Our New Straw Bale Garden–Part I

April 23, 2013

Straw bales–ready to prepare. Pot in the center will be a solar powered fountain. We’re going to experiment with a straw bale vegetable garden in our backyard, inspired by Michael Tortorello’s article in the New York Times. The plan is to grow in the bales and harvest the resulting compost for use in permanent raised beds (that have yet to be built). We’ll keep growing in bales until we have enough compost for the beds. The problems presented by...

Read…

A Light in the Desert

Mr. Homegrown

April 27, 2025

Design

2 Comments

...kins’ spectacular and improbable Desert Lighthouse. The fully functioning, solar powered lighthouse sits atop a hill overlooking the town of Hinkley just west of Barstow. Hinkley is best known for unfortunate reasons, due to water contamination caused by the Pacific Gas and Electric Company and portrayed in the film Erin Brockovich. The population has slowly decreased over recent years. We got to go into the lighthouse and climb a ladder up to an...

Read…

“Interstellar”: Leaving the farm for the stars

Mrs. Homegrown

November 14, 2014

Thoughtstylings

18 Comments

...is our place in the universe. And, practically speaking, the rest of this solar system is inhospitable to life and the stars are so remote we’ll never reach them. We really need to tell different stories than this one. Kelly: Yup. And to be clear, neither of us is anti-science — we just want to look a little more closely at the stories we tell ourselves in this culture. For instance, why can’t we see a story which tells about people rebuilding af...

Read…

Pumpkin Spice Apocalypse

Mr. Homegrown

September 11, 2024

Preparedness

8 Comments

...rom the weekend come to mind: While Kelly kept the house reliably lit with solar charged LED lanterns, it would be nice to have some kind of battery backup at least so we could run a fan. Keeping the fridge going would be nice but a battery large enough to do that is prohibitively expensive. If any of you have recommendations please leave a comment. As friend of the blog Johnny Sanphillippo discusses on a podcast appearance in early 2020, it’s bet...

Read…

SurviveLA Food Review: Mary Jane’s Farm Organic Buttery Herb Pasta

Mr. Homegrown

July 26, 2006

Preparedness, Reviews

...ried tomatoes from the SurviveLA gardens (and dehydrated in the compound’s solar dehydrator – more on that in a future post), and that added the perfect amount of interest. Nuts, canned tuna, fresh veggies if you wanted to carry them, all would work well too. You cook this entree in its own bag (a paper bag instead of a foil pouch, which is nice). All you do is add 3/4 cup of boiling water, reseal the bag and wait for ten minutes. I used a Pepsi c...

Read…