Self Watering Containers

January 16, 2007

...e cause of container plant failure. Container gardening also uses a lot of water and can be messy, as the excess water flows out of the bottom of your pots leaving muddy stains on decks and balconies. Thankfully, there is an elegant solution in the form of self watering containers. The principle is simple. Rather than having a hole in the bottom of the pot, there is instead a reservoir of water. Potting soil is suspended above the water reservoir...

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Making It

Mr. Homegrown

April 26, 2011

Publications

12 Comments

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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Making Beer in Plain Language

Mr. Homegrown

December 14, 2008

Beer, Fermentation, Food

13 Comments

...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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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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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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