Is Facebook Useful?

November 30, 2015

...bout and helping promote interesting events. Getting advice and/or help on homesteading projects. Getting rid of stuff and finding free things for a project. Access to expert advice (the Garden Professors Facebook group is a good example of this). Hearing the opinions of folks I don’t agree with. The negatives? Facebook as acedia engine If I’m avoiding an important project Facebook is there for me to offer distraction fueled by my own narcissism....

Read…

The Manzanita Miracle, or, why you should love native plants if you live in a dry climate

Mrs. Homegrown

December 17, 2015

Gardening, Native Plants

6 Comments

...ere able to calculate how much water the soil held, and how much the plant used daily, leading us to figure out how long this particular plant can go between waterings–safely. Not pushing it to the edge of death, you understand, just calculating its normal water needs. This figure is called the “irrigation interval” and the answer was 225 days. Let me repeat that. This particular plant expects to go 225 consecutive days without water every year, a...

Read…

Build a vegetable prison to keep out raccoons and skunks

Mr. Homegrown

January 12, 2016

Gardening, Pests

18 Comments

...ings about the usefulness of the free 3d drawing program Sketchup, which I used to plan out my veggie prison. It was especially useful for figuring out the angles of the cuts I needed to make for the top. I was able to dial in those angles and dimensions on my compound miter saw. All that was left to do was screw the whole thing together and staple the 14-Guage welded wire from Home Despot. The access panels have two positions. Down to protect sma...

Read…

How to Turn a Rotary Phone Into a Push-button Phone

Mr. Homegrown

January 29, 2016

Reviews, Thoughtstylings, Water and Power

2 Comments

...d Phone Works website. Thankfully, many vintage phones, such as ours, have labeled connections and are easy to rewire. The Old Phone Works pulse-to-tone converter, pictured above, fits completely within our old phone. The phone dials just as it used to, but at the end of each turn of the dial a pulse is emitted. The pulse-to-dial converter I bought won’t work on a conventional phone line (non-VOIP) as the voltages are too high. For non-VOIP servic...

Read…

How to Garden With California Natives: Lessons from the 2016 Theodore Payne Garden Tour

Mr. Homegrown

April 5, 2016

Garden Design, Gardening

7 Comments

...” residential landscaping. On the bad side, opportunistic politicians have used residential watering as a red herring to divert attention from the real water problem here in California: industrial agriculture. The lawn rebate programs and constant messaging to reduce residential watering has resulted in thousands of dead trees and handouts to fly-by-night landscaping companies that installed gravel moonscapes and disappeared as soon as the rebate...

Read…