Search Results for: label/water conservation/page/40/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

893 results

Supper for a buck?

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Bean Fest, Food
16 Comments
...friend or two. A loaf of no-knead bread contains the following ingredients: 400 grams of flour, 300 grams of water, 1 1/2 teaspoons of sea salt and, depending on the recipe, either 1/4 teaspoon of active yeast or a bit of sourdough starter. I figured out the cost for the flour (bulk purchased from Central Milling) comes to 52 cents a loaf. If I were a little more persistent, I could go on and figure out how many more pennies the salt costs, and ye...

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Straw Bale Gardens

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Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
27 Comments
...is, test ) the straw from our local feed store. The Compost Gardener has good instructions for this. In our case, we’re doing the method where you plant beans in soil, and water them with tea made from the straw. Washington State University–instructions for how to start a Straw Bale garden....

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Straw Bale Garden Part III: Adding Fertilizer

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Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
31 Comments
...l does not have much nitrogen in it.) Choosing the organic approach, we’re watering in two cups of blood meal a day to each bale for days four to six. Days seven through nine, we’ll cut back to one cup of blood meal per bale. By day ten the bales should be almost ready to plant. Once the bales are conditioned I’ll need to add a balanced organic fertilizer to provide potassium and phosphorous. And I discovered that taking the time to level the bale...

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Kevin West’s Saving the Season

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Food, Food Preservation, Reviews
8 Comments
...e Canning, Pickling, and Preserving blows all those other books out of the water bath. Full disclosure here: I’ve tasted a lot of West’s jams. I teach a bread making class at the Institute of Domestic Technology. After my bread demo West does a jam making session and I stick around to watch and, hopefully, filtch an extra jar. Those West jams are coveted items around the Root Simple household. What makes Saving the Season different from other pres...

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What’s in Worm Leachate?

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Composting, Gardening, Vermiculture
4 Comments
...leachate (the liquids the flow our of your worm bin) from a home vemicompost setup. It’s pretty strong stuff! Gillman concludes, this could be a great liquid fertilizer if it were used properly. I’d recommend diluting it somewhere between 1:1 and 1:5 worm juice : water before applying it, and I’d only apply it once every week or two. If you want to use it, try it on something that you’re not too concerned about first, just to make sure that it doe...

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