Search Results for: label/book reviews/page/31/2010/06/the-urban-homestead/2011/04/making-it

1149 results

Eight Things to Consider When Saving Vegetable Seeds

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Gardening, Seeds, Vegetable Gardening
18 Comments
The directions for seed saving in our last book, Making It, almost got cut. Perhaps we should have just changed those directions to “Why it’s OK to buy seeds.” The fact is that it’s not easy to save the seeds of many vegetables thanks to the hard work of our bee friends. That being said, Shannon Carmody of Seed Saver’s Exchange gave a lecture at this year’s Heirloom Exposition with some tips for ambitious gardeners who want to take up seed saving...

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Art and Grains

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Design, Food, Thoughtstylings
5 Comments
...’s been a rough year for restaurants, so consider picking up a copy of her book or, if you’re a local, getting some takeout. Meanwhile, friend of the blog Federico Tobon is launching a new zine, has completed 100 days of small drawings, and is making amazing little animated sculptures that you can see in his Instagram and TikTok. He’s got an interesting technique for creating a 3d illusion in 2d images that he explains here. Sign up for Federico’s...

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

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Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
10 Comments
...eds, pots, self-watering containers, straw bales and just plain old by-the-book science-based, extension service advice. Results have ranged from moderately successful to moderately tragic–mostly moderately tragic. Over the years, our vegetable garden has shrunk from ambitious proportions to a tiny 3-foot by 8-foot raised bed filled with tired and expensive potting soil. This past winter (our best season for veggies here in Southern California) I...

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Deep Work

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Reviews, Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
...wport, could be just the person to lead us out of our distraction with his book Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. The book can be boiled down to this: thou shalt schedule uninterrupted blocks of time to focus on single, important tasks. And, yes, that includes thinking about how we spend our leisure time too. If you allow incoming texts and notifications to define your day you’ll turn into a human router, pushing around f...

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Le Phone Freak

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Appropriate Technology
9 Comments
...ovelist and (superb) podcaster Michael S. Judge has pointed out, Pynchon’s book is eerily prescient, seeming to foresee an era when we’re all monitored and controlled by a enormous electronic loom in the form of the interwebs. Not that I’m in favor of going backwards, but sometimes I can’t help but be nostalgic for my simpler, less mediated, 60s/70s childhood when Western Electric was still around making sturdy, oh-so-beige gadgets like this thing...

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