Search Results for: label/water%20conservation/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

822 results

The Rain Got Real

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Gardening, Thoughtstylings
...ater level was the highest I’ve ever seen it. The rain garden gets all the water from one half of our roof which I calculate to have been about 1,500 gallons of water in the last 24 hours. To briefly get back to the Žižek book I rambled about last week, I was reminded of Lacan’s notion of the “Real”, that which is unrepresentatible, unthinkable. Subjects such as our own deaths and climate change fall into the category of the Real. The incomprehens...

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A Low-Tech Experiment in Growing Oyster Mushrooms

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Gardening, Mushrooms
14 Comments
...n January 4th, I put the chips in a plastic bin and soaked them in boiling water to pasteurize them and give the oyster mushroom spawn a better chance of growing. I let the wood chips soak overnight. The next day I squeezed excess water out of the chips and put them in my holey (holy?) bucket, alternating layers of wood chips and spawn. I placed the bucket outside under the dense shade of our avocado tree. You can also, by the way, use straw inste...

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Seaweed Foraging

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Food, Foraging
1 Comment
...’t have time for this so we did it at home. The disadvantage is that fresh water will dissolve seaweed so you have to work quickly and start the drying immediately. Drying can be done in the sun, on a dashboard, in a dehydrator or in an oven at the lowest setting. As it was dark and cold by the time we got home we used Kelly’s step mom’s oven. Our very small Kombu haul dried and ready to use. You should only harvest what you have space and time to...

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McDonald’s Corporation Headquarters Used to Have a Suede Waterbed Think Tank

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Design
...r cent a year in the downtown office, has been 30 per cent in the new surroundings, where the colors tan and burnt‐orange predominate. I guess we can conclude that toxic work places can be cured with some tan and burnt‐orange suede walls and a 700 gallon water bed? Corporations these days have ditched the water bed pods for “mindfulness” classes but I doubt the workers are any happier. I’ll leave it to some of the commenters on Collins’ Twitter po...

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The Obligate Resprouter

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Animals, Goats
...oesn’t put pressure on the very resources that climate change makes scarce—water and top soil. Now, at least temporarily, we find ourselves having to feed the goats hay grown by pumping water in the nearby desert, the very thing we have tried to avoid. Developing a new understanding of this agriculture’s relationship to climate change, drought and wildfire is necessarily the new project, and we are pleased to have you along for the exploration. Yo...

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