Urban Homestead Trademarks Cancelled!

After six years of legal wrangling, “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” belong to us all. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has cancelled the trademarks thanks to the hard work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the law firm of Winston & Strawn. Here’s the press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Urban Homesteaders Win Cancellation of Bogus Trademarks Global Community Had Faced Baseless Legal Claims and Content Remo...

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How to Roast Coffee in a Whirley Pop Popcorn Maker

...you can look at these directions on the Sweet Maria’s website. Whirley Pop Coffee Roasting Procedure Roasting coffee is pretty straightforward and is basically all about adjusting the heat on your burner so that you don’t either roast the beans too quickly or too slowly. It takes a few times to get the hang of it, and while installing a thermometer in your popper will definitely help, you can certainly do it without the thermometer–it will just ta...

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Coffee Grounds in the Garden

..., this peer-reviewed pamphlet also provides a set of suggestions for using coffee grounds in the garden: Coffee grounds should be composted before used as a soil amendment but can be used fresh as a mulch. Fresh grounds are phytotoxic, so keep them away from direct contact with roots. Coffee grounds will not necessarily make your soil more acidic. Don’t use coffee grounds where you are starting seeds. Despite rumors, coffee grounds do not repel pe...

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“Urban Homesteading” belongs to us all

...r Urban Homesteading, for winning the right for all of us to use the term “urban homesteading” freely from now on out. Longtime readers may remember that back in 2011, the Dervaes Institute sent notices to a dozen or so organizations, informing them that they could no longer use the terms “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” unless speaking about the work of the Dervaes Institute, as they had registered trademark on both terms. Beyond that,...

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Should I Put Coffee Grounds in a Worm Bin?

...was looking at worm bins where the feedstock was entirely made up of spent coffee grounds. Adding a few coffee grounds to a home bin made up of a diversity of feedstocks is probably not going to kill the worms. But, in a discussion thread on the Garden Professor’s Facebook group speculating about what percentage of coffee grounds would be safe to use, I found myself agreeing with Raymond Eckhart who says, In the absence of peer reviewed literature...

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