2013 in Review Part II

December 31, 2013

...r summer to be our winter in Los Angeles. It’s hot and dry and, other than harvesting tomatoes, summer here is not the best time for gardening. Time to contemplate closed vs. open floor plans and catch a crappy Hollywood movie. “Crappy Hollywood” is a redundancy, of course, as all Hollywood movies are crappy. September Mrs. Homegrown complained about my flour storage mess. I just bought a Komo mill and so this mess should diminish in the next few...

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Breadbaking (Level 1) Class at the Ecology Center

Mr. Homegrown

January 29, 2014

Bread, Events, Food

5 Comments

...er to take your dough home, a digital scale (if you have one), and an apron (if you have one). By baking bread at home, you’re in charge of what goes into every loaf and can choose to incorporate local and organic ingredients. Other benefits of baking at home include using less energy (used in harvesting, processing, and shipping store-bought bread), using less plastic packaging, and spending less money. Become a baker and join us during this hear...

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Print and Internet Resources for Natural, No-Treatment Beekeeping

Mr. Homegrown

March 5, 2014

Animals, Bees

8 Comments

...k on the one on swarm captures as well as how to do crush and strain honey harvesting. HoneyLove has some great resources and a forum. Discussions on the organic beekeepers Yahoo group get heated, to put it mildly, but there’s good info. Gaia Bees is the website of Michael Thiele, who we blogged about last year. Books The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Beekeeping – not to be confused with the conventional approach in the Dummies book. The Practical Bee...

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Pee on your Compost

Mr. Homegrown

January 24, 2007

Composting

1 Comment

...f you try this at least cease application at a respectable interval before harvesting. There is even a book called Liquid Gold on the subject of pee as fertilizer and the ever more resourceful Europeans have developed a number of urine diverting flush toilets similar to the one we profiled earlier to take the labor out of urine saving. Perhaps the most convenient way to use urine is to simply pee on your compost pile. That way you don’t need to wo...

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Loquat season is here!

Mrs. Homegrown

April 28, 2014

Foraging, Fruit Trees

51 Comments

...rarely see a tree which looks as if it’s being harvested, or if it is, the harvesting does not make a dent in the bounty. After all, how many fresh loquats can you gobble down in a day? All of which is to say I feel no guilt about snagging loquats off of accessible trees as I walk around.* On-the-hoof snacking is one of the pleasures of walking at this time of year! Ripe loquats tend to be a little larger and fatter than the unripe ones, and the c...

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