Artichoke Season at the Homegrown Revolution Compound

April 17, 2007

...gh cleaning in the kitchen. Our love of artichokes means that we’ve gotten used to eating the occasional aphid. They may even have medicinal uses according the the Plants for a Future Database (which only gives them a measly 3 out of 5 score for usefulness!), The globe artichoke has become important as a medicinal herb in recent years following the discovery of cynarin. This bitter-tasting compound, which is found in the leaves, improves liver and...

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Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands

Mr. Homegrown

June 5, 2007

rainwater harvesting

“The bricoleur, says Levi-Strauss, is someone who uses “the means at hand,” that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there, which had not been especially conceived with an eye to the operation for which they are to be used and to which one tries by trial and error to adapt them, not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and the...

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Licensed to Rant

Mr. Homegrown

July 14, 2007

Bikes, Thoughtstylings

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As someone who uses a bike to get around it scares us to think about how easy it is to renew a driver’s license, as one of the Homegrown Revolution compound members did this week. Can you breathe? Great! Here’s your license. Are you homicidal, schizophrenic, elderly, partially blind, or all of the above? No problem! Just step up, have your picture taken, take a vision test that could easily be cheated on, pay $27 and you can legally get behind th...

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Garden Design Trends: Interplanting and Plant Communities

Mr. Homegrown

January 23, 2013

Garden Design, Gardening

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...nature’s diversity, but in a somewhat more compressed form. The example he uses is the striking garden at Arthritis Research UK. You can see a video of that garden here. Rosalind Creasy has demonstrated, this same interplanting strategy can be used with edible and medicinal plants. Another related design strategy are gardens inspired by wild plant communities. The example Rainer cites is the Daily Telegraph garden seen in the picture above. You ca...

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Make a Pepsi Can Stove

Mr. Homegrown

July 14, 2006

Preparedness

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...] [Editor note 10/5/11: The instructions are back! In PDF form.] The stove uses denatured alcohol solvent, sometimes called shellac thinner which is available at any hardware store. The stove is fabricated with the bottom of a Guinness beer can and the bottom of a Pepsi can and the end result is incredibly light. I cut the top off of a 24 ounce Heineken can to make a pot and I used some chicken wire and aluminum foil for a stand. Basically this se...

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