How to clean a stained coffee cup

This is what it looked like fresh out the dishwasher. Ugh! The sink post reminded me about this quick and easy tip. If you̵7;ve got a stained coffee mug, baking soda will take that gunk right off.  Just sprinkle some baking soda in the mug, then wipe down the inside with a damp rag or sponge. The stain will give in on the first pass. As I described in the sink post, the trick here is to keep the mug on the dry side, because baking...

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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. There̵7;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...

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Resources

These are our favorite web resources on various topics, and books which you̵7;ll find on our bookshelves: General Home Ec/Appropriate Tech/DIY Living Mother Earth News How to Homestead Backwoods Home Magazine  AfriGadget  The Urban Homestead Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World Radical Homemakers The Integral Urban House Made by Hand Farm City The Natural Kitchen Country Wisdom and Know-How Wendell Berry̵7;s ess...

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Looking for Urban Farmers

From the photo archives of the Library of Congress: Oswego, New York. A citizen showing his wife vegetables from his victory garden as she starts on her way to church. Homegrown Evolution is writing a profile of urban farmers for a new magazine. We̵7;ve got the West covered, but we are still looking for some folks to profile who: 1. Live in one of the five boroughs of New York City and grow edibles and/or keep livestock. 2. Live in Detroit....

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The Brooklyn Bee

“if bees were to disappear, man would only have a few years to live” -Albert Einstein Homegrown Revolution spoke to urban beekeeper John Howe today who keeps a couple of hives high atop the roof of his home in Brooklyn New York. He got the idea to take up urban beekeeping when one day a bee landed on his plate while he was eating at an outdoor restaurant and now his hives produce around 150 pounds of honey a year which he sells a...

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Michael Tortorello on Urban Homesteading

Michael Tortorello, who wrote that nice piece about us a few months ago, “Living Large, Off the Land,” is one of my favorite writers on gardening and “urban homesteady” topics. He̵7;s critical without being curmudgeonly and manages to separate the truth from the hype (and there̵7;s an awful lot of hype in this movement!). Plus he managed to get an entire paragraph about my thyrsus into the New York Times. Thyrsus...

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The New Urban Forager

On a hot, humid day along Houston̵7;s Buffalo Bayou, in the shadow of four abandoned concrete silos, a maggot infested corpse of a pit bull lies splayed across a sheet of black plastic. Nearby, a pile of asphalt roofing material blocks the path I̵7;m taking down to one of the most polluted waterways in Texas. Not a promising beginning to an urban food foraging expedition.(Read the rest of our foraging essay via Reality Sandwich)...

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Author and Urban Farmer Novella Carpenter Rocks Los Angeles

Yesterday, Homegrown Evolution had the great privilege of meeting urban farmer and author Novella Carpenter who was in Los Angeles to deliver a lecture and sign her new book Farm City. She̵7;s a phenomenal speaker, both hilarious and inspiring. What we like most about Carpenter is her honesty in describing the ups and downs of raising pigs, goats, chickens, turkeys, rabbits and more on squatted land next to her apartment in Oakland. As she p...

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