Every Day Carry Revisited

June 13, 2024

...Alice in Boarderland and I’m not sure what the chewing gum, Coke Light and baby deer are about. If you know please do fill me in. I include this meme just to emphasize the gendered factors in EDC discourse which you could just scratch the surface of in a book length discussion of the lack of pockets or strange, small symbolic pockets that exist in women’s clothing and a parallel discussion of purses vs. “man bags.” For the record my own EDC leans...

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What is that black and orange bug in my garden?

Mrs. Homegrown

May 6, 2014

Gardening, Insects, Pests

14 Comments

...a-based, but the advice tends to be applicable elsewhere. For more climate-specific advice, check your own local University Extension Services. Final note: Don’t mix up any of the above with baby ladybugs/ladybirds, which eat even more aphids than adult lady bugs. They look like this: all the pictures in this post courtesy of wikimedia commons....

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How to Remove Bees From a Tree

Mr. Homegrown

March 20, 2013

Animals, Bees, Gardening, Trees

21 Comments

...es. Next to the exit the beekeeper places a hive box with some brood comb (baby bees) in it. The worker bees leave but can’t get into their old home. They take up residence in the new box and make a new queen. If all goes well the beekeeper comes in six weeks and takes away the box. I took bees out of a kitchen vent this way and wrote about it in a blog post. Know the difference between a swarm and a beehive. Swarms are how bees reproduce. Often t...

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Bad Forager: Mistaking Hemlock for Fennel

Mrs. Homegrown

October 31, 2013

Food, Foraging, Mistakes

12 Comments

...ies, and are hard to fool. Some notes on hemlock: I’ve always been wary of baby hemlock. It likes to grow where chickweed grows, so its easy to pull up a few hemlock sprouts along with young chickweed, and it doesn’t take much fresh hemlock in your salad to make you very sick. The main poison in hemlock coniine, which is similar to nicotine in both its chemical structure and pharmacological properties. It takes about 100 mg of coniine to kill an a...

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Meet the Amazing Sierra Newt

Mrs. Homegrown

March 22, 2016

Animals, Nature Awareness

12 Comments

...e’s the best part–he was breathing through his skin. The gills he had as a baby are long gone, traded for fledgling lungs when he left his birth pool. But once back in the water, he dispenses with those clumsy organs altogether and draws oxygen out of the water straight through his skin, in a process called diffusion. That’s right. This handsome orange show-off breathes in three different ways over the course of his life: by gills, by lungs and, c...

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