Saturday Tweets: A Difficult Week

November 10, 2018

...2018 Word of the day: “Ginkgo” – from the Japanese “gin” (silver) & “kyo” (fruit); one of the most distinctive of trees, the fan-shaped leaves of which glow radiant yellow in autumn. Ginkgos have been alive on earth for around 270 m years; they watched us arrive & will watch us leave. pic.twitter.com/5t8MG07l29 — Robert Macfarlane (@RobGMacfarlane) November 9, 2018 Challenged with sloping land? Want to stop hillside erosion? Learn how to stabilize...

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The Glorious USDA Pomological Watercolor Collection

Mr. Homegrown

September 30, 2019

Design, Fruit Trees, Gardening

6 Comments

.... Deborah Griscom Passmore 1901. The collection showcases the diversity of fruit and nut varieties before industrial agriculture took it all away and replaced it with easily shipped but tasteless produce. Pomegranate. Mary Daisy Arnold, 1932. The human eye can see and perceive things that a camera can’t and the artists who made these exquisite watercolors must have had an encyclopedic knowledge of the fruits and nuts they portrayed. The collection...

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Learn to Embroider at Trade School Los Angeles

Mr. Homegrown

November 8, 2019

Design, Domesticus, Events, Fermentation, Food

3 Comments

...ing barter items: a pack guitar strings; a paperback novel; a bag of local fruit; help with finding an apartment. Every class’s barter will be different, as each instructor sets their own class’s exchange. Step 2) Students sign up for classes on our website, and, by signing up, they agree to bring 1 of the barter items requested by the instructor. Step 3) On the day of class, the teachers & students meet in a space that is made available by Trade...

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Boozing Bees

Mr. Homegrown

January 20, 2020

Animals, Bees

1 Comment

...issue, there’s an article about an attempt to reconcile the need to spray fruit trees with pesticide and the impact of those chemicals on bees. Another talk at the conference by Dr. May Berenbaum of Cornell, that I was only able to hear part of, looked at the history of the use of pesticides. Honeybees are a complex organism and their interaction with pesticides can often work in counter-intuitive ways, as Berenbaum showed in a study that proved...

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How to Store Bulk Goods

Mr. Homegrown

April 22, 2020

Food, Preparedness

8 Comments

...s and techniques with your neighbors. Knowing the folks on our block, thanks to our neighbor Jennie’s monthly happy hour parties, has been helpful. We check in via Zoom once a week, trade food and backyard fruit and run errands for folks in deep quarantine. We need not equate emergency preparedness with the sort of destructive individualism partly responsible for getting us into this mess....

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