Do Something Day

...ould be bestowed upon the fridge and the contents it protects. We have not used the fridge yet and unfortunately we need to move and can not bring the fridge with us. It is sad, but we are happy to give this spiritual appliance to another.” At $1,500 Harvey passed over the Dalai Lama blessed “spiritual appliance” due to budget constraints and, no doubt, queasiness attributing supernatural qualities to an refrigerator. An ad for BMW takes this anim...

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Grow the Soil

...Farm and Garden Supply has a nice selection of annual cover crops here. We used their dryland mix to deal with the bad soil in our front yard and we’ll re-sow it again this fall. Cover crops send down roots that break up soil, with the legumes used to fix nitrogen–it’s a great way to amend a large area with almost no work involved. Here at Homegrown Evolution we don’t believe in tilling soil. Tilling soil disrupts the natural balance of soil micro...

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Maintaining a Worm Bin

...ss than an hour. You could go through a plastic tote-type bin much faster. Making a New Working Side After harvest you’ll have empty space–and that space will become the new working side, which means you need fresh bedding for the worms. I usually start by robbing some of that from the other side of the bin. Anything that’s big enough to notice, like a corn husk or a coffee filter or a handful of straw, I’ll grab. Today, I scraped the top layer of...

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What Equipment do I Need to Keep Bees?

...r than too small. Gloves I’ve gone through a lot of gloves over time. I’ve used both rubber gloves and goat skin gloves. The rubber gloves come in handy where there’s the possibility of dripping honey such as when cutting bees out of a wall or doing a honey harvest. The goat skin gloves make for less finger fumbling. I suggest owning both. Smoker Dadant’s basic smoker has not changed design in a hundred years. It’s one of those objects, like the s...

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Recipe for the World’s Best Whole Wheat Pancake

...the oldest wheat in the Americas. It’s a soft, winter wheat traditionally used for tortillas. Recipe (based on Nancy Silverton’s pancakes) 210 grams starter 2 tablespoons maple syrup 3 tablespoons safflower or corn oil 2 eggs 1/2 teaspoon sea salt 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1 teaspoon baking powder The night before making these pancakes I take a tablespoon of mature starter and add it to 100 grams of freshly milled Sonora wheat flour and 110 grams...

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