So, it’s the time of year out here in the Maritime Northwest where periodic nice days start to happen. A few legitimately sunny Spring days in Seattle send thoughts to the veggie patch, and gardeners everywhere start running to buy plant starts. This can become a caveat emptor situation pretty fast, because baby plants are,…
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A Community Thing
Hi there. I’m Erica. Been a while, hasn’t it? Sorry about that. I have been elbows deep in my real life, for good and for bad. This blog is real enough. It’s as true as it needs to be. The stuff I write about doing, I actually do. The rants about food politics, I actually…
How To Make A Heavy Duty Potato Cage
Every year about this time gardeners start inflicting all manner of experiments upon the humble spud. We drop them into burlap sacks, grow pots, wood towers, mesh towers, tire towers, garbage cans, straw bales and more. We attempt the Square Foot method, the Ruth Stout method, the Hilled Row Method, the Plastic Mulch Method. The…
Adding A New Chicken To An Established Flock
My neighbor rang my doorbell yesterday. She was holding this chicken. She had just come from her kids’ school, where the chicken had been wandering the busy parking lot, causing all kinds of havoc by darting under and around the station wagons and mini vans. My neighbor’s eleven year old daughter is a natural Animal…
How To Use Pee In Your Garden
If you can get over the ewwww factor, pee-cycling your own urine into the garden makes good sense. Fresh urine is high in nitrogen, moderate in phosphorus and low in potassium and can act as an excellent high-nitrogen liquid fertilizer or as a compost accelerator. Components of Urine The exact breakdown of urine varies depending on the…
Giveaway: The Drunken Botanist (Because I Can't Buy All Of You A Drink)
Well, hello, you gorgeous, sweet-talking readers. I think I’d like to buy you a drink, just to say thank you for the unexpected and lovely outpouring of anti-troll support you laid on me last week. That was….wow. It was wow. Please know I appreciate it, and I have no intention of letting a few anonymous…
Whine, Wine and Weed
Whine I would like to humbly suggest that an urban homesteading lifestyle requires a certain degree of letting shit slide. You have two choices: make peace with weeds, kitchen dishes, chicken shit and dirty fingernails or go crazy fighting the inevitable. I would like to humbly suggest that blogging also requires a certain degree of…
Can You Heat Your Home With Bricks and Twigs? Paul Wheaton Thinks So.
Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that you think the world would be a better place if the collective “we” used less coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear energy and other heat-generating resources. Or, maybe you don’t give a rip about the environment but you sure like saving money. Perhaps you just need a reliable DIY way to…
To Do In The Northwest Edible Garden: March 2013
My gardener Spidey Sense tells me that we Maritime Northwest Gardeners aren’t going to see some crazy late super cold snap this month. I could be wrong, for sure, and your microclimate milage may vary, but I think it’s safe to start thinking Spring is here-ish. Here’s what Maritime Northwest gardeners should be doing this…
Lamb Blade Chops with Apricot Halves and Salt Preserved Lemon
This is a simple one-skillet dish disguised as a fancy-pants chef-type meal. The deception works because we’re using slightly more exotic pantry ingredients like salt-preserved lemons and apricot halves in syrup. The salted lemons, apricots and warm spices meld together into a Moroccan-influenced sweet and sour sauce that rocks with the lamb blade chops. If you don’t…
Fast Marinated Chickpea and Parsley Salad
At the Northwest Flower and Garden Show recipe demo I did yesterday I inadvertently shafted my vegetarian friends by focusing on some pretty carnivorous recipes. So, I made a video showing how home canned chickpeas can be transformed into this super fast vegetarian entree salad in just a few minutes. Watch It! Make It! Marinated Chickpea Salad Ingredients…
Stir-fry of Pickled Green Beans with Ground Pork
This Chinese inspired skillet stir-fry gets its distinctive flavor from the sour pickled green beans. These are beans that have been traditionally brine pickled through lacto-fermentation, rather than quick pickled with vinegar. Any fairly sturdy sour pickled vegetable will work very well in a dish like this. I adore lacto-fermented turnips with beef and chili…