Roots Simple’s Last Minute Gift Guide

December 23, 2013

...’s the ones I suggested: Saving the Season by Kevin West. We reviewed this book a few months ago but I’ll say it again: this is my favorite book on food preservation. Excalibur dehydrator with stainless steel trays. Expensive, but this thing works a lot better than those cheap round dehydrators. Truly the Cadillac of deyhdrators. 1.5 liter lactofermentation kit. Yes, you can make one yourself, but this is a nice all-glass model. Plus, when you buy...

Read…

2008 . . . a year of luxury

Mr. Homegrown

January 1, 2008

Animals, Chickens

3 Comments

...w to poultry and, in just an hour of reading, have learned a lot from this book. It’s a must have for anyone thinking about getting chickens. Thanks to info in the book and our microscope, we’re looking forward to a year of DIY chicken fecal examinations and turning those parasite egg counts into a drinking game. We’ll inaugurate a new year of posts with an entertaining excerpt from The Chicken Health Handbook, “Spontaneous sex change is a phenome...

Read…

Least Favorite Plant: Yellow Oleander (Thevetia peruviana)

Mr. Homegrown

June 2, 2009

Least Favorite Plant

31 Comments

Thumbing through a book of toxic and hallucinogenic plants, I finally manged to i.d. the neighbor’s shrub that looms over the staircase to our front door. The popular name given for this plant in the book was “suicide tree”, so named for its use in Sri Lanka, though I’ve found other plants with this same moniker. The scientific name is Thevetia peruviana, and it’s also known as “lucky nut” (can we change that to unlucky nut please?), Be Still Tre...

Read…

Bread and Transformation

Mr. Homegrown

January 25, 2010

Bread, Fermentation, Food, Thoughtstylings

7 Comments

...w. The baking method I’ve used for over a decade is from Nancy Silverton’s book Breads from the La Brea Bakery. You use a sourdough starter and at least half the flour must be white to get it to leaven properly. I’ve had great results, but would like to someday make a loaf entirely from whole wheat with a sourdough starter. Reinhart, in his book Whole Grain Breads: New Techniques, Extraordinary Flavor claims to be able to do just that and not end...

Read…

What To Do With Old Vegetable Seeds

Mr. Homegrown

November 27, 2012

Gardening, Permaculture, Vegetable Gardening

15 Comments

...ng in a shoe box. And I’ve been reading a newly published translation of a book by the late, “natural farmer” Masanobu Fukuoka (review coming soon). Fukuoka inspired me to distribute those old seeds around our micro-orchard to see what comes up. Fukuoka has some tips in his book The Natural Way of Farming for creating a semi-wild vegetable garden: Include nitrogen fixers (in my case some clover seeds) Use daikon and other radishes to break up hard...

Read…