We went. We saw. We drooled. We had a fantastic time at the Heirloom Expo. We ended up not seeing nearly as many workshops as we wanted to due to time allowance. We did see two – Dr. Vandana Shiva’s talk and Gardening with and for Chickens by Pat Foreman (author of City Chicks). It…
Tomorrow I’m hitting up the Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa, California. This is it’s second year but last year I was on vacation in Ohio so I missed it. I’m so excited to be attending this fantastic event. Tuesday is going to have so many amazing speakers I might not even get a chance to…
Those that know me know just how much I LOVE Halloween.Tom and I even got married on Halloween in the ultimate DIY labor of love. Half of the tower is packed with Halloween decor, most of it being the classy Martha-Stewart-esque type of decor. No plastic crap for us. So it was kind of a…
I can pinpoint my intense love for plants to when I was in high school. I was particularly interested in medicinal plants. My mom had given me a little space in the garden that I could plant whatever herbs I wanted. Mullein, comfrey, wormwood, rue, hyssop, sweet woodruff, mugwort, and horehound were just some of…
It was once thought that bigger was better. People were buying up these giant homes providing at least a 1,000 sf per person. The tables have now turned since the housing bubble popped. Tiny homes have become the new McMansion. People are protesting the monstrosities of the 4,000 sf home by living in 244 sf…
There is always somebody out there bitching about urban homesteaders. Usually it’s a woman bitching about other women that choose to grow vegetables and preserve their harvest. Sometimes it’s some dude bitching about urban homesteaders being elitist and out of touch because they don’t want to eat the corn-and-soy-laden-pseudo-food. Why don’t those stupid locavores just…
Yes, it’s been over a week since my last blog post. No, we did not fall off the planet. Well, we did fall off of the world wide web though. Our internet went out last week. Since we’re probably the last household without smartphones we were cut off from the world. More so because we…
We do a lot of canning here, especially with tomatoes. We harvest several hundred pounds every year with most of it being preserved. This year I’ve been getting a lot of questions about canning and tomatoes seem to the most popular. Tomatoes are the gray area of canning. They’re not quite acidic enough to just…
We came home yesterday after work to carnage. I almost cried. Almost. But I didn’t because deep down inside the demise was a relief. Our Fuji apple tree was dead. Snapped off a the base. It really wasn’t a surprise and was eventually going to happen. Half the tree and thus half of the trunk…
It’s that time again. It’s time to go over what has and has not worked this year in the garden. It’s always a learning experience and this year was no exception. I like making these posts because I always go back to them to remember what we need to change the following year. 1. “We’ll…
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
