Posted by: chapka in law, beer on
Jan 30, 2009
The Utah house has finally passed a bill legalizing homebrewing. On to the state Senate.
If all goes well, Utah homebrewers could be firing up the burners legally by springtime, leaving just a few states where it's illegal to brew up a batch of beer in your kitchen, including Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Iowa. If you live in one of those states and you'd like to change that, please join the American Homebrewers Association, who do great work on these and other homebrew issues.
The Times has a firsthand account of the effects of Colony Collapse Disorder, and a suggestion for a new way of pollinating our crops, from a beekeeper. And on a more troubling note, the Seattle Post Intelligencer recently published an article on lax industry practices that encourage the importation of tainted honey, a followup to their series on "honey laundering," the too-common practice of mislabeling honey to disguise its country of origin--and, in some cases, that it's diluted with sugar syrup or adulterated with antibiotics or worse.
Yet another reason to get your honey from a reliable source -- your backyard.
Posted by: chapka in root cellaring on
Jan 26, 2009
I somehow missed this back when it came out, but the New York Times has published an article on one of the most basic preservation techniques of all: the root cellar. The article, Food Storage as Grandma Knew It, describes a root cellar built in the basement of a Harlem brownstone.
If you're interested in the subject, please consider contributing to the Root cellaring page of the Cellar and the Pantry Wiki.
News outlets are reporting today on a new study that forests in the western United States are dying due to the effects of global warming. This is no surprise to home gardeners, who have been learning for years that the plants they can grow successfully, and the way they need to grow them, are slowly changing.
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