The New Homemade Kitchen

...ioned bread baking, the IDT offered classes in mustard, cheese making, jam making, coffee roasting, cocktail crating and much more. Joseph gathered the recipes and collected wisdom of these classes into his posthumously published book The New Homemade Kitchen: 250 Recipes and Ideas for Reinventing the Art of Preserving, Canning, Fermenting, Dehydrating, and More just released this month by Chronicle. The section on cocktails is a good example of t...

Read…

Planting in a Post-Wild World

...with no tall species present. Woodland/shrubland relates to the typical suburban yard where trees and shrubs mix with lawn. The forest is for those lucky enough to have land with stands of trees. Planting in Post-Wild World is not a simple how-to book. In fact, there’s nothing simple about it at all– but it is very clear. Its goals are ambitious, and while it might seem like it was written for designers, it can be used by a determined home gardene...

Read…

The Wonder of Worms

...oil. Every time you water your plant, the castings will release nutrients. Making tea is just extra work for you. Humans like to complicate things. Worms leave their castings in or on the soil. We should, too. (Leave the worms’ castings, that is, not our own castings. We needn’t alarm the neighbors.) Third, there’s aerated compost tea (ACT), as popularized by Elaine Ingham. This is made by brewing a tea from castings with the help of an air pump,...

Read…

Stirred, Not Shaken

...ties us to nature and I look forward to stirring preparations and perhaps making them with a few close friends. In fact, I’m much more excited about making preparations than it buying a package through the mail. Steiner’s set of herbs all grow well here and many of them I have already. But a cow is kinda hard to come by in Los Angeles. While it may be heresy to some, perhaps we’ll have to come up with some modifications to the rituals that make s...

Read…

Big List of Earth-Friendly (homemade, compostable, recyclable, no-plastic) Holiday Decorations

...ts biodegradable by choosing cotton or wool yarn, and natural fiber cloth. Making little cloth ornaments is a great way to use up scrap cloth and yarn. Save colorful scrap paper for the paper projects. Popcorn/cranberry strings (pro-tip: stale popcorn threads better) Gather a few evergreen branches by the branch ends to make a broom or fan shape, decorate with a spray of berries, tie with a ribbon. Much easier than a wreath! A few cranberries stru...

Read…