I bought a huge clump of oyster mushrooms in the store a couple days ago. Josh and I refer to them as the beef jerky of the plant world – when crispy-fried in olive oil with just a sprinkle of sea salt and a dash of soy sauce glazed onto them at the last minute, […]
The duck house is nearly finished. I started building it a couple weeks ago because it suddenly dawned on me that a) winter is coming and the old duck coop had no shelter, and b) winter vacations are coming up and the ducks really need to be somewhere more secure than under a single flimsy layer of […]
I’ve resigned myself to the fact that my farm area is suited more for growing rice than veggies. This year has been especially wet, with thunderstorms nearly every other day, and my garden is suffering. Despite all the work I’ve done to raise the beds through copious additions of organic matter every year, the water […]
My new colony is doing great – the population absolutely exploded! In fact it boomed so much that the last week when I checked, every single frame in a two-deep was full of brood. I happily put on an extra box and walked away. You’d think this would be a good thing, right? Except I […]
I’ve always wanted to make some of my bigger pots out in the garden into self-watering pots – the kind where you fill a reservoir in the bottom of the pot and the water slowly wicks up into the soil so you can go way, way longer between having to water. In fact this spring, […]
One of my very first harvests every Spring is black, not green. I deliberately set my coop’s run directly on the soil in order to be able to use the deep bedding method. The method is simple: every time the bedding starts to look gross, you add another deep layer of organic material on top. It’s that simple. […]
What is it Paul Wheaton is famous for saying: that permaculture lets him be as lazy as he really is? Meaning that people can go to extraordinary lengths to find easier methods for doing tasks they dislike. He was referring to avoiding weeding, fertilizing, and planting through the use of guilds and perennial food crops; […]
I’ve been fed up lately with the rising cost of organic chicken feed. It’s gone up from $30 to $40, probably due in part to the storms and drought through the corn belt last year, which means that during their best laying months, my girls’ egg output is just covering the cost of their room […]
Of all the homeowner’s chores we have to deal with every year, raking up fallen leaves is probably the one we hate the most. It’s the chore we keep putting off long past the point of procrastination, because not only is it tedious, but there’s just so much of it, and we have so little […]
We ran out of Quaker Oats Instant Oatmeal packets – one of Sofía’s regular breakfast staples – the other morning. Little paper packets full of mostly-sugar and fake flavorings that microwave up to an appetizing gray mush. Yum. They really aren’t that high in calories, even given that they are mostly sugar, and I thought […]