Search Results for: label/water%20conservation/page/4/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

1157 results

Seaweed Foraging

Avatar photo
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...

Read…

The Rain Got Real

Avatar photo
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...

Read…

A Self-Watering Container in a Pot

Avatar photo
Self Watering Containers
1 Comment
...owers. You fill SWCs up via a pipe and they can go at least a week between waterings. It is, in our opinion, the only way to grow water-needy vegetables reliably in a container. We have used them to successfully grow eggplants, tomatoes, collard greens and blueberries (note to the DEA: no cash crops at the Homegrown Revolution compound!). With our backyard looking fairly ugly this summer we’ve backpedaled on our earlier strident post about how we...

Read…

Going Gray!

Avatar photo
Water and Power, Water Conservation
10 Comments
...as you know takes a good bit of water, so I thought our not-so-gray shower water would be much appreciated by the little yellow bastards. Another benefit is that we won’t have to deal with the recurring shower clogs which have been forcing us to use drano. The drain setup was super simple from a plumbing perspective, so all I did was cut off the old drainpipe, replace the drain assembly, and route a new pipe out to the garden. It took three 22 deg...

Read…

Three Things I’ve Learned About Baking Bread With Whole Grain

Avatar photo
Bread, Food
25 Comments
...h more water than white flour. Bread recipes are a ratio between flour and water. In bread baking parlance this is called a hydration ratio (to get the hydration ratio you divide the water by the flour–the quirk of baker’s math is that the flour is always 100% ). Old school bread recipes, most of which require a lot of kneading, have hydration ratios in the 65% range. Popular no-knead white bread recipes have hydration ratios in the 75% to 80% ran...

Read…