Monthly Archives: September 2006

Dwelling Portably

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Dwelling Portably is one of the finest publications we have ever come across. Produced on a manual typewriter in a yurt in an undisclosed location in a forest in Washington State, Dwelling Portably is a how-to guide to living without a permanent roof over your head. In short, this is a guide by homeless folks for homeless folks. Holly and Bert Davis have been putting this collection of tips and anecdotes out for decades. Formerly known as the Message Post, this zine has evolved from multiple pages with a staple to just a single sheet or two with incredibly small type, so as to save paper.

Content ranges from cooking and bathing out of your car, to edible weeds, to improvised bicycle pannier bags, to musings on 12 volt microfiche readers and the practicalities of nudism. The advice, written in a consistent and factual manor, is interspersed with letters from readers who are also living the portable life. These stories offer a glimpse into a lifestyle most of us have not lead, and offer a perspective on and compassion for those who don’t have a place to call home. Even if you do have a roof, the practical advice in this publication should be a part of the library of every Urban Homestead.

Holly and Bert Davis don’t have much nice to say about computers or the internet and as a result the only way to receive this fine periodical is by mail at $1 per issue 2 for $2, or 6 for $5, or 14 for $10 with back issues available. The P.O. box, which Bert and Holly check when they are away from the yurt is:

Dwelling Portably
POB 190
Philomath, OR 97370

DPc/o Lisa Ahne (just the initials of dp, ie, NOT spellled out)
POB 181
Alsea OR 97324

Via Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools blog here is an excerpt from Dwelling Portably:

Legality of salvaging from dumpsters. Amy Dacyzyn, who phoned several police officials, said (in The Tightwad Gazettte, July 1993), “Dumpster diving is generally considered to be legal with the following exceptions: — If the container is on CLEARLY MARKED private land, behind a fence or locked up. However, most dumpsters in ‘semi-public’ areas such as parking lots are fair game. — If the discarded items are outside the dumpster they should not be taken.” A deputy district attorney in Santa Clara, CA, where many people rummage for high-tech discards, told Amy: “By putting items in a dumpster, the companies have abandoned ownership…. The idea that people are stealing is not a prosecutable case.”

Transcendental Taggers

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Thoughtstylings

“I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”
– Henry David Thoreau, “Excursions”

We found this amusing graffiti on our morning Xtracycle ride to the market. Which gives us a brief opportunity to clarify the SurviveLA mission. No, SurviveLA does not take responsibility for this high-brow tagging. In fact, while we believe in the forest and the meadow, we believe in growing the corn in the city. Unlike HDT, we like cities and we enjoy the amenities that go with urban living, mainly a critical mass of creative and interesting people living in close proximity. They’ll be no heading off to a remote cabin. We have no Walden Pond here, just Echo Park Lake.

That being said, it is our goal to bring Walden Pond to the city, that is to bring the amenities of rural life, i.e. nature and agriculture, to our lives here in this somewhat ugly but interesting place we call home, the City of Los Angeles. In short, we intend to put the Urban in Urban Homestead.

By the way, to the transcendentalist gangbangers who did the tagging – nice handwriting – you are obviously not the product of the same public schools we are.

Grow Italian!

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Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

It’s almost time to start planting seeds for the most productive growing season in Southern California – winter. While our friends in the cold parts of the country will be freezing their asses off we’ll be picking gourmet salads (sorry to rub it in). Since the climate here is like southern Italy, we like to plant Italian varieties. Which brings us to the source of many of our seeds at the Homegrown Evolution compound, Seeds from Italy.

Italians dig vegetables, and the offerings of the Franchi Co., which the folks at Seeds from Italy import, show a tremendous diversity of species and varieties. Why grow the same boring vegetables supermarkets carry anyways? Also, Italy and California both have similar climates. We’ve been growing Franchi vegetables for several years now and have enjoyed everything from sweet beans to powerfully bitter weed-like greens. The purple Sicilian Cauliflower we grew last year was a revelation – fresh cauliflower is a billion times better than store bought cauliflower though, along with broccoli, it can be challenging to grow and it takes up a lot of room. It was still worth it, as was the somewhat less difficult to grow quick maturing broccoli rabe Seeds from Italy caries.

Our seed selection committee is meeting this week to decide on what we’ll be growing and we’ll get more specific in subsequent posts. We’re intrigued with agretti, and we’ll be looking at more perennial vegetables after the multi-year success of our artichoke plant. We’re also jumping on the permaculture bandwagon this year with an experiment in the backyard. And look for more root vegetables in our illegal parkway garden.

Lest we come across as Eurotrashy, here’s two domestic seed companies that have interesting varieties:

Seeds of change.

Native Seeds which sells Native American seeds

By the way, for us in L.A. the back of the seed packages have no connection with our climate. You need a book like Pat Welsh’s Southern California Gardening to set you straight on what to plant and when to plant it. Now get out there and plant some seeds.

Root Simple Visits Simparch’s Utah Compound

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Thoughtstylings

Root Simple is in Wendover, Utah this weekend on business and it’s here, in this hallucinogenic landscape of salt flats and casinos, that the artistic/architectural thoughtstylist collective known as Simparch has established a self-sufficiency experiment they call Clean Livin’. Located on the remote South Base section of the historic Wendover Airfield on land leased by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Simparch’s project proves that self-reliance is possible in what must be one of the harshest climates in North America.

Clean Livin’ features a set of solar panels, batteries, a solar shower, a refrigerator, and a composting toilet all housed in and around a repurposed WWII era Quonset hut. Water is biked in with specially adapted cargo bikes. Solar power pumps the water up to the tower where it is heated by the sun in a black drum. A solar panel array and batteries provide more than enough power, all day and all night, to run power tools and pump some tunes out on the powerful stereo system.

The composting toilet features, what must be the most stunning view to be seen from any toilet seat perch in the world – the decomissioned Wendover Airfield’s munitions bunkers and the endless salt flats beyond.