Search Results for: label/composting/page/8/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

459 results

Compost Outlaws

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Thoughtstylings
15 Comments
Yard Trimmings being used as “ADC” at the Bradley Landfill in Sun Valley Our neighborhood comrade Tara Kolla, who grows sweet peas for farmer’s markets in her urban backyard, has been busted for . . . composting! Specifically for composting fruit and vegetable scraps from a local restaurant. From last Friday’s Los Angeles Times: Tara Kolla said she was doing a good thing for her Silver Lake Farms business while doing the...

Continue reading…

Resources

These are our favorite web resources on various topics, and books which you’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 Berry’s ess...

Continue reading…

Summer Urban Homestead Failures: Exploding Beer Bottles

Mr. Homegrown
Beer, Fermentation, Food, Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
Somehow in last week’s roundup of the summer’s failures I blocked out of my memory the most exasperating: exploding beer bottles. I think I may have had a contaminated siphon hose which passed on some nasty, yeasty bacterial bug to every single bottle of two batches of beer I had made this summer. Three of those bottles over-carbonated to the point that they became beer grenades and exploded. One blew up on the kitchen counter and...

Continue reading…

Cat Litter Composting

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Cats, Composting
53 Comments
Pocket Nitrogen Generator  Mrs. Homegrown here: Apologies to you googlers looking for solid answers. This is what Erik calls a probe. I’ve decided to compost our kitten’s litter box waste, and this is how I plan to go about it. However, I’m sure I’ll learn a lot as I go, so this post isn’t instructional. I will post a report once the system gets going. The real reason I’m posting is because I’d...

Continue reading…

Our Books

o live inexpensively. It’s also a really pretty, well organized book–if we don’t say so ourselves. Here’s a preview what it looks like inside. Please forgive the black layout marks: The Urban Homestead (Expanded and Revised Edition): Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City (Process Self-reliance Series) by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen  “The contemporary bible on the subject” &...

Continue reading…

The Very First Urban Homesteading Book

Mr. Homegrown
Reviews
11 Comments
The urban homesteading shelf at your local bookstore, thanks to the great recession, sure has gotten crowded in recent years. There are many fine volumes now alongside our two books with a great diversity of authors opining on chicken coops, homemade soap and composting. This is a good thing–we need as many voices as possible. But there’s nothing new here. On a serendipitous trip to the library last week I stumbled across what must...

Continue reading…

Urban Permaculture Survey/Interview

Mr. Homegrown
Permaculture
RLeave a comment
Attention urban/suburban permaculturists. I’m writing an article for Urban Farm Magazine on “urban permaculture” and I need your help. I’ve created a survey/interview for the article: click here to take the Urban Farm permaculture article survey. Please forward this link/survey to all your permaculture friends–send it out far and wide–work that Facebook! If you’re critical of permaculture you are also w...

Continue reading…

Tips on Composting from Will Bakx of Sonoma Compost

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening
2 Comments
Sonoma Compost’s composting operation. On Thursday at the National Heirloom Exposition, Will Bakx, soil scientist and operations manager of Sonoma Compost, gave a rapid fire lecture on the nitty gritty details of composting. Here’s some of his useful tips: Temperature and Turning Compost should stay above 131ºF for 15 days to kill pathogens. Bakx recommended getting a thermometer to check the temperature every day during the...

Continue reading…

Disconnect to Reconnect: Ditching the “Flushie” for a Composting Toilet

Nancy Klehm
Composting, Gardening, Humanure, Preparedness, Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
piping can’t seem to handle even the most modest bodily donation. Once a flushing attempt proves unsuccessful, and immediately following the ‘oh no…’ guilty grimace, a light-hearted blame game plays out and then according to homestead rules, Erik snakes the toilet. The closet augur is kept on the front porch (to greet visitors?). Erik augers for a few minutes, flushes successfully, marches the tool back outside to air out and we settle back into...

Continue reading…

Composting at the NATO Protests in Chicago

Nancy Klehm
Composting, Gardening
6 Comments
Have you ever gone to a concert or a convention or some other large event and marveled at the staggering amounts of waste generated? I’ve been particularly wishing more of that waste was composted. And what do you know? Just as I was thinking about this, guest Root Simple blogger Nancy Klehm happened to send me a post on this very subject. If only every event had a compost tsar! Here’s Nancy: I am obsessed with urban soil health,...

Continue reading…