105 GardenNerd’s Tips for Organic Gardening Success

July 12, 2017

Gardening, Podcasts, Vegetable Gardening

...ch on a lot of topics and tips including: Monarch VR CropSwap Time Banking Homestead Hamlet Repair Cafés Sandflex Almanac.com Epic Seeds Baker Creek Seed Savers Exchange Renee’s Garden Summer Spinach National Heirloom Expo Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherry Keeping tomatoes healthy mid-season Powdery mildew When to harvest tomatoes Extending the growing season for tomatoes Mulch Shade cloth Capillary matting Don’t pull your bolting vegetables! Ollas What...

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Build a Ghetto Solar Cooker

Mr. Homegrown

September 29, 2006

Preparedness, Solar, Water and Power

Using crap we had laying around the homestead, SurviveLA fashioned a solar cooker based on plans from Backwoods Home Magazine, the Dwell of the Ted Kaczynski set. We just substituted an old cooler for the cardboard boxes, and we finished it off by using one of Los Angeles’ ubiquitous abandoned car tires as a cradle to keep the cooker oriented towards the sun. It ain’t pretty but it works. In our first test we reached 160º inside the oven, but we...

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Security

Mr. Homegrown

July 24, 2006

Preparedness

1 Comment

...we ain’t the gun-toting survivalist types here at the Homegrown Evolution homestead, we do have a security system. It’s a security system developed in the 19th century by tax collector and dog pound proprietor Louis Dobermann – the notorious Doberman Pincher. Last popular with coke dealing pimps and players in the late 1970s, Dobermans are powerful, fast, hyperactive, and combine occasional bad-assness with extreme sensitivity. Our Doberman, “Spi...

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The Miraculous Lavender

Mrs. Homegrown

July 25, 2014

Gardening, Herbs

14 Comments

...we’ve had no precipitation for months now. I don’t water it. I don’t send water down the stairs. The soil off the stairs is dry, because that slope is planted with natives, which are getting no irrigation. There’s no plumbing beneath the staircase, either. Yet the lavender keeps getting bigger. I’m going to have to pull it soon, before it ruins our stairs. But I don’t want to, because it’s so determined to live. And this goes to show that when a...

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Get Baking and Share the Loaves

Mr. Homegrown

August 7, 2014

Bread, Food

10 Comments

...be incorporating more flour into your dough. Whole wheat soaks up a lot of water. Your hydration ratio could hit 100% or more. Wet dough like this can be tough to handle which is why Baker’s recipes in the book are around 80%. As you get more experienced you can start working with more water in the dough. Baker said that he often gives a loaf of whole wheat sourdough to people who come in his bakery and say that they can’t eat bread. He says they...

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