Backwoods Home Magazine

...issue features a detailed article on how city dwellers can maximize their vegetable production in small spaces. Even the article on running a cattle ranch has the side benefit of letting us all know where our food comes from, and the challenges of running a family farm, “Jessica Troxel has donned a plastic sleeve, greased it with mineral oil, and reaches in through the cow’s anus to see if this one is pregnant.” reads the caption over a photo in...

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A Recipe for Injera

...Foods) 1 teaspoon salt 1 teaspoon baking soda or baking powder (optional) Vegetable oil 1. Mix the sourdough starter, flours and water. The result should resemble a pancake batter. 2. Ferment in a warm place for 24 hours. 3. Just before you cook add the salt. 4. Katz gives several options with the baking powder/soda. He says that if you like the sour flavor and don’t mind a less bubbly bread skip the baking soda. We like sour, but we thought the...

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Newspaper Seed Starting Pots

...We started our summer herb and vegetable seeds yesterday using the method in this video. It’s labor intensive but it beats having to buy pots. Happy planting . . . UPDATE: We had some problems with these and have shifted back to old plastic pots for starting seeds. Read more here....

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Nettle Mania

...ough, nettles pack a powerhouse of vitamins, minerals, and are perhaps the vegetable with the highest protein content (10%). At the risk of contradicting yesterday’s anti-media screed (After all, Marshall McLuhan once said, “If you don’t like that idea I’ve got others.”), we’ll end with some links to an obscure sub-genre of youtube videos, nettle torture stunts. Mrs. Homegrown could drone on about the psycho-sexual implications of these clips, but...

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Mistakes we have made . . .

...e agent. 6. Planting a lawn We weren’t always the Molotov cocktail tossing vegetable growing radicals that we are now. Just after we bought this place ten years ago we planted a lawn in the backyard. With some temporary fencing, we roped it off from the Doberman to allow it to grow. After a month the lawn matured into a lush green carpet . . . but it only lasted five minutes. That was the time it took for the Doberman to gracefully leap over the b...

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