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…
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…
My guess is that the beef lobby hates us. If you hadn’t heard, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association FREAKED out when a USDA internal, online newsletter mentioned the words “meatless Monday.” Apparently that’s the equivalent of saying an incantation to bring Satan, himself, up from hell. We are those people that usually prescribe to Meatless Monday. And…
Almost all of the food we grow we put up if we can’t eat it fresh. We buy staples in 50lb bags and I have a giant stockpile of wheat that I inherited. We only grow open pollinated varieties and save seed for the following year. We have emergency water rations and first aid kits….
This year was my first time ever finding a lacewing in my garden. I was probably more excited than any normal human being should be. Of course in all my excitement I wasn’t able to get a photo of it for this post, so I borrowed one from flickr. Why was I so excited to…
If you hadn’t noticed I haven’t been writing much on the blog lately and for that I apologize. The universe was against me for the last few weeks. It started with two of my coworkers being out on vacation for the same two week period. There are only 5 of us in the studio so…
We’re about to enter our 22nd month of not buying food at the grocery store. The 22nd month. Nearly 2 years of avoiding processed food. I documented the first year over at our other blog, A Year Without Groceries, but have pretty much tapered off to a once a month cheese challenge post over there….
Dog Island Farm is a small urban farm in the San Francisco Bay Area.
