Search Results for: label/propagation/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

820 results

Mandrake!

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Fermentation, Food
2 Comments
...wn-market other is his emphasis on the ancient and sacred elements of beer making which used to be, he claims, the duty of women, not men. His chapter, “Psychotropic and Highly Inebriating Beers” contains a number of recipes, including one making use of the mysterious mandrake plant, a member of the nightshade family and popularized lately in a certain series of books about a wizard school (Homegrown Revolution suffered through the first film base...

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Your Open Floor Plan is a Death Trap

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Design
23 Comments
...[i.e. large sectional couches] + new construction materials = faster fire propagation, shorter time to flashover, rapid changes in fire dynamics, shorter escape times, shorter time to collapse.” It turns out that nobody was considering fire safety as trends in materials and living arrangements have changed in recent years. While the number of structure fires has stayed the same since the 2000s the death rate has increased (U.S. Fire Service Fatal...

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Mistakes we have made . . .

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Animals, Chickens, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings
13 Comments
...oo prodigious, and that’s the kind of problem you can hope for as an urban homesteader. 3. Newspaper seed pots Those newspaper seed starting pots we linked to earlier this year . . . well, there seems to be a problem with them. I think the newspaper is wicking the water away from the soil. While in Houston recently, I took a class from a master gardener in plant propagation and we used regular plastic pots, a thin layer of vermiculite over the pot...

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Use Your Microwave as Dough Proofing Box

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Bread, Fermentation, Food
4 Comments
...ur dough in a cooler. If you want to get really fancy you could use a seed propagation heating mat in a cooler. I don’t have a mat so I’ve been using the microwave and it works great. There are reasons you might want to cool dough and prolong fermentation, either to develop flavor and/or to put off your baking time to a more convenient hour. Your proofing box and refrigerator thus become, to use an old person metaphor, like the fast forward and pa...

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New Health Food Trends at the Natural Products Food Expo West

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Food, Thoughtstylings
17 Comments
...y have some sort of wheat allergy. However, someone tell me why we have to label products like tomato sauce and raw chicken as being “gluten free?” Most new gluten free products, everything from pasta to crackers to power bars, use quinoa. The Natural Products Expo’s own trade publication noted that the exponential growth of quinoa consumption in the U.S. has created a situation in which the indigenous people of Peru can no longer afford their own...

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