Our Disastrous Summer Garden

September 15, 2015

Fruit Trees, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

...po with some ideas: Spend a little less time on Facebook and a little more time in the garden. Come up with better raccoon fortifications. Take out stone fruit that isn’t performing (Kelly has wanted to do this for a long time but I’ve dragged my heels). Take better notes. Improve soil and restart a composting project. Come up with small metal cages to enclose fruit (I have a notion that involves 3D printing–more on this later). How did your garde...

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Our Amazon Problem

Mr. Homegrown

August 24, 2015

Thoughtstylings

52 Comments

...but finding them, negotiating with them and wrangling their ads is a part-time job that neither of us wanted to take on. Regarding alternatives to the Amazon model, there was a period when Amazon dumped all associates in California after the state went after them for not paying sales taxes. During this time, I tried using Portland-based bookstore Powell’s associate program, but it proved unpopular with our readers. There were maybe one or two ord...

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A Day of the Dead Altar

Mrs. Homegrown

October 30, 2015

Domesticus, Thoughtstylings

13 Comments

...ure, such thoughts have been considered morbid, even unhealthy, for a long time–but that is changing. This year I felt ambitious, so built a much bigger altar, or ofrenda, than usual. Actually, the cats made me do it. Given access to the altar, they’d eat the flowers (ending up muerto themselves as a result, no doubt) and bat the rest of the objets to the ground. For the safety of the cats and my treasures, the entire surface needed to be so tight...

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Tools for Conquering Internet Addiction

Mr. Homegrown

May 22, 2015

Thoughtstylings

15 Comments

...projects that provide fodder for this blog and for our books. I think it’s time for some drastic action. It’s time to limit certain highly additive and often counter-productive Internet activities such as email, social media and general surfing not related to my core mission. Two tools I’m evaluating are LeechBlock, which works with the Firefox browser and allows you to block up to six sets of sites for certain periods of the day and two Chrome-ba...

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What to do with not-so-good tomatoes

Mrs. Homegrown

April 21, 2015

Food, Recipes, Tomatoes

13 Comments

...per. Put them in a low oven–around 300F- 325F. They’ll need to cook a long time, maybe two hours or so. The exact cooking time depends on the size and moisture content of the tomatoes. So this is something to do when you’ve got other things going on in the kitchen–like maybe a pot of beans simmering on the stove–so you will be around and remember to look in on them. What you are trying to do is remove some of the liquid and concentrate the flavors...

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