De-Cluttering for DIYers, Homesteaders, Artists, Preppers, etc.

February 9, 2015

...on your grill, like oatmeal and coffee? If not, how are you going to boil water? If you camp, all your camping equipment can perform double duty in emergencies. I can’t recommend camping enough as the best form of emergency preparedness. Water is essential, and it’s also incredibly awkward and inconvenient to store. There’s no getting around it, though, you’ve got to find a place to keep it We keep ours in BPA free, rectangular 20 gallon containe...

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Three Things I’ve Learned About Baking Bread With Whole Grain

Mr. Homegrown

February 19, 2015

Bread, Food

25 Comments

...h more water than white flour. Bread recipes are a ratio between flour and water. In bread baking parlance this is called a hydration ratio (to get the hydration ratio you divide the water by the flour–the quirk of baker’s math is that the flour is always 100% ). Old school bread recipes, most of which require a lot of kneading, have hydration ratios in the 65% range. Popular no-knead white bread recipes have hydration ratios in the 75% to 80% ran...

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The Rain Got Real

Mr. Homegrown

February 5, 2024

Gardening, Thoughtstylings

...ater level was the highest I’ve ever seen it. The rain garden gets all the water from one half of our roof which I calculate to have been about 1,500 gallons of water in the last 24 hours. To briefly get back to the Žižek book I rambled about last week, I was reminded of Lacan’s notion of the “Real”, that which is unrepresentatible, unthinkable. Subjects such as our own deaths and climate change fall into the category of the Real. The incomprehens...

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A Low-Tech Experiment in Growing Oyster Mushrooms

Mr. Homegrown

February 3, 2022

Gardening, Mushrooms

14 Comments

...n January 4th, I put the chips in a plastic bin and soaked them in boiling water to pasteurize them and give the oyster mushroom spawn a better chance of growing. I let the wood chips soak overnight. The next day I squeezed excess water out of the chips and put them in my holey (holy?) bucket, alternating layers of wood chips and spawn. I placed the bucket outside under the dense shade of our avocado tree. You can also, by the way, use straw inste...

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Thankful for the New Rain Garden

Mr. Homegrown

November 28, 2019

Garden Design, Gardening, Native Plants

7 Comments

...sting calculator, in an average year we could send almost 6,000 gallons of water to our backyard. We ran a pipe from the rain gutter way back into the yard along a fence. The pipe terminates at a simulated gravel filled stream bed that spills into the rain garden. Kelly has just started planting the wet lower part of the rain garden with native plants including water loving Douglas irises (Iris douglasiana). She planted the dry outer edges with de...

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