L’hamd markad – Preserved Salted Lemons

...There are two ways to deal with this–share the harvest and/or preserve it. Homegrown Revolution has done both this week by mooching some lemons off of a friend’s tree and preserving them by making one of the essential ingredients of Moroccan food, L’hamd markad or preserved salted lemons. L’hamd markad is easy to make. Here’s a recipe from Cooking at the Kasbah by Kitty Morse: 12 or more unblemished organically grown Meyer or other lemons, scrubbe...

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Buddy Burner

...s a huge wick. That inferno effect is what you want. Control your flame by making a damper out of a piece of aluminum foil folded into a long rectangle three or four layers thick and as wide as the can, but much longer so that you can use the excess as a handle. Slide the foil back and forth to expose or repress the flame as needed. To recharge the BB, place chunks of wax on top of the BB while it is burning. The wax will melt down and refuel it....

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Book Review: My Side of the Mountain

...me as a child, and still has strong appeal for me an adult. (I’d allow Mr. Homegrown to visit on holidays, provided he helps me pot up jam for the winter.) Of course, it is a crazy fantasy–no child’s family would just let him go live in the woods for a year by himself–and some critics complain about this aspect of the book being so unbelievable that it somehow negates the rest of the book. To that I’d say that although this book is full of specifi...

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Got a Critter Question?

...Our guest on the next episode of the Root Simple Podcast will be Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild. We’re interviewing her tomorrow (Thursday) so if you have a question about coyotes, moles, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, rats or any of the other creatures that visit our urban backyards, leave a comment....

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Fish Don’t Fart

...ve it closer consideration. Aquaponics is profiled in the pioneering urban homesteading book, The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City and Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew’s book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-Ourselves Guide which comes out of their work at Austin’s Rhizome Collective. What all of these efforts have in common is a permacultural design principle of turning a waste product into a resource and closing...

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