Search Results for: label/build it/2011/04/making-it

403 results

Bar Codes on Veggies

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
6 Comments
...schemes biased towards the big guys (see Joel Salatin’s book Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal for more on how food safety regulations, like these, are often just a ruse to put small organic farmers out of business by making them adhere to rules to expensive to follow). This bar code scheme also raises privacy concerns. Will cell phone companies and supermarkets conspire together to gather marketing information on individuals? If I buy a...

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Adventures in Gardening Series: Wrap up on the Hippie Heart: Growing lentils and flax

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
10 Comments
The Hippie Heart got a crew cut We’re clearing out our cool season crops for the warm season ones, so it’s time for some reporting on the new beds we’ve been profiling under the “Advances in Gardening” series. We’ll start with the Hippie Heart. The Hippie Heart is a heart-shaped bed where I was intending to experiment with planting seeds straight out of the pantry, ill-advised as that might seem,...

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Press

...cre farm in the heart of Los Angeles. They are the keepers of the popular DIY blog, Root Simple, and the authors of The Urban Homestead (2008), which the New York Times calls “…the contemporary bible on the subject” and Making It (2011) a project book for post-consumer society. In addition to their writing and blogging, Kelly and Erik teach and speak on the topics of self-reliance, urban gardening and sustainability. Other Info: Contact us...

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Saturday Linkages: Keeping It Cool

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
2 Comments
Watering the roof. One of the low-tech home cooling tips on the Build It Solar Blog. Tiny Home in Italy made out of pallets http:// bit.ly/NGWlPS Build-It-Solar Blog: Cooling Without Power http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/07/coolin  … Build-It-Solar Blog: DIY Solar Water Heating for 7 Unit Apartment http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/07/diy-so  … Measure for Measure – Beth Schaleben’s Yardstick Table http:// bit.ly...

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Poultry Houses of the Ultra-Wealthy

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Design, Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
tics when I built our coop. I am much more happy with the chicken run our architect friend John Zapf designed for us. The east elevation of Odey’s coop. Of course Odey’s coop is a bit over the top, to put it mildly. The symbolic meaning of a hedge fund manager, who profited off the financial collapse, building an elaborate stone chicken house has ruffled a few feathers in Britain. But I have to admit that I share the same neo...

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CooKit Solar Panel Cooker

Mr. Homegrown
Solar
14 Comments
ifficult. The other improvement would be a stand to lift the pot off the aluminum foil for more efficiency and to keep the cooker un-scuffed. When panel cooker season returns to LA in the springtime, you can bet I’ll be making a lot of rice with this thing. Detailed instructions for how to build a CooKit can be found here. Also, Mrs. Homegrown and I are writing a new book and we’d like to include some plans for solar cookers (any kind...

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June: National Bathroom Reading Month

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
2 Comments
le we proudly drink our L.A. tap water, we use bottled water for our home brewing projects due to the chlorine. Here’s a link to how you can compare a water quality report like this one to what kind of water is good for making beer. Performance Bicycle Catalog. We get a lot of these catalogs since every few months we break a bike tail light and have to order a new one. They just don’t build bicycle accessories to last! These bike cat...

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Healing the yard with a huge compost pile

Mrs. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening
20 Comments
ct.) This excavation had two purposes: 1) to remove the topsoil, where most of the lead (lead being an airborne pollutant) is located and 2) to harvest the clay beneath to use in our earth oven. Between the clay harvested for making the adobe bricks and cob, and the supplemental clay that we’ve put aside for future repairs and maintenance on the oven, the pit has grown to be about 12 feet wide and 2 feet deep. This pit is going to be our ne...

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Free Preparedness E-Books

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness, Resources
10 Comments
Camp loom, for making mats and mattresses from the 1911 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook Through a circuitous bit of aimless interweb searching I came across a huge list of downloadable urban homesteading/gardening/survivalist manuals on a site called hardcorepreppers.com. Unfortunately, this site is so popular that it seems to be down every time I’ve checked. But thanks to Google’s caching feature I was able to access a li...

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A Taste of Honey – Story from the BBC

Eric Thomason
Animals, Bees, Reviews
8 Comments
Gentle readers, Mrs. Homegrown here. When we renamed our blog Root Simple we were making a commitment to build a better blog. We don’t have the change all mapped out yet–we’re letting it evolve organically (how else?) but one thing we’ve known for a long time, and that is that we wanted to partner with Eric Thomason and Julia Posey from Ramshackle Solid. We’ve long admired their aesthetics, the grace with which they...

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