Search Results for: label/water%20conservation/page/34/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

891 results

Fruit Tree Maintenance Calendars

Avatar photo
Fruit Trees, Gardening
1 Comment
...est issues on fruit trees. The University of California has a very helpful page of fruit tree maintenance calendars for us backyard orchard enthusiasts. The calendars cover everything from when to water, fertilize, paint the trunks and many other tasks. You can also find them in one big handy set of charts in UC’s book The Home Orchard. The permaculturalist in me likes our low-maintenance pomegranate and prickly pear cactus. But I also like my app...

Read…

A Question About Freezing and Canning Home Grown Vegetables

Avatar photo
Food, Food Preservation
12 Comments
...here are other options as well. For example, if you are canning carrots in water (which requires pressure canning), you could defrost the carrots, but add calcium chloride (pickle crisp) to firm them up a little in the can. Probably the best thing for frozen vegetables used for canning would be to use them in “cooked” preparations, such as soups. Although celery is a terrible candidate for freezing because it is texturally destroyed, I don’t see w...

Read…

Three California Natives that Double as Culinary Herbs

Avatar photo
Gardening
5 Comments
...hbor has one that made it through our multi-year drought without a drop of water. When you grow it in a garden it’s best to prune it back every year to prevent it from getting rangy looking. You can use the cuttings as smudge sticks or dry them for use in the kitchen. White sage is over-harvested in the wild for the crystal shop smudge stick market which is another reason you should grow this one in your garden. Black sage (Salvia melifera) Our bl...

Read…

How To Capture a Bee Swarm With Kirk Anderson

Avatar photo
Animals, Bees
2 Comments
...To capture a swarm you: Spray the swarm with a mixture of white sugar and water–this keeps them busy cleaning themselves while you . . . Knock them in a nuc box (a cardboard box that holds five frames–get one at your local beekeeping supply shop). Take the nuc box home and let them settle in for a few weeks. Then you can transfer the frames to a permanent hive box. That’s just about it. Bees tend not to be aggressive when they swarm (they have no...

Read…

Steve Solomon’s Soil and Health e-Library

Avatar photo
Resources
1 Comment
...e books for free, but Solomon requests a modest $13 donation. You can find this amazing resource at: www.soilandhealth.org. The “Radical Agriculture” part of the archive contains many early organic ag classics by authors such as Sir Albert Howard, J.I. Rodale and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. The “Homesteading” part of the library contains tomes dating from the 1700s (William Ellis’ The Country Housewife’s Family Companion), all the way to the appropriate...

Read…