Search Results for: label/seeds/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

581 results

Digital Farming- What’s The Deal?

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Gardening, Thoughtstylings, Vegetable Gardening
29 Comments
Homegrown Neighbor here: So here in the world of urban homesteading things can get pretty busy. We can become so preoccupied with work, chickens, vegetable gardening, cooking, cleaning, blogging duties and email that we can miss some of the things going on in the world. I do like to occasionally check in with the world at large by reading the newspaper. I just read an article that I have to comment on. A recent New York Times article titled, ‘To...

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How to Cook Broadleaf Plantain

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Food, Foraging, Preparedness, Recipes
1 Comment
...most inventive wild food recipes I’ve seen anywhere. On a recent visit to Urban Outdoor Skills, I was very excited to find he’d developed a cooking technique for broadleaf plantain (Plantago major, the common weed, not the banana relative). Though I know plantain is very nutritious, it is also bitter and heavily veined, so I prefer to collect it as a medicinal herb. I infuse it into oil that I put into salves and creams and I use it as a fresh po...

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Dry Climate Vegetables

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Gardening, rainwater harvesting, Vegetable Gardening, Water and Power
20 Comments
..., we’re in the midst of a terrible drought. And unfortunately, most of the seeds we buy for our vegetable gardens are adapted to require lots of water. One solution is to find veggies that have reseeded accidentally without supplemental irrigation. Here’s a short list of reseeding rogue veggies from our garden that have thrived with just the small burst of rain we got last month. New Zealand Spinach The one I’m most excited about is New Zealand sp...

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Without Merit: poison in your compost

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Composting, Gardening, Thoughtstylings, Vegetable Gardening
7 Comments
...ns for performing a simple test here (pdf). Basically, you plant three pea seeds in a 50/50 blend of compost and potting mix and compare their growth against a control group of three pea seeds grown in just potting mix. If you use manure in your compost pile and you don’t own the animal it came from, this test should be routine. Secondly, a political solution: the Rachel Carson Council suggests writing two EPA officials to suggest banning a trio o...

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Homesteading Disasters: The Skunk Menace

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Mistakes
17 Comments
...ed. I know that I’ve got a skunk problem. Yet each year when I sow lettuce seeds I get lazy about putting up the required bird net barrier over the beds. Or I haphazardly put it up, thinking that the skunks aren’t smart enough to squeeze through any gaps. And each year I wake up the morning after planting to a kind of vegetable garden apocalypse–dozens of V shaped holes, overturned seedlings and scattered seeds. And each year I swear off vegetable...

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