Nasturtium “Capers”

...ur frère et soeur at Terre Vivante, editors of a great book called Keeping Food Fresh, we now have a use for all those Nasturtium seeds. Pick the seeds while they are still green and put them in a jar with a decent white wine vinegar and some dill or other herb. We keep our jar in the refrigerator and wait a few weeks before using them. I actually prefer these substitute capers to the real thing. Some things to note: we grow Nasturtium as an annua...

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Book Review: My Side of the Mountain

...-you. * * * An excerpt. Sam’s first day with his baby hawk, Frightful: The food put the bird to sleep I watched her eyelids close from the bottom up, and her head quiver. The fuzzy body rocked, the tail spread to steady it, and the little duck hawk almost sighed as she sank into the leaves, sleep. I had lots of time. I was going to wait for the man to leave. So I stared at my bird, the beautiful details of the new feathers, the fernlike lashes alo...

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Block Party Weekend

...d, that it must transform or die. Sooner or later it must generate its own food, fuel, water, wood and ores. It must use these at the rate that nature provides them. It can . . .” -Paul Glover Los Angeles: A History of the Future as quoted in the LAEV Overview SurviveLA dropped in this weekend on a block party thrown by the apartment homesteading pioneers at the Los Angeles Eco-Village. Founded in 1993, the Los Angeles Eco-Village is a so called “...

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Bucket Flushing

...ot be reused. For now we’ll lump the kitchen sink in with the toilet since food scraps, particularly for meat eaters can quickly turn your greywater into rancid blackwater. Greywater systems range from the simple to the complex and we’ll start with the cheap and easy — bucket flushing. Simply keep a bucket next to the shower and collect the water that you run before the shower gets hot. Since you haven’t even stepped into the shower this water is...

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Roundup

...weapon against weeds, it has become a prevalent ingredient in most of our food crops. Three recent studies show that Roundup, which is used by farmers and home gardeners, is not the safe product we have been led to trust. A group of scientists led by biochemist Professor Gilles-Eric Seralini from the University of Caen in France found that human placental cells are very sensitive to Roundup at concentrations lower than those currently used in agr...

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