What are trees worth?

August 20, 2015

Fruit Trees, Gardening, Nature Awareness, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings, Trees

...ing a pump and well which you don’t have to maintain. Trees make for clean water. By absorbing all that storm water, they pull the filth from our streets into the soil, and the soil cleans it, pro bono. (This is one of the many benefits of healthy soil, another important player in environmental health.) If that storm water runs unchecked, it just dumps all of the oil and fertilizer and insecticides and poo straight into the nearest waterway. Trees...

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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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Lady Urine, Water Conservation and Halfway Humanure

Mrs. Homegrown

April 26, 2013

Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening

45 Comments

...he toilet so much. And if all our pee went outside, it would not only save water, but it also would add water and nitrogen to the soil. Win-win. Now, I imagine our more feisty readers will ask, why stop at pee? We’re big supporters of the humanure concept and have kept a dry toilet in the past. It’s not difficult to compost human waste , but you do have to be careful, and you need a dedicated humanure pile–more than one, really. More like three. W...

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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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