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Northwest Edible Life

urban homesteading in the pacific northwest

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Archives for May 2012

275May 29, 2012Cooking by Erica

Never Buy A Rotten Avocado Again

Where I live, far from avocado country, it’s not unusual for organic avocados to be $2.50 or $3 each. “Oh, waaah, you big crybaby,” locavore purists might argue, “avocados are expensive because you live in Seattle, so stop buying non-local food!” To which I reply: “The zombies can have my guacamole when they pry it…

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34May 23, 2012Food Preservation by Erica

Buying An All American 30 Quart Pressure Canner: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

If you are part of the NW Edible community on Facebook, then you may already know about the pressure canner that brought me to tears. I had some birthday money, you see. Visions of pantry-ready, home-canned stock danced in my head. And so, after some research, I look the plunge into pressure canners. It was a…

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0May 22, 2012Gardening by Erica

The Spring Garden That Wasn't: A May Photo Tour

This is a very strange spring. I have foot high corn and foot-across squash but hardly any of the typical spring crops. There’s a few heads of lettuce, and peas of course, but for the most part when I should have been most focused on putting in more complete spring garden I was instead mucking…

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12May 21, 2012Food Preservation by Erica

Canning Swirly Fruit: An Easy Way To Prep Pears and Apples

Here’s a lovely way to save some time when you prepare apples or Asian pears for canning. Use an apple peeler-corer (see mine at work here) to make beautiful coils of automatically-cored firm fruit. The swirly fruit looks fantastic in the jar, and packs in well for a nice, well-filled raw pack. Don’t get too…

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0May 18, 2012Recent Posts by Erica

reCAP Mason Jar Cap Giveaway Winners

You all had so many great ideas for how to use reCAP Mason Jar Pour Caps. Thanks to everyone who entered. Our five winners were: Ryan Darla S Ellen Toni Wolfie Winners, you’ve been emailed so check your inbox for details on how to claim your reCAP prize. Thanks all for entering and for reading!…

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0May 16, 2012Homestead Animals by Erica

Battling Mulch Mountain at the Chicken Coop Door

I suspect anyone who has a chicken coop with a human-sized door has encountered the problem of door-blockage. Chickens adore kicking and scratching in the straw and dirt and debris of the coop floor, and tend to make little mountains and valleys from their scratching efforts. Mulch Mountain The mountain chickens create is always immediately…

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11May 15, 2012Uncategorized by Erica

When She Got There, The Cupboards Were Bare: Assessing Your Larder

How’s your larder looking? Mine is pretty spartan. This is a great time of year to assess your larder and see what you’ve eaten tons of and what hasn’t been a hit. If you make some notes now about what your family really eats, before the furor of canning season comes upon us, there’s a good chance…

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0May 14, 2012Recent Posts by Erica

Giveaway: Mother Earth News Fair Weekend Passes

Are you tired of amazing giveaways yet? Nah, me neither. The second annual Mother Earth News Fair in Puyallup (“pyew-AL-up,” for non-Washingtonians) is happening soon, on the weekend of June 2-3, and I’ve got a pair of tickets to give away. We went last year and it was fantastic. I saw Joel Salatin, who is…

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0May 12, 2012Life and Family by Erica

Mother’s Day: A Radical Act of Defiance

Secretly, creeping through the brain and heart and blood of every mama there is a deep, dark fear that we are Not Mom Enough. We snap at our kids, or grab the sharpie out of their little hand a bit too roughly before they can decorate another piece of furniture, or are the last to…

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0May 10, 2012Recent Posts by Nick

Notes From A Synthetic Environment

For the past five days I’ve been living in an unreal, unearthly limbo. I’m at a professional conference, in a 34 story hotel, in Chicago. I could easily have no idea what time it is. I certainly have no idea what the weather is like. My menus over the past few days read something like this:…

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0May 8, 2012Motherhood by Erica

Side-Dressing: A Feeding Strategy For Plants and Kids

For a year-and-a-half I felt terrible guilt that I was ignoring my daughter. Reasonable observers would assure me that I was not neglecting her, but in my heart I knew that the attention lavished on her had diminished markedly since the birth of our son. You see, our daughter was a home-schooled only-child for six-and-a-half years. She got…

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25May 7, 2012Homestead Animals by Erica

Coop Improvement: Nesting Box Failures and Successes

The nesting box is a pretty important part of the coop – it’s where the chickens, hopefully, lay their eggs. Our nesting box has seen a couple of modification lately. One worked. One really didn’t. Let’s start with the failure, shall we? Fail! Using Shredded Paper For Nesting Box Material In an effort to turn…

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Hi! I'm Erica, the founder of NWEdible and the author of The Hands-On Home. I garden, keep chickens and ducks, homeschool my two kids and generally run around making messes on my one-third of an acre in suburban Seattle. Thanks for reading!

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