Bees will love your Coyote Brush Hedge

March 27, 2014

...al bloom, is an unassuming Western native plant with a secret super-power: native and non-native pollinators love, love, love! its tiny little flowers. If you want to lavish affection and care on the pollinators in your garden, plant one of these babies, if you can. It really is one of the best plants for the purpose. (For more info on coyote brush, here’s a nice post at the Curbstone Valley Farm blog with lots of pictures. And here’s its page at...

Read…

Making New Drawers . . . Plus Rants . . . Plus Roland Barthes

Mr. Homegrown

February 20, 2025

Design

1 Comment

...Once I got home from the lumberyard I set about installing the slides and making story sticks, which are pieces of scrap wood cut to the precise size of the final drawer and used as a guide for milling and sizing the final dimensions of the maple I had bought. In making drawers there’s a very, very small margin of error in terms of sizing. You have to be precise. https://youtu.be/jyMwR3jjtGg The next step was to cut the dovetails. I took a class...

Read…

What laundry detergent should I use for greywater applications?

Mrs. Homegrown

February 7, 2014

Water and Power, Water Conservation

35 Comments

..., so some people will opt to soak the bag in a cup of hot water first–like making tea–and then dump the water and the bag into the wash. Other people stew the nuts in water and make soap nut tea, which can then be used like liquid soap, for both hand washing and laundry. There’s lots of info online about soap nuts if you poke around a bit. I just remembered that I posted here back in 2010, asking for feedback on the nuts, and got lots of it. So yo...

Read…

It Quacks Like a Duck

Mr. Homegrown

November 14, 2007

Animals

...of the line was an old comrade of ours, one of the proprietors of Petaluma Urban Homestead, who we know from Mr. Homegrown Revolution’s post grad school sojourn in the dull city of San Diego. In the ten years since we lost contact it turns out that our lives have taken similar paths, including the appreciation of Xtracycles and poultry. Except that the folks at Petaluma Urban Homestead have had the brilliance of exploring the world of ducks in add...

Read…

White Sage and Bees and our other sage friends

Mrs. Homegrown

May 14, 2013

Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs, Native Plants

25 Comments

...It has dark green leaves, which is less common than greyish foliage in the native sages. It brings reliable dark green foliage into the garden, and the foliage is powerfully fragrant. If you want to mellow out or soothe sore muscles, you could try throwing a a branch of this in the bath. Our other native sage, Cleveland sage, Salvia clevelandi, lives a harsh existence out in the front of our house, occupying a formerly barren strip of sun baked cl...

Read…