Search Results for: label/build it/page/15/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

683 results

Waking up on New Year’s Day with the world of long crowing roosters

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
9 Comments
Now I’m not suggesting these guys for urban situations, but New Year’s Day seems an appropriate moment to survey the world of long crowing roosters. According to poultry expert Gail Damerow, writing in the current issue of Backyard Poultry Magazine, long crowers probably have their origins in Japan and have spread throughout the world through deliberate selection. Here’s a play list for your listening pleasure, consisting of a...

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Santa Monica Legalizes Beekeeping

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
8 Comments
Last night the Santa Monica city council voted to amend their municipal code to allow beekeeping on single family properties. Now, legalizing beekeeping is a bit like legalizing sunshine. Bees, after all, do their thing whether or not the government permits it or not. For every beekeeper in an urban area there must be hundreds of feral bee colonies living in walls, roofs and compost bins. Nevertheless, Santa Monica took a big step forward, join...

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Garden Amendments as Placebos

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Soil, Thoughtstylings
9 Comments
I just finished writing an article for Urban Farm Magazine on the subject of aerated compost tea (ACT for short). It proved to be one of the most contentious subjects on which I’ve ever tried to, as Mark Twain liked to say, “corral the truth.” It got me thinking about other controversial soil additives popular in organic gardening and farming circles right now such as rock dust, mycorrhizae additives, and biochar. Now I pr...

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Friday Afternoon Linkages–Some Fun, Some Scary

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
1 Comment
Life is like a seesaw with a rusty bolt–a good kid on one end and a bad kid on the other and no way to tell whose ass is gonna hit the ground hardest. On the fun side of life’s pesky algebra equation this week: Mark Frauenfelder is experimenting with a unique way of drying persimmons using a traditional Japanese method as pictured on the left. Meanwhile, in a busy month of blogging, the intrepid urban homesteaders over at Ramshackle...

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Looking for a Hardware Store Interview Subject

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
Image from the new CLUI Morgan Cowles Archive Hey all, I’m working on an article for the May issue of Urban Farm magazine on the subject of businesses to patronize before they disappear. One of those businesses is your local independent hardware store. If you either own or work at a hardware store and have opinions, I’d like to interview you. Send me an email at [email protected] For the rest of you, if you...

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Moringa!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Permaculture
1 Comment
Photo by Harvey McDaniel One of the big inspirations for starting our front yard urban farming efforts at the SurviveLA compound is a Philippino neighbor of ours who has turned his entire front yard and even the parkway into an edible garden featuring fruits and vegetables from his native land, most of which we have never seen before. This morning, while walking the dog, I found him cutting hundreds of long seed pods off of a small attractive...

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The Boy Scouts Suck

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
24 Comments
t the girls have got to whore themselves selling cookies. 2. Let’s teach our kids to make the world a better place without the Norman Rockwell fascist veneer. 3. Hipper uniforms. We suggest something like this. 4. An urban cycling merit badge. 5. All activities are outdoors. Lots of nature experiences. No computer merit badges and certainly no copyright merit badges. 6. Lastly, the SurviveLA Scout mission statement, borrowed from Edward...

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Mistakes we have made . . .

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings
13 Comments
reliably every year while growing in terrible alkaline soil with no added water or fertilizer. The problem with the prickly pear is that it is too prodigious, and that’s the kind of problem you can hope for as an urban homesteader. 3. Newspaper seed pots Those newspaper seed starting pots we linked to earlier this year . . . well, there seems to be a problem with them. I think the newspaper is wicking the water away from the soil. While in...

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Content Mills: Pimples on the Information Superhighway

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
8 Comments
Yes, there really is a “How to Get Rid of Pimples on the Buttocks” video on eHow. If only they had a how to get rid of eHow article. Google’s powerful search engine has become an essential component of the urban homesteading toolbox. From diagnosing tomato diseases to cooking Ethiopian injera Google has the answers. In recent years, unfortunately, low quality “content mills,” such as ezinearticles and suite...

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