Chatting over at the Stumbling Homestead
We had a nice chat about all things homesteady with Darcy over at the Stumbling Homestead. If you’d like to listen to the podcast, click here. Their backlog of episodes is well worth checking out, too....
Search Results for: label/build it/page/4/2010/06/the-urban-homestead
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Build a Ghetto Solar Cooker
Using crap we had laying around the homestead, SurviveLA fashioned a solar cooker based on plans from Backwoods Home Magazine, the Dwell of the Ted Kaczynski set. We just substituted an old cooler for the cardboard boxes, and we finished it off by using one of Los Angeles’ ubiquitous abandoned car tires as a cradle to keep the cooker oriented towards the sun. It ain’t pretty but it works. In our first test we reached 160º inside the...
How to Build an Igloo
TRANSA | Iglu Bauanleitung from Sooli Entertainment on Vimeo. Paul Overton over at Dude Craft (a great website, by the way) described this slick video as “Swiss hipsters build an igloo.” Sure looks like fun. Instructions are in German, but I think the process is pretty self explanatory. Makes me want to head up into the mountains and give this a try....
Hay Boxes or Fireless Cookers
Illustration from The Fireless Cook Book Mrs. Homegrown here: Jessica from Holland sent us a letter recently praising our work, but very, very gently scolding us not including the hay box, a groovy old energy saving technology, in our book. We do stand corrected! And her enthusiasm for hay boxes has reignited our interest, too. We actually considered hay boxes for Making It, but didn’t end up building one for a variety of reasons...
Build a Solar Dehydrator
Like many of you, I suspect, we’ve got a few too many tomatoes at this time of the year. One of our favorite ways to preserve our modest harvest is with our solar dehydrator. There’s nothing like the taste of sun dried tomatoes, but unless you live in a very dry desert climate like Phoenix, Arizona you can’t just set fruit out in the sun and expect it to do anything but go moldy. In most places in the world, including here in...
Build a Sawdust Toilet
SurviveLA would never have guessed that the composting toilet could provide such a great outlet for aesthetic innovation!. Thankfully you can build your own for less than $25 (pdf instructions)....
Comrades
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It Quacks Like a Duck
The Happy Ducks of the Petaluma Urban Homestead It seems a new lifestyle is taking shape, in part born of the ashes of the World Trade Center, the aftermath of Katrina, and the endless resource wars our country feels the need to fight. There’s a great desire out there to “do something” and a refreshing DIY spirit of self-sufficiency is beginning to emerge. Two of the indicators of this new lifestyle seem to be the mixture o...
Urban Homesteading Mistakes: Landscape Fabric
Since you all seem to enjoy accounts of our many failures around the Root Simple compound, I thought I’d share what must be one of the worst mistakes I’ve made. It’s a error up in our great chandelier of failures along with buying a 91 year old house on a hill with a bad foundation. Two words for you: landscape fabric–that plastic stuff sold in rolls at big box stores that allegedly blocks out weeds. Just after we bough...
Three Power Tools Every Urban Homesteader Should Own
On nearly all the work I’ve done on our house, everything from chicken coops to wood floors I’ve used just three power tools: corded drill circular saw sabre sawjig saw While I also own a router, a miter saw, a sander and a few other miscellaneous power tools, the three tools above I consider essential. Even if you don’t own a house, but would like to build some furniture or help a friend or relative with a repair project,...