There Will Be Kraut Part II–Full Day Hands-On Fermentation Workshop at the Greystone Mansion

...orkshop for only $200 ! Erik Knutzen: Co-author of The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, co-founder of the Los Angeles Bead Bakers collective. Hae Jung Cho: After recovering from a career in nonprofit management, Hae Jung has been working in the food industry since 2003 in high-end restaurants, catering and retail environments. Driven by a passion for foods that require time and patience, she became a Master...

Read…

The tale of the worm bin celery

...hope. Celery doesn’t like our climate much, and I consider it one of those plants which is easier to buy than to grow. To my surprise, the plant did quite well, though it did have a feral quality to it, despite its mild domestic origins. It didn’t grow fat, moist stalks which can be used to scoop up peanut butter. It grew stringy, dark green stalks which tasted powerfully of celery. It made excellent stock, and chopped into fine pieces, it was goo...

Read…

How to Plant a Fruit Tree

...ube.com/watch?v=Tttq3M739YA It’s bare root fruit tree planting season here in California and this video, from the Dave Wilson Nursery, shows you how to plant your trees once they arrive in the mail. One quibble–it’s been proven to be not a good idea to amend soil when you’re planting a tree. Other than that, this is how we’ve planted our trees and they’ve all grown well. And I wish that I had done the radical pruning you see at the end of the vide...

Read…

Our new front yard, part 4: a digression on the new paradigm

...against the soil, against the drought, against the nursery which sold the plant, against the plant itself. In all cases, though, I’m considering the plant as an isolated individual, and I’m evaluating its success or failure in myopic terms. Now, I’m not a botanist or any other kind of “ist” and I sometimes I suspect all I know about plants would fit in a thimble. Yet I don’t think that the point of viewing the yard as a system means that I have t...

Read…