Free Permaculture Class

...e are living on a planet in crisis; often individuals feel powerless to effect change but Permaculture offers positive solutions to the problems facing the world; using ecology as the basis for designing integrated systems of food production, housing, technology and community development, you can learn to create a self-sustaining environment, on a farm or in your urban backyard or apartment. The Permaculture Design Course is for anyone interested...

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How to start a chicken retirement community

...ng that way. What happened is sort of surprising, looking back. I’ve not eaten chicken since high school (or other meat, except rarely, fish). My objections have never centered around the morality of killing animals for food, but rather a long-standing objection to how the animals were treated within the industrial farming system. I wanted the chickens so I could have constant access to guilt-free eggs. Erik was a meat eater up until we got...

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Boulder man faces $2000 fine/day for guerilla garden fencing

Via BoingBoing (complete with video): “[L]ast month, an enforcement officer from Boulder’s Environmental and Zoning Enforcement office showed up and said a neighbor had complained about the garden. “She said to take it all down — the tomato cages, the trellises, the posts, the basketball hoop, everything,” Hoffenberg said. … Hoffenberg has until July 14 to take down the trellises and fencing. At that point, Arthur said, he could be c...

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Moringa!

...miracle plant as a way to deal with malnutrition, since its ability to tolerate drought while still producing edible leaves makes it highly desirable. We like plants like this that have multiple purposes, since in addition to food and medicine the attractive Moringa tree also provides shade. The goal that we have set for the new SurviveLA landscaping is that every plant must have multiple uses with priority given to stuff that is edible. We suspe...

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Block Party Weekend

“Los Angeles is an army camped far from its sources of supply, using distant resources faster than nature renews them . . . Our region today is so dependent, so uninhabitable, yet so inhabited, that it must transform or die. Sooner or later it must generate its own food, fuel, water, wood and ores. It must use these at the rate that nature provides them. It can . . .”-Paul Glover Los Angeles: A History of the Future as quoted in...

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Bucket Flushing

SurviveLA is researching greywater systems and today we’ve got our first tip on recycling your water. First a definition. Greywater is the waste water that comes out of your shower, sinks, and washing machine. Blackwater is the icky stuff that comes out of your toilet and because of the risk of contamination it should not be reused. For now we’ll lump the kitchen sink in with the toilet since food scraps, particularly for meat eaters...

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Bugs Ate My Garden

A letter from one of our readers: “I just read the article on growing your own food. I have tried this but have had great difficulty with insect damage. I have tried some of the “natural” insecticides but they don’t seem to work very well. Two of the major problems I have are cutworms that snip off seedlings before they can get started, and a plague of small white snails which invade later in summer and devastate everyt...

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City of Memphis Cites Front Yard Vegetable Garden

...another city bureaucracy has decided to crack down on a front yard vegetable garden. What makes this particularly annoying is that the homeowner is a teacher who is using the front yard garden to show his students how to grow food. The folks at Kitchen Gardeners put together the following ways you can help: 1. Write to Judge Larry Potter at [email protected] in support of Adam Guerrero’s garden. Please be respectful. You are...

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The glass is half full–even if it’s full of greywater

..., mostly turnip and beet greens, bitter Italian greens and Swiss chard. The hoops you see support light row cover material to keep insects away. Our beds look like covered wagons a lot of the time! We’ve had some nice food this year, too, some of which was documented. Good to look back on. A salad made with our greens, our pomegranates, and Erik’s notorious pickled crosne: Or this salad of greens, avocados, nasturtium and arugula...

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