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

October 31, 2012

u’ll probably come to agree with him, because in this book, as in all of his writing, Greer is remarkably lucid, straightforward and persuasive. Blood of the Earth is unlike any other book you’ll read on peak oil. It’s challenging, honest, sobering and inspiring. It’s not a end-times book. Greer doesn’t do apocalypse. Nor is it an airy-fairy “we’ll save the world by the magic of positive thinking” s...

Finding an Urban Homestead on Craigslist

Mr. Homegrown

March 15, 2012

Thoughtstylings

6 Comments

of your room. Your roommates will be as follows: a 31 y.o. park ranger who inhabits the upstairs and likes to identify birds by ear and spot clean the floors, a 34 y.o. medic and bike mechanic who likes to brew beer, drink it, and then go on 300-mile rides, and a 30 y.o. outdoor educator who likes to pet her cat and sew up organic undies from reclaimed t-shirts. The last two will be your downstairs co-inhabitants and bathroom buddies. We are...

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

If I could have only one book on my zombie apocalypse bookshelf it would be this one. Though it has to be one of the worst book titles ever, More Other Homes and Garbage: Designs for Self-Sufficient Living, by Standford University professors, Jim Leckie, Gil Masters, Harry Whitehouse and Lily Young has everything you need to set up your off-grid compound. This book, first published in 1975 and revised in 1981, grew out of a heady period in appr...

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

;s nothing new here. On a serendipitous trip to the library last week I stumbled across what must be the very first urban homesteading book, Cato and Varro’s De Agri Cultura (On Agriculture) written around 160 BC. Well, it’s really more of a rural homesteading manual, but much of the advice seems familiar. Looks like Cato the Elder forgot to use sunscreen. Cato holds the farmer in high esteem, And when they would praise a wor...

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...