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

622 results

Grow Italian!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
RLeave a comment
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 fr...

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Homemade Cat Toys

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Cats
53 Comments
Top to bottom: Trout, palm frond, twine, acorn, plastic strip This is advice for new cat owners coming from relatively new cat owners: don’t waste your money on cat toys. Cats are fickle, ungrateful little creatures. Novelty is more important to them than just about anything else. And I don’t mean genuine novelty–they don’t need newer and stranger toys all the time. Rather, individual toys seem to get stale for t...

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Till vs. No Till Poll Results

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Soil
2 Comments
US Department of Energy Our highly unscientific till vs. no-till poll results are in: 17% of you said you till43% of you don’t till23% of you double-dig15% are undecided Looks like most of you fall into the permacultural no-till camp. For more information on no-till ag see the no-till section of our publisher Rodale’s website. Meanwhile, we’re on our book tour of Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. Check out...

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Why We Travel By Train

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
18 Comments
Amtrak ain’t this grand, but it’s a lot better than flying! Photo via the Library of Congress. We’re headed up to Northern California, Oregon and Washington to promote our new book Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World . And, with the exception of the San Francisco to Seattle leg, we’re traveling by train. Why do this when it’s more expensive, time consuming and probably makes our dear publis...

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City Repair LA

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
8 Comments
Mark Lakeman stares down the new Bimini Street salamander. Portland architect and activist Mark Lakeman, founder of the City Repair movement, is in Los Angeles for a week of lectures and activities. Lakeman believes in actions that correct what he believes is our disassociation from nature and our alienation from each other. He’s a passionate opponent of the grid, the imposition of street networks and regimented thinking that he traces ba...

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The Pressure is On

Mr. Homegrown
Food
14 Comments
My pressure cooker is my new best friend. Especially when I’m not in the mood for cooking, I can toss a few ingredients in, lock the lid down and come back to a healthy, nutritious supper in just a few minutes. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a pressure cooker cookbook up to my standards. All of the ones I checked out from the library, even those newly published, seemed stuck in the 1950s tuna noodle casserole era, when pressure cooki...

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Out Of The In Box

Mr. Homegrown
Design
6 Comments
res, which contains plans for everything from a simple chair to a multi-level home, all in a distinct modular style. Best of all, it’s available as a pdf for free here along with a couple of other interesting books from the period. Above is Isaac’s clever cube crapper. Not much headroom in the head, but what a nice view. Isaac’s work has a playful plywood-meets-the-moon lander vibe. I think I would have loved this modular bunk b...

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When the Crate’s Better Than the Chair

Mr. Homegrown
Design
2 Comments
Steve Badgett of the design/art/architecture collective Simparch tipped me off to Dutch furniture designer and architect Gerrit Rietveld’s set of chairs built out of crates, done back in the 1930s. As Rietveld put it, “A piece of furniture made of high-grade wood and manufactured completely according to traditional production methods is transported in a crate to avoid damageR30;no one has ever ascertained that such a chest embodi...

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You’ve probably never met a soup like this

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
5 Comments
Mushroom and Fruit Soup. Yep. I don’t know if you’re going to like this recipe. I did. Erik made it, which shocked me, because he has a general prejudice against savory fruit preparations. In fact, he has a general prejudice against soup, seeing it somehow as being a substandard food form. Nonetheless, he cooked this soup.  I smelled it first, as it was cooking, and it smelled really good. Then I saw it in the pot, and said, “...

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