Steve Solomon’s Soil and Health e-Library

October 23, 2012

...h as Sir Albert Howard, J.I. Rodale and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. The “Homesteading” part of the library contains tomes dating from the 1700s (William Ellis’ The Country Housewife’s Family Companion), all the way to the appropriate technology movement of the 1970s (Gene Logsdon’s Getting Food From Water: A guide to Backyard Aquaculture). So go load up those e-readers. Or maybe print them out in case we have a revolution....

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I don’t hear you singing in the wire . . .

Mr. Homegrown

June 14, 2008

Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...radio (perhaps a good idea considering AT&T’s repair service–I’d hate to see what they’d be like in an earthquake). In the meantime we leave you with a song that seems appropriate under our circumstances, Wichita Lineman, often described as the “first existential country song”:...

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Let’s Pedal Together in this New Year

Mr. Homegrown

January 7, 2021

Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...In the past week my great desire was to get back to my urban homesteading/appropriate technology lane. A journalist called me on Tuesday to interview me for an article on urban homesteading in a pandemic. She asked me what I thought of as the most important activity in the homesteading tool basket. I said that it’s not growing vegetables or canning things it’s getting to know your neighbors and forming communities of mutual support. I am very tha...

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A Tensegrity Table

Mr. Homegrown

December 27, 2008

Design

3 Comments

...ld make a similar table, only out of scavenged materials (scavenging seems appropriate in these crummy economic times!). To make your own tensegrity table, molecular biomechanics professor Dr. William H. Guilford has some very nice step-by-step instructions here. My version is slightly different, but frankly Guilford’s design is probably more stable. I used some electrical conduit tubing left over from remodeling the house, some rope and a stop si...

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Native Plant Workshop

Mr. Homegrown

February 4, 2009

Events, Native Plants

3 Comments

...re–go ahead and mix natives with vegetables, fruit trees and other climate-appropriate plantings. 2. Natives aren’t edible. Many natives yield edible and medicinal crops. In North America the best way to delve into this topic is to figure out the plants that Native Americans in your area used. 3. Southern California is a desert and native plants are desert plants. Coastal Southern California has a Mediterranean climate not a desert climate and nat...

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