends. Cloth ivy. The sort used to festoon wedding tables, or is sometimes found creeping dustily along the molding in B&Bs. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to offer a pack of hungry teenage boys a bowl of cooked ivy, much less fake ivy. Now, of course, the intended audience, teenage girls, are NOT looking at the ivy as the hot boy leads discuss their survival problems in the garden. They are, in fact, at this moment, laughing ri...

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I made shoes!

Mrs. Homegrown

October 21, 2014

Domesticus

32 Comments

...lar Root Simple readers know, I’ve been obsessing on making shoes for some time now, but was not able to wrap my mind around the process without help. Help arrived this weekend in the form of the wonderful–and wonderfully patient– Randy Fritz, who taught me and four other intrepid souls how to make turnshoes over the course of the last 4 days. Lesson 1: As we have all suspected, shoes are not easy to make. Seriously not easy. Four full days of wor...

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Why it’s Better to Pressure Can Tomatoes

Mr. Homegrown

October 30, 2014

Food, Food Preservation, Gardening, Tomatoes

8 Comments

...cipes. All of these factors are why the recommended hot water bath canning time for raw packed tomatoes is 85 minutes. I’ve hot water bath canned tomatoes and got great results (especially with San Marzano tomatoes). But 85 minutes is a long time. You can cut the processing down considerably and get better results by pressure canning tomatoes. Here’s a raw pack recipe that includes both hot water and pressure canning instructions. Note that you st...

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The Future is Biomorphic

Mr. Homegrown

November 4, 2014

Design

4 Comments

...ccurate as a dead clock. Twice a day they get it right and the rest of the time they end up looking foolish. We can be especially thankful that the washing machine for people on page 179 of The Futurist never caught on. That said, the point is not always to predict the future. Architects, artists and designers push the envelope of consensus reality to spark a dialog. Architect Glen Small, one of the founders of SCI-Arc and the subject of an entert...

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