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

820 results

Loquat season is here!

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Foraging, Fruit Trees
51 Comments
...o do with them, but they defy preservation because they are made mostly of water. They are also small, have skins which are impossible to peel (you just eat the skins), and large pits, all of which makes processing difficult. Yet they can be really tasty. The best ones taste a little like citrus honey and have a nice floral fragrance. Their light, watery flesh is refreshing on a hot day (If anyone has figured out something to do with loquats other...

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Quick Relief for Poison Oak

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Domesticus, Herbal Medicine, How-to
34 Comments
...til I found one I liked from good ol’ Dr. Weil. He recommended running hot water over the rash, as hot as you can stand it. I don’t remember that he said how long you should do this, but I decided to do it as long as I could stand it, which in my case was probably a minute or so. He said the heat will cause the itching to flare temporarily, but then suppress the itching for hours, and speed healing as well. Results? It worked like a charm for me....

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A Prickly Situation

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Food, Foraging
...pted to Southern California’s climate, that are both edible and don’t need watering. One of the most versatile is the prickly pear cactus, of which there are about a dozen varieties all under the Opuntia genus (Family Cactaceae). In the late spring the plant produces new leaves which can be harvested and eaten. Stores and street vendors sell them as “Nopolito”. Nopolito, tastes a bit like a slightly slimy green pepper and can be used in scrambled...

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Cooking with Poo

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Composting, Humanure
...plastic bag. Each day you add one bucket of excrement and five buckets of water. In return you get “biogas” and usable compost. Some clever artistes have turned biogas into art. A Danish collective who call themselves Superflex have created a biogas system involving an bright orange ball to collect biogas and claim that just two cows will generate enough gas for 8 to 10 people. SurviveLA is working acquiring a herd of water buffalo for Silver Lak...

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Moldy Grapes!

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Fermentation, Food
13 Comments
...e is to weight them down somehow. In this case, I had a baggy full of salt water (salt water so that if it leaked, it wouldn’t dilute the brine) sitting at the top of the jar. But I didn’t pay attention to the jar during the fermentation, and a couple of the rolls popped up at the sides and mold set in––a kind of fluffy, spider-webby black mold that crept from the exposed bundles up the sides of the jar. The lesson to be learned here is to pay som...

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