Chemistry

Preserving Eggs: A Six-Month Update

My mission at Mezzacello is to Grow, Maintain, Sustain, and Explain. This blog post aims to do all of that at once. If you are looking for details on how to get started preserving eggs, see more here. It’s important…

Preserving eggs to share with families and the elderly

Harvest Time at Mezzacello

Growing a garden is a three part opera that is true to my mission: Grow, Maintain, Sustain, and Explain. This post will outline how to grow, maintain, and sustain in an urban garden. The growing part is where you prepare…

Beets from the garden

The Carbon Sink: AKA the Formal Gardens

My animals, the insects, the pond, and tree and bush trimmings create a lot of organic matter. More than my Compost bins can usually absorb. I can funnel some of it into my garden beds for developing lasagna compost beds…

Alliums in the front formal rooms.

Crickets In Glass Houses

I have been experimenting with new systems of protein synthesis and nutrition at Mezzacello. I started out with meal worms and beetles. Meal worms were high in quality protein, but they required just right difficult conditions and moisture. Additionally they…

Chickens exploring the new terrarium abode of the crickets.

Winter Is Coming; How To Be Systems Ready

Winter is a challenge on an Urban Farm, no doubt. It’s a bit of a challenge on multiple fronts; protecting built infrastructure, planters, rain barrels, and fountains from water and freeze damage protecting greenhouses, hoses, waterers, and outbuildings from UV…

Resetting the aquatic ecosystem. Protecting fish from predators, managing duck access and keeping leaves out.

Winter Prep: researching and learning

It’s not just the urban garden that’s resting, but our bodies as well. But while the body rests, the mind engages. At Mezzacello the mind is almost always engaged; how else are you going to change the world, right? On…

Planning and researching for the downtime in winter.

The Foodist: Mushroom Bourguignon 2.0

A rare continuation recipe to switch up the Mushroom Bourgingnon recipe from the NYT.

Leeks picked one the fall are still growing in the winter.

Practicing Gratitude

Practicing gratitude is a woefully underrated skill in 21st Century America. We are consumed by the desire for efficiency and disdain inconvenience as if it were a mortal sin. We are allergic to nuisance. none of this is a sin,…

Feed Me Seymour: The Real Costs of Food

I talk a great game about recycling food and adaptive reuse at Mezzacello. I really do feed every scrap I can back to the animals, insects and compost. Some days I do feel like Seymour trying to find enough “food”…

Rick and Alice Cooper by the fire.

Being a Renaissance Smurf

Y’all remember the Smurfs? When I was in middle school every Saturday morning I would watch “The Smurfs”. I loved the message of community and resourcefulness. The singular villain, Gargamel, was a stand in for the cruel world and later on…