Moonshine

...preferably from a source that will lend itself to a pretty picture on the label — bottle it, and you’re in the vodka business.” As it turns out there is an art to good homemade moonshine — a far cry from the soulless mouthwash Archer-Daniels-Midlands turns out. Here’s some excerpts from an interview of ex-moonshiner John Bowman conducted by the Coal River Folklife Project from “Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia...

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What laundry detergent should I use for greywater applications?

...l because they are essentially salt-based (look for the word sodium on the label). They play well with aquatic life, bless them, and they’re a fantastic alternative to more toxic detergents if your laundry water is going to the sewer, but they aren’t good for soil microorganisms. Surely you’ve heard that salting the land is a bad idea? You don’t want to salt your garden. It’s worth adding that the drier your climate, the saltier the soil, because...

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How to Organize a Small Workshop

...to go a lot more smoothly. In the past few months I’ve decided to focus on making my tiny workshop both useful and pleasant. The challenge has been that our 1920s garage is tiny–sized for two Model-Ts–and must also accommodate our Honda Fit. At the risk of seeming like I’ve come down from the mountaintop with stone tablets, permit me to share a few things I’ve learned about tiny workshop design: Put everything on wheels. Get some locking wheels at...

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Plum Lemon Tomato Power’s Heirloom Tomato

...gardening efforts, we somehow mislaid the names of the tomatoes we planted making our reporting efforts incomplete. We do know the name of the wondrous plum lemon tomato pictured above, well worth planting again next year. It’s a meaty, sweet, yellow tomato delicious both fresh and dried. Allegedly the seeds for this tomato originally came from an elderly seed seller in a bird market in eastern Moscow which the Russian police have since shut down...

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Making Tofu From Scratch at the Institute of Domestic Technology

...coffee roasting, bacon curing, bread baking, jam and exotic projects like making your own nocino and toothpaste. One of the perks of teaching at the IDT is getting to sit in on some of the other classes. The coffee roasting class changed my life. Now, every morning, I look forward to fresh coffee I roasted myself in a Whirley-Pop Popcorn maker. This past weekend I sat in a new IDT class taught by author Andrea Nguyen on how to make tofu from scra...

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