life on garden time
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
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 [Continue Reading...]
The thing about this chili is, you pretty much just open up a bunch of jars and simmer. So on a difficulty scale of 1 to 10, 1 being “Boil Water” and 10 being “The Food They Invent at Moto” this chili is maybe a 2, and that’s only if you need to rummage around for a [Continue Reading...]
Regular readers know that my absolute favorite financial and frugality blogger is Mr. Money Mustache, he of the “early retirement through badassity” slogan. In fact, a few NW Edible readers have even told me that, once they started reading MMM, their outlook on finances, hope, freedom and even their future totally changed for the better. So when [Continue Reading...]
Don't need a Garden Planner & Journal? Tips are gratefully appreciated and help pay for blog hosting services, seeds and extra compost to keep the garden and the writing going.
What's this Tip Jar thing all about, anyway?
Latest Comments