Book Review: The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil

October 31, 2012

Phoebe says that despite her midnight coat and lambent eyes, she has nothing whatsoever to do with magic. Or peak oil. And for the record, she also scorns Halloween. What do magic and peak oil have to do with one another? Quite a lot, actually, if you believe the author, John Michael Greer. And if you read The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil you’ll probably come to agree with him, because in this book, as in all of his...

Finding an Urban Homestead on Craigslist

Mr. Homegrown

March 15, 2012

Thoughtstylings

6 Comments

Backyard of the “Lee Street Homesteaders” You know the urban homestead thing has caught on when the phrase shows up in a Craigslist rental ad: ImagineR30; living at the edge of a city and at the edge of modern society. Growing your own food and medicine in your backyard. Raising poultry and harvesting your own eggs. Brewing your own beer and kombucha. Fermenting your own raw sauerkraut and pickles. And living within s...

Book Review: More Other Homes and Garbage Designs for Self-Sufficient Living

Mr. Homegrown

July 24, 2012

Appropriate Technology, Reviews, Water and Power

4 Comments

75 and revised in 1981, grew out of a heady period in appropriate technology research and DIY hippie experimentation that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s. In some ways it’s the rural version of the original urban homesteading book, The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City. Both books, not coincidentally, share the same publisher. Feeding the digestor on the homestead. An illustration from More Other Homes and G...

Book Review: The New Sunset Western Garden Book

Mr. Homegrown

February 28, 2012

Reviews

6 Comments

The Sunset Western Garden Book was one of the first gardening books we picked up when we bought our house back in 1998. A new version is out this month, now dubbed The New Sunset Western Garden Book, and it’s a significant improvement over our old copy. Lavish photos have replaced the drawings of my 1998 copy. The new edition has significantly more coverage of edibles, including a vegetable planting schedule as well as nice photographs of...

Making It

Mr. Homegrown

April 26, 2011

Publications

3 Comments

Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen (Rodale Books, 2011) ISBN-13: 978-1605294629 Buy it at: Amazon • Abe Books • Barnes & Nobel • Powell’s Making It provides you with all of the tools you need to become a producer instead of a consumer and transform your home from the ground up. Projects range from the simple to the ambitious, and include activities done in the home, in the garden an...

Countdown

Mrs. Homegrown

March 24, 2011

Events

24 Comments

Our new book comes out just about a month–April 26th–and today two super-advance copies came to us by mail. Believe me, it’s awfully strange to see something that has existed only as computer files suddenly materialize on your porch! We realize we haven’t given our new book a formal introduction yet, so here goes. Making It: Radical Home-Ec for a Post Consumer World is our follow up to The Urban Homestead . The...

The Very First Urban Homesteading Book

Mr. Homegrown

June 15, 2012

Reviews

11 Comments

The urban homesteading shelf at your local bookstore, thanks to the great recession, sure has gotten crowded in recent years. There are many fine volumes now alongside our two books with a great diversity of authors opining on chicken coops, homemade soap and composting. This is a good thing–we need as many voices as possible. But there’s nothing new here. On a serendipitous trip to the library last week I stumbled across what must...

Broom Corn–or is it Broomcorn?

Mrs. Homegrown

September 20, 2011

Domesticus, Gardening

18 Comments

Mrs. Homegrown here: This summer I suggested we plant broom corn for no other good reason than I saw the seed pack at the nursery and thought it would be fun to make a broom. (This sort of temporary insanity often overtakes me in the seed aisle.) So without knowing anything at all about broom corn or broom making we planted a block of the stuff. Maybe I should have done a little research into broom making before planting, but I let it slide ...

Making It e-Book Corrected

Mr. Homegrown

August 11, 2011

Thoughtstylings

RLeave a comment

To those of you who purchased an e-version of our book Making It and had trouble reading it, I just received a note from our publisher Rodale: The “disappearing words” are actually words that appear in a faint gray color that was hard or impossible to see over light background color settings on some devices, especially the Kindle from Amazon. We have corrected the e-book files and re-released them to all retailers. The corrected vers...