Search Results for: label/book reviews/page/4/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

628 results

Saturday Linkages: From The Woodsman Workout to Crafting With Your Cat

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
3 Comments
Yes, it’s the woodsman workout. Via the Art of Manliness. Gardening My new favorite botanic garden – in Mexico! | Garden Rant http:// gardenrant.com/2012/09/new-fa vorite-botanic-garden-in-mexico.html  … Deconstructing the cornmeal myth: http:// ow.ly/1Owd1F DIY Build-It-Solar Blog: DIY Solar Water Heating System in Southeastern Pen… http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/09/diy-so lar-hot-water-heating-system-in.html?spref=...

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Greywater Guerrillas in LA this Weekend

Mr. Homegrown
Water and Power, Water Conservation
4 Comments
With the prospect of at least ten more years of drought here in California, greywater is a hot topic. This weekend Oak-town’s fabulous Greywater Guerrillas are heading down to Los Angeles for a weekend of talks and workshops. If you’re not in Southern California, make sure to check out their informative website and their new book Dam Nation. We especially enjoy the GG’s project examples. Here’s the 411 on their LA appeara...

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Cleaning the Sink with Baking Soda and Lemons

Mrs. Homegrown
Cleaning, Domesticus
16 Comments
   Our sink, freshly cleaned and so darn photogenic!This is because you can’t see all the clutter just out of view.   A little green cleaning review here. It is possible to keep a sink white and shiny without bleach or other toxic cleansers. I took pictures this week while I was cleaning to prove it. Below is our grungy sink. A photo can’t quite capture that particularly scuzzy quality a dirty sink has, th...

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SIP Improvement

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Self Watering Containers
13 Comments
Watermelon SIPs on the Chicago rooftop of the Green Roof Growers We’ve featured self-irrigating pots (SIPs) in our first book and have done a lot of experiments with them over the years. One of the problems with growing tomatoes in SIPs is that the roots can get into the water chamber and cause problems and diseases. I found a nice workaround to this problem via an anonymous tip on a BoingBoing tomato post: With tomatoes, you need...

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Post Petroleum Lecture

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
RLeave a comment
Albert Bates, author of a brand new book The Post Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook will be speaking at the Audubon Center at Debs Park on Saturday March 24th as part of the 2007 Sustainable Habitats Lecture Series. The series is put together by permaculture expert David Khan, and those of you who missed the last lecture, raw milk outlaw and dairyman Mark McAfee, missed an engaging, and provocative afternoon. So don’t miss this next on...

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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
41 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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