Land Girls

Mrs. Homegrown here:

During WWI, Great Britain instituted The Women's Land Army, a civilian corps created to replace male agricultural workers called into military service. These women were generally known as "Land Girls." Yep, the rural version of Rosie the Riveter.

By WWII, both Australia and the U.S. had their own Women's Land Armies, too.

It seems in some cases the women took on full-time waged agricultural work, and in other cases they formed temporary voluntary emergency relief teams, helping short-handed farmers at harvest time and the like.

The images, both photos and graphics from the period are fantastic:

U.K. women in working the plow, and workin' some fine style, too.

Women volunteering in an Oregon hops field. They look so happy (and stripey)! Were they paid in beer?

We'd never heard about the WLA prior to today--which is astonishing and a little sad--and stranger still, of all sources, we have the louche Chap magazine to thank for this increase in knowledge. They ran a Land Girl fashion spread titled "Britches & Hoes," saying,

"The recession has led to endless talk of austerity measures, making-do-and-mending and growing your own vegetables on an allotment. But the big question is, of course, what to wear while mulching the compost on your carrots."

It's good point. The Land Girls prove there's no need to look like a slob out in the garden, trailing your already disreputable bathrobe through the mire--as Mrs. Homegrown is wont to do.

Instead, as The Chap (and historical record) suggests, we could adopt sassy belted sweaters, crisp trousers and sexy Wellingtons. The fellows at The Chap also make some savvy suggestions for planting, captioning this photo, "Come along Tiffany, these tobacco plants, juniper berries and truffles won't plant themselves!"

Kale, Pomegranate and Persimmon Salad

Homegrown Neighbor here:

Season's Eatings.

I made this salad for a party recently and again for Thanksgiving. I had so many people asking for the recipe, I figured I might as well share it with everyone. I love the deep green of the kale with the bright orange of the persimmons. The colors feel very festive and seasonal. Kale may not be a vegetable you think about eating raw. If so, this salad will change your mind. All of a sudden, I can't eat enough raw kale.

I feel fantastic after loading up on a big bowl.

The recipe:

1 bunch black kale (also called Tuscan or dinosaur kale)
2 medium sized fuyu persimmons
1/2 cup pomegranate seeds

For the dressing:
1 tablespoon olive or grapeseed oil
2 teaspoons apple cider vinegar
1/2 teaspoon, a dash of Bragg's Liquid Aminos. You can use soy sauce or tamari, but I think Bragg's is best.
1/2 teaspoon sesame oil

Wash and chop kale. Cut the tops off of the persimmons and cut into chunks, about 1/2" cubes. To seed the pomegranate, place it in a bowl of water and cut in half. Then proceed to remove the seeds. This takes the mess out of the pomegranate. If you remove the seeds underwater, you never get stains on your clothes. The seeds float to the bottom and the white pithy part floats. Mix everything together in one big bowl, serve and enjoy.

Variations: You can always use apples instead of persimmons for that slightly sweet crunch. Shredded carrot

could also be nice and colorful. Adding a tablespoon of either tahini or peanut butter to the dressing adds flavor and makes it creamier. But if you are doing

the tahini or peanut butter dressing, I recommend mixing the dressing in a jar first so that everything

melds together. A little dash of mustard helps emulsify the dressing.

Basil all winter long

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Basil is a summer plant. When the nights get cold, basil turns unhappy. It yellows and loses flavor. Here in LA that doesn't happen until quite late in the year. Erik just pulled out our summer basil a couple of days ago to make room for winter plants. I'm replacing it--in a culinary sense--with Italian parsley, which loves cool weather, but hates the heat. It seems our gardening year swings between the basil and parsley poles.

I made the last of our basil into basil cubes, which is my favorite way of preserving it. Just wash and coarsely chop your basil leaves and shove them into an ice cube tray, so that there's a spoonful of basil in every cube. Cover with water and freeze. Pop them out of the trays and transfer them to a ziplock freezer bag. Throughout the winter, whenever you want a little fresh basil flavor, all you have to do is grab a few cubes. Toss the cubes straight into sauces, or let them melt to retrieve the leaves alone to use for toppings, salad &etc.

Happy Thanksgiving, Now Go Buy Something

We're kidding. Well, sort of. Hopefully you'll negotiate a truce with your family today to forgo expensive and wasteful holiday gift giving. Like us, you probably are also heavy users of the public library. But just in case you need to find the right gift for the fanatical urban homesteader in your life we've opened a Homegrown Evolution Amazon Store which contains books and tools that we actually own and use around our humble compound. Purchases made through the store and even other items you click through to will help support this website.

A few items in I'd like to call attention to:

Novella Carpenter's Farm City
Carpenter is a phenomenal writer and anyone who's involved in the activities profiled on this blog will love this book. The concluding section, where Carpenter describes raising two enormous pigs in the ghetto is both amusing and profound.


John Jeavons How To Grow More Vegetables
It's the vegetable gardening bible around here. Since we started using Jeavons' methods this fall I've noticed a significant improvement in the health of our garden. The only book on vegetables you need to own.


Haws Watering Can
Jeavons turned me on to this. The can produces a gentle spray that is perfect for watering flats of seedlings. I can't believe I lived without this thing. It's expensive but worth it.


The Urban Homestead
And, of course, there's our own book. If you order directly from us on the right side of this page, we make a few more pennies then when you buy on Amazon. But either way, pick up a copy for the whole family! Help keep our doberman in kibble!

Row Covers in a Warm Climate

The aftermath of a skunk rampage.

Here's an unintended organic gardening chain of events:

1. Scoop up multiple trash bags full of fruit scraps from Fallen Fruit's jam making event at Machine Project.

2. Add this large bounty of organic material to the compost pile.

3. Watch as a bunch of beetle larvae hatch and devour the fruit and other goodies in the compost pile.

4. Sift compost and feed most of the larvae to a happy flock of hens.

5. Add compost to the vegetable garden.

6. Plant seedlings.

7. Wake up the next morning to find out that skunks have spent the night rampaging through the vegetable beds in search of the remaining grubs. Yell in frustration at the sight of all the uprooted seedlings that took a month to grow in flats.

Now I knew that skunks were a problem at our place, and I had covered the beds each night with some spare shade cloth to keep them out. But on this particular evening I had forgotten to cover the beds. Pepé le Peu had destroyed a month's worth of work.

Setting about to find a solution, I considered everything from high powered weapons to peeing off the front porch to spreading batches of compost for the hens to pick through. Not wanting a visit from the LAPD, I settled on floating row covers, a light fabric that is used to exclude pests and protect plants from frost. Row covers would also take care of another persistent problem, cabbage worms. But here in USDA zone 10, where we have only occasional frosts, row covers have the potential to make growing conditions too warm. Thankfully I was able to get a roll of an extremely light row cover material called Agribon 15. Agribon makes a range of row covers in varying thicknesses. Agribon 15 is the lightest and is used mainly to exclude pesky insects. It has also worked with the skunks, who seem unwilling to poke through the flimsy fabric. Those of you in colder places should use a heavier cover to retain more heat.


I drilled holes in the corners of the beds and bent some scrap PVC pipe to create hoops to hold the row cloth above the plants. Agribon is so light that you can just put it on top of many plants without hoops.


Now I can sleep at night knowing that my beds are locked down in a kind of "vegetable Guantanamo".


Johnny's Seeds sells Agribon 15 in 250 foot rolls for $45. Seeds of Change sells it in 5o foot lengths for $26. It would make sense for most urban homesteaders go in with a few friends on a roll.

Watch a video on how to install row covers at Johnny's Seeds.

Compost Field Trip

Homegrown Neighbor Here:

I recently had the opportunity to tour an industrial scale composting operation. I am a huge compost geek so I was pretty excited. I've seen a lot of piles in my day, but nothing like this. This facility, Community Recycling (a division of Crown Disposal), processes food scraps and organic wastes from most of the major grocery store chains in Southern California. They also collect food scraps from restaurants and other food vendors in the region as well as operate a recycling facility for metals, plastics, wood, paper, yard trimmings and anything else they can find a market for or a way to keep out of the landfill. I must say it was pretty impressive. But the most exciting part of course was the compost.

There were literally mountains of compost called windrows in rows perhaps twenty feet high by several hundred feet long. It's a large scale operation with not just one windrow but dozens of them. And this is all stuff that otherwise would end up in landfills. Of course we should be composting all of our organic wastes close to home, but the sad truth is that a lot of this lovely organic material gets thrown away instead of returned to the earth. So I am glad that enterprises such as this exist.

When vegetables are going to go bad at the grocery store, they get tossed in a bin bound for these vast fields of degrading organic matter. The interesting part is that they get tossed in, plastic and all. There are bagged carrots, bagged salad mixes, plastic wrapped heads of cauliflower, all together. The compost windrows are just littered with plastic as you can see. Nothing like my backyard compost, where I would never allow any plastic or so much as a stray rubber band. On a commercial scale, they find it easier to sort the plastic out at the end of the composting process. Just how they do that, they won't say--apparently it's proprietary. But we got to drive around the hundreds of acres of compost and see the process for ourselves, start to finish. [Mr. Homegrown here: plastic combined with organics is one of the big problems in the world of municipal waste.]

The food waste is blended with wood chips or wood 'fines' as needed. Huge windrow machines straddle and churn the piles. They look like something out of Star Wars. Several months later the finished compost is sold to farmers. Community Recycling is a totally vertically integrated operation so of course they farm a little too--organic almonds, some row crops and some forage crops. That way, if they have too much compost on their hands at one time, they can always put it on their own land. The soil looked pretty good to me. I got to traipse around and get my hands in the earth. They also raise wild turkeys and other native birds to be released into the wild. It is part of a habitat and wildlife restoration project they are involved in.

This was better than any amusement park I've ever been too. I mean, they have compost, weird looking wild animals- yes, turkeys are very weird looking, organic almonds, a recycling facility and did I mention the mountains of compost? I'm pictured below, the happy queen of the compost heap.

When the Crate's Better Than the Chair

Steve Badgett of the design/art/architecture collective Simparch tipped me off to Dutch furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld's set of chairs built out of crates, done back in the 1930s. As Rietveld put it,

"A piece of furniture made of high-grade wood and manufactured completely according to traditional production methods is transported in a crate to avoid damage...no one has ever ascertained that such a chest embodies an improvised, highly purposeful method of carpentry...there must therefore at long last be someone who chooses the crate rather than the piece of furniture."

You can bet our next book will have some Rietveld inspired DIY designs. In the meantime, for the industrious makers out there, the chair above would be a cinch to back-engineer with pallet wood. Rietveld sold pre-made kits for the volk to assemble themselves. You can still buy a crate chair kit for $450 produced by Rietveld's grandkids, but a few hours with a sawzall, drill and some screws and scrap will be De Stijl in no time.

A special thanks to daddytypes.com for some info on this--oddly, Greg at daddytpes seems to share my interest in hippie building manuals and furniture made from junk.

Out Of The In Box

While my architectural tastes run closer to Prince Charles than Buckminster Fuller (those damn domes leak!), I have a soft spot for DIY hippie design manuals. I recently stumbled upon Ken Isaacs' 1974 book How to Build Your Own Living Structures, which contains plans for everything from a simple chair to a multi-level home, all in a distinct modular style. Best of all, it's available as a pdf for free here along with a couple of other interesting books from the period.

Above is Isaac's clever cube crapper. Not much headroom in the head, but what a nice view.

Isaac's work has a playful plywood-meets-the-moon lander vibe. I think I would have loved this modular bunk bed as a kid.

Dwell Magazine did an interview with Isaacs recently:



After I complained about hippie aesthetics in a previous post, an astute reader countered that hippies are the only people who have done grassroots building in recent memory. Good point. I don't think it's a coincidence that, during the "great recession", we're revisiting books such as this one rather than heading to Ikea.

Cutting a Beehive Out of a Wall

Bees in a wall!

Last week, along with two other "backwards beekeepers" Russ and Sue, we relocated a hive of bees that had taken up residence in a garage wall in East Hollywood. It was a "cut-out" in beekeeping parlance. The property owners did not want to exterminate the hive and we were able to give them a new home in Sue's idyllic garden. Backwards Beekeeping guru Kirk Anderson sent us some tips via email. It's Kirk's view that feral bees have more robust immune systems than the pedigreed bees that most beekeepers order through the mail. So with good intentions we got about to, as Kirk puts it, "save the world." Here's how we did it:

Kirk told us to smoke the hive when we got there and smoke again when needed. Smoke makes the bees think their house is on fire and they rush to stock up on honey. Preoccupied with their sweet food stockpile they ignore the homo sapiens tearing their house apart. Russ got one sting, but the hive was pretty calm under the circumstances.

Next, we got all our tools ready and suited up in our white bee suits. A cut-out is a delicate combination of building demolition and surgery on a living entity. Like surgery, once you start you can't stop. With a long butcher knife and some crowbars we peeled back the paneling to reveal . . . more paneling underneath! Thankfully it was ancient fiberboard that disintegrated as we tugged on it. The comb was not attached to the panelling and we were able to easily access the hive. Kirk had warned us to have the butcher knife ready in case we had to separate comb from the wall as we peeled it back. With the wall off we could see a mass of several thousand bees who had neatly built comb between two studs.

Russ and Sue then began to carefully cut out the comb from the wall cavity with the butcher knife and put it into wooden frames, using string to tie it in place (see Kirk doing this at the end of this Backwards Beekeeping TV episode). We focused on saving the comb with brood (bee larvae). These frames were then placed into a "nuc" box, a cardboard box that holds five frames in which we could transport the bees to their new home. We also had two garbage bags: one for empty comb and the other for honey comb to feed back to the bees once they got to Sue's garden. The next time I do this I'm going to get some buckets for this purpose as the trash bags tend get stuck together with honey. Another lesson I learned is to bring a tarp. Taking a hive out of a wall leaves a huge mess of spilled honey, construction debris and dead bees.

Once we had the brood comb in the nuc box we noticed worker bees returning from field massing where their hive used to be. We put the nuc box with the frames of brood in it next to the wall and took a break. Russ gave Kirk a call and he suggested we spray the mass of workers with sugar water and use our bee brush to push them into a dust pan. The sugar water occupies the bees with cleaning themselves and makes them easier to move. Once in the dust pan they are easy to dump into the nuc box where, we hoped, the queen had taken up residence.

After scooping up as many workers as we could we taped up the nuc box and got ready to put it in the back of Sue's hatchback. Recalling the story of a friend of a friend who had a nuc box full of bees overturn while driving a sedan, Sue and I decided to drive the short distance home wearing our bee suits (a truck would be handy here!). Even on the streets of freaky East Hollywood, the sight of two bee suit clad folks in a car attracted curious stares and laughter. During the short drive I noticed, through the screen of my veil, public access TV star Francine Dancer, in her wheelchair, going through a box of junk on Virgil. It's moments like these that reveal Los Angeles as far more like the magical realism of a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel than the celebrity spectacle the media disseminates.

Russ, Sue and property owner Jen

When we got back to Sue's garden we put the frames into a hive box and dumped the loose bees in. While we won't know for a while if the hive will take to its new home, we all felt a great sense of accomplishment. Hopefully, other urbanites around the world will take up beekeeping and put more exterminators out of work.

For more info on Kirk Anderson's natural beekeeping methods see www.beehuman.blogspot.com.

Got a beehive that needs to be removed from your LA area residence? Get in touch with Kirk at kirksurbanbees.com.

Red Cabbage Kraut

Homegrown Neighbor here:

Red cabbage sauerkraut is my new favorite condiment. I put it on everything including stir-fry, pasta, eggs, salads and soups. The kraut is salty so it is a great addition. No need to add salt or soy sauce to anything- kraut will kick up the flavor.

Then of course there is the color. Sure, I could eat ordinary green cabbage kraut. But where is the fun and excitement in that? Green cabbage turns grey and colorless when it is fermented. Red cabbage however, turns a bright shade of purplish pink. The liquid around it dyes all of your food. I like to eat it on eggs. It stains the egg whites a lovely shade of blue and purple. Plus I'm sure the bright color represents some kind of potent cancer fighting compound. Brightly colored fruits and vegetables are good for you. Artificially colored foods, not so much.

And of course sauerkraut is a naturally fermented food. This means it contains live bacteria. Don't worry- bacteria are everywhere, you just have to cultivate the good kind. And kraut is full of lactobaccili, a beneficial bacteria in this case. I had never liked the sauerkraut I tried as a child. But now I am converted. I think if the kraut on my hot dog when I was a kid was bright pink, I would have liked it a lot better.

This is my weird and wonderful urban farmer breakfast: raw kale, pinto beans, a spoonful of homemade pesto, eggs and kraut. Trust me, its delicious. I need a nutrition packed breakfast to go clean the chicken coop and garden all day.

I got my kraut making ideas and recipes from Wild Fermentation: The Flavor, Nutrition, and Craft of Live-Culture Foods.

Also, thanks to the neighbors for letting me use their sauerkraut crock. I have also made smaller batches in a simple glass bowl. So there is no specialized equipment required. Just try fermenting something delicious.

Events in Los Angeles This Weekend: SIP Workshop and Maria's Garden

Saturday (i.e. TODAY!)

On Saturday November 14th Kelly and I will be doing a Self Irrigating Pot (SIP) workshop in Westchester at 3 p.m. SIPs are a great way for folks in apartments to get into small scale vegetable gardening. Best of all the workshop is FREE FREE FREE! Here's the location:

Playa Del Oro at 8601 Lincoln Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90045

Sunday

Anne Hars, who lives a few blocks from us, helped save another neighbor's garden from a management company that wanted to remove it. Tomorrow, Sunday the 15th, Anne has organized a work party to tidy up the garden and she's looking for volunteers and a few donations of pots, mulch and soil. The fun begins at 9 am at 421 North Coronado Street.

"This is a great opportunity to help a Senior Citizen in need and spend the day puttering around in the garden! We need people of all skill levels from beginners to experts. Landscape Designer Maggie Lobl has kindly worked out a design approach and will help co-ordinate activities."

For more info see Anne's website.

Humanure Happens

Simparch's dry toilet located in Wendover Utah

From the 1806 edition of the Old Farmer's Almanac,

"Four loads of earth mixed with one load of privy soil, will be equal to five loads of barnyard dung. Let it lie for several months and occasionally turn it over with a shovel, and it will be of use as manure."

The editors of the Old Farmer's Almanac 2010,where I found that quote, deemed it necessary to tack on a disclaimer, "Human waste, as well as that of dogs and cats, is not recommended as manure for fertilizer today." But after fielding a couple of calls from journalists interested in the subject of composting human waste, I'm thinking that humanure is about to get serious consideration again. After all, why waste a good source of nitrogen in the middle of a recession?

Simparch's striking Clean Livin' compound

All this is a long winded intro to get you all to check out two fine examples of dry sawdust-based toilets. First is the one at the top of this post, designed by a collective known as Simparch, and located on the historic Wendover Air Force Base on the Nevada-Utah border. The facilities are simple: a toilet seat sits atop a 55 gallon drum. Each time you use it you add some sawdust. After composting, you've got rich soil. But what makes the Simparch crapper so amazing is the view. From the throne you look out on a landscape so flat you can see the curvature of the earth, punctuated by munitions bunkers dating back to World War II. The toilet facilities are part of a self-sufficient living project they call "Clean Livin'".

It ain't the moon but close: the view from the Simparch Clean Livin' crapper

The second example, nicknamed the "crap-cedral", is featured on Lloyd Kahn's amazing blog. Built by someone with the improbable name of Birchbarkbobananda, the crap-cedral features intricate woodwork and an equally stunning location. What both of these dry toilet facilities prove is the siting possibilities that can happen when you can put your crapper wherever you damn well please. No sewer line means you can have a nice view!

Rubber Sidewalks Rescue Trees

Homegrown Neighbor here:

I love trees and all of the things they do for us. They shade us, feed us, house us. Trees are something we just need more of here in Southern California.

I used to work at an urban forestry non-profit, TreePeople. So I am familiar with the challenges of the tree/sidewalk interface. I have fielded calls from people frantically trying to save trees that are being ripped out because they are lifting the sidewalk. I have also received calls from people eager to remove trees for the same reason. Sadly, I have also heard from people that would call just to complain about a tree being messy and littering their sidewalk or driveway. My personal take on that is it isn't the tree that should be removed- it is the concrete. Leaves falling off of trees is a good thing. Leaves make glorious mulch or compost and that hardscape is just in the way of some healthy soil.

Nonetheless, in a city there are sidewalks. There are also commonly trees near sidewalks. The wrong species of tree or a tree that is too large for the available space, can lead to problems. Cracked or raised sidewalks can be hazardous or inaccessible for the disabled, people with strollers, cyclists, skate boarders and those of us who are just generally clumsy. Rubber tiles in place of concrete can be a solution. They allow the tree roots to grow yet they are flexible. They conform to the contours of the roots. This eliminates gaps and provides an even surface. They are safer than ordinary concrete and allow the tree to thrive as well. I have heard of these rubber tiles before but I had never seen them in person until just a few days ago. I came across this tree and the rubber sidewalk in a leafy, pretty suburb along a major boulevard with a lot of foot traffic. Viva el arbol!

More on this material via the Charlotte Observer,"When the rubber meets the sidewalk (at $80 a foot)".

The company that makes them is called, not surprisingly, Rubber Sidewalks.

Apron Contest Winner

Homegrown Neighbor here:

We have a winner for our apron giveaway. I received a lot of great entries. It was fun to hear what each of you would do in an apron. I'm happy to say that we have a lot of interesting, witty and crafty readers. I even received some international entries. I wish we could give you all aprons.

But Katie Presley made me laugh, so I had to choose her as our winner. Lots of people cook and craft, but Katie cooks and crafts with an irreverent and sassy sense of humor. My kind of girl.

Her entry was rather long, so I'll just give you the highlights. She said she would first roll around on the floor and wrap herself up in the apron like a "sexy burrito."

She cooks, of course. She even makes her own recipe books of tasty treats. In addition to cooking she notes, "I am also in printmaking, so this apron can come with me to my art classes to make the bindings for the recipe book for the recipes that Apron and I were JUST working on! It is an artistic, apron-centric circle of life."

Congrats, Katie.

I've got a batch on jam on the stove, so I'd better finish this post and get to canning. I'm putting on my apron now....the jam is peaches with ginger, zero white sugar, a little maple syrup and unripe apples pieces for pectin. I'll let you know how it turns out.

Another Panel Solar Cooker

Poyourow demoing her solar cooker design

There's no one size fits all solution when it comes to the world of solar panel cookers. All have their advantages and disadvantages. I got an email from author Joanne Poyourow, leader of the amazing Los Angeles Environmental Change Makers, with a simple and effective design she came up with.

Pouyourow's cooker comes together much faster than the CooKit design that I blogged about earlier this week. There's hardly any cuts to make and no glue needed. Her design makes use of a car sunshade which can be picked up cheap at your local 99¢ store. The sunshade is more durable than aluminum foil glued to cardboard. While you can also fashion a sunshade alone into a solar panel cooker, I've found that they don't stand up well in even a moderate wind.

Plans for Poyourow's cooker can be found here (pdf).

She also has a list of solar cooking resources here.

And yes, for most North Americans this is the wrong time of year to be blogging on this topic since, as the sun gets lower in the horizon, solar panel cooking season is almost over. But I've got a backlog of summer R&D to share. Stay tuned for the ups and downs of our summer gardening, a bike accident story and a taste test of beer made with our homegrown hops . . .

CooKit Solar Panel Cooker

I've been experimenting with a nice panel solar cooker for the past week and, so far, the results are impressive. Called the CooKit, it was developed in 1994 by a group of engineers and solar cooking enthusiasts associated with Solar Cookers International and based on a design by Roger Bernard.

It has a couple of nice features:

• It produces ample heat to cook rice and simple casseroles.
  
• When you fold it up it takes up no more space than an album (do I have to explain what an album is for the youngsters out there?).
  
• A flat area on the base of the CooKit makes weighting it down with rocks easy. This is really important in windy places.
  
• All you need to build it is a knife, cardboard, aluminum foil and glue.

As with all panel solar cookers you need an black enamelware pot wrapped in a turkey roasting bag to hold in the heat. You ain't gonna deep fry things with a panel cooker, but they are great for slow-cooked crock pot type dishes. The only disadvantage to this design is having to cut curves, but with a sharp knife it wasn't difficult. The other improvement would be a stand to lift the pot off the aluminum foil for more efficiency and to keep the cooker un-scuffed. When panel cooker season returns to LA in the springtime, you can bet I'll be making a lot of rice with this thing.

Detailed instructions for how to build a CooKit can be found here.

Also, Mrs. Homegrown and I are writing a new book and we'd like to include some plans for solar cookers (any kind). If you've got a favorite DIY model, leave a comment with a link.

Another view with curious Doberman in the foreground:

Digital Farming- What's The Deal?

Homegrown Neighbor here:

So here in the world of urban homesteading things can get pretty busy. We can become so preoccupied with work, chickens, vegetable gardening, cooking, cleaning, blogging duties and email that we can miss some of the things going on in the world. I do like to occasionally check in with the world at large by reading the newspaper. I just read an article that I have to comment on.

A recent New York Times article titled, 'To Harvest Squash, Click Here,' introduced me to the world on online farming. Apparently people spend a lot of time "farming" on line. Twenty two million a day in fact, according to the article. There are several farming games on Facebook, Farmville being the most popular. You can get seeds to plant, watch your crops grow and then harvest them. Some people are so addicted that they are eschewing real life responsibilities and social obligations to harvest their virtual soybeans.

It is even suggested that the popularity of these farming games is indicative of a collective yearning for a more pastoral life. I'm not sure I get this. I spend all day outside in the dirt making things grow. At sundown, I lock up the chickens. Then I harvest something to make into dinner or on a special evening, I'll make a big batch of jam or sauce and spend hours canning. I'd rather spend as little time online as possible.

I can't wrap my head around how a video game can in any way replicate the experience of farming. I may be an urban dweller, but I get my satisfaction by getting real, not virtual, dirt under my fingernails. Can any one explain this trend to a clueless non-gamer like me?

Handmade, Homegrown Apron Contest

Homegrown Evolution reader Pam Neuendorf has offered fellow readers a chance to win one of her handmade aprons. She sells her wares through Etsy, a website where crafters and artisans can sell their goods. You can see more of her aprons here. She has an ordinary day job but is a maven of craft by night. Pam says, "I love making aprons. They make me happy." I am a big fan of aprons. They are useful for cooking, gardening or just looking darn cute. I am also a big supporter of all things handmade. So I love this handcrafted apron.

I also hope our readers will appreciate this reminiscence of mine. -When I was in college I lived in a house with a lot of people. There were about 50 of us and we took turns cooking and cleaning. Every Friday we celebrated 'Naked Pizza Fridays.' Only the men would cook on Fridays. They would wear aprons and nothing else. Just the apron. Oh, the good old college days. Perhaps this is why I see aprons as slightly subversive and rather sexy.

Dear readers, if you would like to have this apron, send me an email and tell me what activity you would use your apron for. I want to hear about your hobbies and how this apron would help your creative energies. I will pick a winner by Sunday night. Send your entries to fullcirclegardening@gmail.com.

Quince: the "Poster Child of Slowness"

Oops--I think they mean "quince"

A year ago I planted a "Karp's Sweet Quince" tree from Raintree Nursery and blogged about it, saying that I'd like to hear from fruit expert David Karp for whom the tree is named. Karp called me a few weeks ago to say that he was working on a quince article for the LA Times, "There's a new taste for quince". In the article Karp discusses varieties that can be eaten raw as well as how our Southern California climate is an ideal place to grow quince. Karp asked how my tree is doing and I had to say that it's not doing all that well. In a fit of mad, rare fruit tree planting fever, I put it in a crappy location, in bad soil too close to a large prickly pear cactus that is probably competing with it. We'll hope it does better in the next season.

Filling in for my lack of backyard quince, Homegrown Neighbor was nice enough to pop by with some she bought local Asian market. The label must have lost something in translation, but refers to a variety called "Pineapple quince". Karp points out in his article that this is the most prevalent commercial variety. When picked fresh it could conceivably be eaten raw, though the commercial stuff ain't fresh.

Quince is indeed, as one of Karp's sources notes, "the poster child of slowness." I tried to make some jelly with it and greatly underestimated how long it takes to cook. The jelly did not set, so I'll have to try again. But the fruit did fill the entire house with a heavenly scent. Definitely a fruit worth slowing down for.

A Warning About Straw

Claude Monet used straw (or is that hay?) for art. We use straw to catch chicken droppings!

Straw is a very inexpensive and useful material for composting, mulching and animal bedding (we use it for all of these purposes). If you use it for mulch you'll probably get some seeds that will germinate, but I've never found it to be a big problem in a small vegetable garden. I get my straw from the feed store, but you can often get it for free from yuppies on Craigslist who have bought it to give their parties the Hee Haw ambiance we enjoy 24/7 at the Homgrown Evolution compound. If you buy it from the feed store remember to ask for straw, not hay. Hay is green and a lot more expensive. You feed hay to your horses.

But one warning from my friend, permaculturalist David Kahn. It's tempting to pick up bales that stores have used after Halloween, but make sure they weren't treated with fire retardant. Fire retardant has some nasty chemicals in it you don't want in your garden. When in doubt, just go to the feed store--straw it ain't expensive!

Addendum 10/27/09: Reader Polyparadigm raised another potential issue with using straw in your garden or compost pile: halogenated pesticide/herbacide residues. Clopyralid is an example--while banned for use in lawns in many places it's still allowed on hay and grain crops . All the more reason to grow your own mulch and carbon materials if you can--don't throw out those fall leaves! Here's what Polyparadigm says:

"I'm glad I read through to the end! I was thinking this would be a warning about clopyralid and its close cousins. Which bears some mention: Halogenated pesticides aren't broken down by any but a few soil organisms.

Clopyralid and aminopyralid mimic the hormones in broad-leaf plants, causing them to grow un-evenly and die from wrong-facing, crinkled leaves and other symptoms. Grasses are un-affected, so fields of grain and lawns have been sprayed with this sort of chemical, as a cheap way of keeping broad-leaf competitors at bay for a few years.

These chemicals have a half-life of 11 months in hot compost, and are often applied at such high rates that certain plants won't grow in garden soil dressed with finished compost from a mix of sources, if one of those sources is a treated lawn or field.

A quick bioassay will test for this in straw: peas sprouting from soil mixed with that straw will look deformed if the field that grew the straw was treated. Browns of a similar texture from a source you know to be clean should probably be used for a control group."