Our new front yard: history

...planting our first vegetable bed in the back yard, and we soon caught the homegrown food fever, and as the years passed we added more beds and colonized areas for growing edibles in almost every possible nook and cranny. Eventually, the front slope was the only place we weren’t growing food or herbs or medicinals–unless you counted the lavender. We wanted more fruit trees, but didn’t imagine we had room for more than the couple we already had unt...

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How to Make Your Own DIY Instant Oatmeal

...ointed out, “Umm…why aren’t you making your own darn instant oatmeal, Mrs. Homegrown?” To be sure, you all said it more nicely than that, but this was my takeaway. Well, you were right. I think the impulse to bring packets of oatmeal camping is the sort of thing which, once inculcated at an early age, is never considered again consciously afterward. But yes, of course one can make their own instant oats, and even pack them up in single serve packe...

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Tomato Grafting Fail

...is project out of a geeky sense of fun but it resulted in a summer with no homegrown tomatoes and that’s a life not worth living. A better project, for our climate, would be to figure out how to grow tomatoes with little or no supplemental water. The feral tomatoes on the side of my mom’s house prove this is possible. For years, we also used to have volunteer cherry tomatoes along a wall now dominated by a massive Vitus californica vine. Next year...

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Kitchen KonMari Session, Illustrated

...ory but we’ve still got to tackle the pantry. [An editorial note from Mrs. Homegrown: First, I cannot believe he has shared this cat hair business with the world! The age of chivalry is long gone. Also, yes, I know it’s a crazy lady thing to do, to collect cat hair, but I have an Idea and will not toss the hair just yet, not until I’ve tried it. Also, the bag of hair was not stored with our cooking stuff, which would be genuinely disturbing and wr...

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Saturday Tweets: Cat Memelord

...ingle layer for use later in smoothies and ice cream. ☺️ #growyourownfood #homegrown pic.twitter.com/Z1jlndOT3N — Gardenerd (@gardenerd1) June 12, 2019 Veselka Bulkan, Munich based embroidery artist #womensart pic.twitter.com/kau3VPyzzO — #WOMENSART (@womensart1) June 13, 2019 This thread checker recommended by @makerprojectlab and @TensorFlux is awesome. Side effects include spending Sunday afternoon sorting random bolts in the shop and realizing...

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