Making Beer in Plain Language

December 14, 2008

...me brew shop (they’ve been sprouted and roasted for you) are soaked in hot water. 2. Music, courtesy of Triple Chicken Foot, kills some time while the grain steeps. 3. After soaking, the liquid is drained off and more hot water is added. The liquid pouring into the pot on the ground contains sugar from the grains. 4. The extracted sugars are boiled with some hops for an hour. 5. After boiling for an hour you cool down the liquid as rapidly as poss...

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Solar Water Disinfection (SODIS)

Mr. Homegrown

February 23, 2009

Preparedness

7 Comments

...st a PET plastic bottle. The diagram, developed by Unicef, pretty much speaks for itself. Too much gunk in the water? Let it settle and filter through some cloth. At least six hours of sunlight will be enough UV to kill bad buggies. Using solar water disinfection, or “SODIS”, replaces the need to boil water, thus reducing deforestation to supply fire wood. Obviously, this is not a long term solution. Drinking water out of heated plastic bottles ca...

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How to Make Clear Ice

Mr. Homegrown

May 30, 2017

Fermentation, Food

4 Comments

...tap water that I filtered with a counter top water filter. A side note on water filters–our tap water tastes better when filtered–depending on where you live you may not need to filter it. 2. Around 24 hours later take the cooler out of the freezer, run some water over the ice (to help release the ice) and turn the cooler upside down. You should have around two inches of ice on the top of the cooler and a lot of unfrozen water on the bottom which...

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Watering 101

Mrs. Homegrown

July 2, 2013

Gardening, How-to, Vegetable Gardening

13 Comments

...swer will vary, depending on your soil, the weather, the method you use to water, how often you water, and what you’re growing. In the end, you just have to use your hands and your common sense to figure it out. There is no formula. In the picture above, you see the surface of the soil in one of our raised beds. This is imported soil, the kind that comes in bags. It doesn’t hold water in pools like clay soil does, it doesn’t sink in fast as it wou...

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Why You Should Have a Cat Fountain

Mr. Homegrown

May 4, 2017

Animals, Cats

9 Comments

...rts say they perceive it as fresher and more likely to be a safe source of water. Some cats, apparently, won’t drink anything but water flowing from a tap. While cats are desert creatures they still need water. For our cat’s wild ancestors rodent blood (yum!) provided supplemental hydration. The ideal diet for a cat would be a mouse a day, but we’d get in trouble with the PETA folks if we started a mouse farm at the Root Simple compound. So we’ve...

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