Legalize Baking!

...petition in support of a California cottage good law put together by the Sustainable Economies Law Center. Please spread the word about this petition! From the text of the petition: As part of a growing movement to localize food systems and stimulate small-scale food production, we are proposing that the California State Legislature allow for the sale of certain home-made food products, namely: baked goods (but with no cream or meat filli...

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Poo Salon and Urban Forage Classes with Nancy Klehm

...cologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ecologies in response to a direct experience of a place. She grows and forages much of her own food in a densely urban area. She actively composts food, landscape and human waste. She only uses a flush toilet when no other option is available. She designed and managed a large scale, closed-loop vermicompost project...

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Growing Your Own Food is Like Printing Your Own Money: Ron Finley’s TED Talk

Please take a moment and watch gangster/guerrilla gardener Ron Finley’s inspiring Ted talk. I first heard about Ron after he got busted for planting a vegetable garden in what used to be a weed strewn parkway. He’s gone on to plant many more gardens around Los Angeles. The end of this talk really hit home for me, “Don’t call me if you want to sit around and have meetings. If you want to meet with me come to the gard...

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A Food Forest in Los Angeles

The great thing about this blog is that I get to meet people like Ron Finley, profiled in the video above. Ron got busted for this garden (the city of Los Angeles requires all parkway plantings to be mowed to 2 inches). Ron is now leading an effort to get the rules changed. We wish him luck and hope that his garden inspires many others around the world....

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Emergency water storage

We’re finally ready for The Big One. In terms of emergency preparedness, we were pretty well set in terms of food, light, fuel, etc., but we didn’t have much water. Just some jugs, a rain barrel that’s empty most of the year, and the water in our hot water tank. This lack made me nervous, so we finally did took the bull by the horns–or the bung hole…  How much water should you store?  1 gallon of water p...

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Bulk Bin Microgreens

Sunflower seed germination test An admission: both Mrs. Homegrown and I are sprout haters. We love the people who sprout, but not the sprouts. Perhaps it’s just the association with 1970s era health food restaurants or macramé. Sprout lovers out there are welcome to try to convince us otherwise, but I’ll warn you that numerous good-hearted attempts have already failed. But we’re both open to the microgreen idea. Microgreens ar...

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Saturday Linkages: The Archdruid, Cat Climbing Shelves, Rewilding, Tempeh Food Safety and More!

John Michael Greer The Archdruid Report: The Rumbling of Distant Thunder http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2012/05/rumbling-of-distant-thunder.html?spref=tw Simple and Elegant DIY Cat Climbing Shelves – http://www.moderncat.net/2012/05/31/simple-and-elegant-diy-cat-climbing-shelves/ Build-It-Solar Blog: How Large a Solar Collector Do You Need to Heat Your Hot Tub http://www.builditsolarblog.com/2012/05/how-large-solar-collec...

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Bean Fest, Episode 2: Falafel and Babaganoush Recipes

...onions & etc. at the bottom of the pan before adding the beans. I don’t know if any of these methods are better than the others, and admit to doing all three. This Week’s Recipe: Falafel The first lesson in food photography is not to consume your subject before you even get around to taking the picture. These few falafels were all we had left when we realized we needed to take a pic for this post. I was thinking that a lot of...

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Bisphenol-A

Above, the bisphenol-A or BPA molecule, a type of plastic found in all kinds of products including baby bottles, plastic food containers, Nalgene bottles, some wines (from the plastic stoppers and the lining of fermentation tanks) and the lining in metal cans. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration says it’s safe, a viewpoint contradicted by at least 100 studies. The problem: BPA is a endocrine disruptor linked to a host of problems, acco...

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