Moonlight Medicine Foraging Expedition!

...ce. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and currently manages a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project at a downtown homeless shelter where cafeteria food waste becomes 4 tons of worm castings a year which in turn is used as the soil that grows food to return to the cafeteria. Mo...

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Straw Bale Garden Tour Part II

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhRnWP9ehlA In this video we take a tour of our straw bale garden as it appears this week. The vegetables varieties you see growing are Tromboncino squash, Lunga di Napoli squash (growing up into a native bush), Matt’s Wild Cherry tomato, Celebrity tomato, eggplant and Swiss chard. And just to take down my smugness a notch I also included a shot of an unsuccessful cucumber plant. Other than the cucumber, though, thi...

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The Upside Down Fire

...the same method with smaller sticks and a more bushcraft-y technique.I’d recommend watching both. The only thing I’d add to the technique in the video above is that I would lay down a larger layer of thin sticks (the 1″-2″ diameter stuff) on top of the big logs. Somehow he pulls it off with remarkably little small stuff. I found that if I didn’t have a good supply of twigs and small branches on top, the big logs in the under layers didn’t catch fi...

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Don’t Wash Raw Poultry

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZXDotD4p9c According to research it’s a bad idea to wash chicken before cooking. Why? As the clever video above shows, washing can spread pathogens. The research, conducted by Drexel University, led to the following advice: Although raw chicken and turkey can carry bacteria on their surfaces, research has shown that washing raw poultry under running water in your kitchen sink is a bad idea. If germs were visible to...

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Cycling in the US from a Dutch perspective

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2THe_10dYs I laughed and cried when I first watched this video. The Dutch are at least forty years ahead of us in terms of cycling and pedestrian infrastructure. Holland hasn’t always been a pedestrian and bike friendly place. In the early 1970s, prompted by the death by motor vehicle of his child, Dutch journalist Vic Langenhoff started a campaign to transform the streets of the Netherlands. Inspired by his articl...

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