My 2013 New Year’s Resolution

A day after writing about all the things I didn’t do in 2012 I understood the main problem with my New Year’s resolution list. And it’s not that the list was too long. The problem was that I was treating my life as a collection of merit badges. I think it’s an obvious trap for a how-to book author and homesteading blogger to fall into. My merit badge accumulation better served my ego than those around me. This year, rath...

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Update: Women’s Land Army

Last December, we posted about The Women’s Land Army. Christina Habberjam just left a comment on that post, pointing us to the resource page she’s compiled on that topic. It’s too nice a thing to be buried in the comments, so we’re posting the link to that page here. Also, her grandmother, Veronica Rattray, who was a “Land Girl”, wrote a book about her experience called My Land Girl Years, 1939-1948....

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More Furniture in 24 Hours

With our stained and Doberman-thrashed thrift store furniture about to end up on the sidewalk, my thoughts have turned to what to replace it with on a limited budget. Naturally, I’m thrilled when the interweb answers my conundrum with yet another 1970s era plywood furniture building manual. This one comes courtesy of a design blog called Ouno, who put up a flickr set of a few pages and plans from a book called More Furniture in 24 Hours...

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Country Wisdom

Thanks to a tip from the Soapboxers, SurviveLA augmented our homesteading library with a copy of the extremely useful book, Country Wisdom & Know-How by the editors of Storey Books. Country Wisdom is a compendium of tips culled from the Country Wisdom Bulletin published in the 1970s and oriented to the “back to the land” movement of that time. While geared to country living there is plenty in here for city dwellers such as ourse...

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EDC Part I: Multi-tool and Knife

...bicycling and even military and law enforcement multi-tools. Leatherman is the Budweiser of multi-tools. There’s a whole array of other companies that make higher quality products but, alas, we don’t sell enough books for me to peruse the finer offerings at our local Ross Cutlery shop. Again, my basic Leatherman seems to have enough tools for most situations. Of course a multi-tool is just part of one’s EDC. On days that IR...

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Helping the Bees with Science in your Backyard

...lay. This project is very important, and participation and support of it is a way we can all help out with what appears to be an alarming decrease in bees due to colony collapse disorder. In a fascinating and well written new book, A Spring Without Bees, author Michael Schacker explains the details of colony collapse disorder and the media’s poor job of covering it (hint: it ain’t cellphones, moving bees around or a bee rapture). Scha...

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Vegetable Garden Update: Too Much Salad

...Farms and ask him what I should plant. I grow salad greens by sowing the seeds densely in blocks and thinning as we eat. The dandelion greens and chard are started in flats and transplanted as John Jeavons recommends in his book How to Grow More Vegetables. I grow most of these cool season vegetables under a thin row cover material called Agribon-15 to keep out cabbage worms that go after the chard. Stay tuned for more vegetable gardening updat...

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Tuesday Morning Fruit Linkages

We’ve been reading Adam Leith Gollner’s entertaining book The Fruit Hunters: A Story of Nature, Adventure, Commerce, and Obsession and Gollner mentions a number of intreguing internet resources, perfect for a little post holiday weekend surfing: More than you ever wanted to know about the world’s smelliest fruit: Durian (Durian Palace) The California Rare Fruit Growers, “Pushing the Limits of Fruit Growing, Worldwide...

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Saturday Linkages: How to Wrap a Sari, Scotts Behaves Badly and America’s Finest Bathrooms

...his Lost Wife | Inhabitat – Sustain.. http:// bit.ly/NYOjks America’s best public bathrooms: http:// boingboing.net/2012/09/07/ame ricas-best-public-bathroo.html  … The history and science of meringue, from a new book by Linda K. Jackson and Jennifer Evans Gardner: http:// boingboing.net/2012/09/04/the For these links and more, follow Root Simple on Twitter:  Follow @rootsimple...

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