Search Results for: label/book reviews/page/30/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

622 results

Injera

Mr. Homegrown
Bread, Fermentation, Food
2 Comments
Hermann Göring is alleged to have said “When I hear the word culture I reach for my gun”. These days when Homegrown Revolution hears the world culture we reach for our knife and fork, since our compound’s test kitchen has been busy experimenting with the bubbling and frothing world of live cultures through the ancient art of fermentation. We revived our sourdough starter (to be explained in a future post), and cooked up a batch...

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Humanure Dry Toilet Made From a Milk Crate

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Design, How-to, Humanure
29 Comments
Modern toilets take two valuable resources, water and nitrogen rich human waste, and combine the two to create a problem: sewage. In a dry or “humanure” toilet, you cover your deposits with a layer of non-toxic sawdust. Once the toilet is full you dump the contents into your outdoor humanure pile and compost the waste at high temperatures for at least a year. You can then use that compost as fertilizer for plants. The ubiquitous fiv...

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Keeping it Local

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
7 Comments
A depression ear local currency The Wall Street Journal had a fascinating article, Cash-Strapped California’s IOUs: Just the Latest Sub for Dollars on the history of IOUs and local currencies. It seems that Depression 1.0 spurred quite a few improvised currencies, including the “Minneapolis Sauerkraut Note”, for a good reason. Just as today, a lot of people want the rewards for our labor tied to tangibles rather than moneti...

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My Trip to Maker Faire

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes, Solar, Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
Getting ready for the earth oven workshop this weekend meant that I never got around to reporting on my trip to Maker Faire up in San Mateo on the 19th. I spoke in the low-tech “Homegrown” shed far away from the high powered tesla coil displays happening elsewhere. To add to the low tech/high tech irony, I was not able to use my PowerPoint and had to speak extemporaneously. This worked out for the better, as I was able to pull up a...

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Stinging Nettles and Cat Allergies

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Herbal Medicine, Herbs
40 Comments
Facebookers have already seen these pics. Kitty, being a fast moving black hole, is very hard to photograph. Mrs. Homegrown here: Sorry this is sort of rambling, but context is everything. Our friend Anne, of the pea-eating-Chihuahua fame, and the chicken-sitting-on-kitten fame, and various other fames, is a frequent animal rescuer. She came over to our house maybe 2 weeks ago with a pet carrier. She said, “Someone dropped this of...

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Mead!

Mr. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food
7 Comments
While we’ve tasted the Ethopian honey wine known as Tej, we’ve never had mead, so we decided to cook up a batch. It’s way too early to tell if we have a tasty beverage or a gallon of home brewed Listerine–it will be many months before the stuff is drinkable. But we thought we’d note how we made it, based on a recipe in Ken Schramm’s book The Compleat Meadmaker. We downsized the recipe from five gallons to one...

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A Bicyclist’s Bill of Rights

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes
3 Comments
Thomas Jefferson, founding father and fixed gear gallery addict. Biking back from downtown this morning in the poorly designed bike lane on the high speed/high volume traffic sewer that is Sunset Boulevard, I came upon a treacherous bend in the road that I’ve navigated a million times before. Over the past few months our city has seen fit to erase the bike lane markings, dig up the road and then apply asphalt the way a five year old woul...

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Gathering in Portland: Looking for ideas

Mrs. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
9 Comments
Hey all, We’re visiting in Portland on Tuesday, May 3rd and Wednesday, May 4th as part of our book tour. On the Tuesday we arrive, we’re going to be on KGW’s “Live at 7″ program. We’ll be done by 7:15 and have nothing to do afterward. Would anybody like to meet us downtown? Our idea is that we could settle ourselves at a pub or cafe, and anybody who feels like it could come and hang out with us. We’ll ta...

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Sourdough Pancake Recipe

Mr. Homegrown
Bread, Food, Recipes
2 Comments
Yes, that’s a real children’s book from the 1970s. A question came in as to what to do with extra sourdough starter. First off, check out the new way we feed our starter, which wastes a lot less flour. But another answer is to use all that tangy delicious starter to make pancakes. For years we’ve used Nancy Silverton’s recipe. Basically, the starter fills in for the flour and milk used in standard pancake recipes. That...

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