Problems Part I

The road to urban homesteading ain̵7;t smooth and involves more than a few potholes along the way. Some of those potholes will swallow a bike tire while others are big enough for a Hummer. But with persistence it becomes easier to deal with the occasional bump, lessons can be learned and future mistakes avoided. With the popularity of our earlier blunders post, I̵7;d like to begin regularly sharing problems as they develop. Here̵7;s...

Continue reading…

June: National Bathroom Reading Month

who drive somewhere to ride their bikes (note the cover) feature lots of god-awful candy-colored spandex outfits, $5,000 mountain bikes and nutritional supplements. Precisely the items you don̵7;t want for getting around urban Los Angeles. This particular catalog featured something new, however, his and hers matching bikes from Schwinn called, we kid you not, “Sid and Nancy“. Sid and Nancy feature automatic shifting since either...

Continue reading…

Upcoming Classes: Edible Gardening and Vermicomposting

vermicomposting with a dry toilet or pet waste composting system* How to best use your castings in the garden* Tips for the apartment dweller* What to do with all those extra worms… And more! Nancy  Klehm is a long-time urban forager and grower, ecological system  designer, artist and intrepid soil builder. She spent over five years  designing and running a closed-loop vermicomposting project in Chicago  that used 100’s of thousands of worm...

Continue reading…

Car Free in the City of Cars

ore info: Joe Linton 213/220-1608 This talk is sponsored by L.A. Eco-Village in association with: CICLE, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, and CRSP in support of the Los Angeles Bike Summit planned for the fallby the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. And a special thanks to Joe Linton and everyone at the L.A. Eco-Village for inviting us to speak last night!...

Continue reading…

The Great Sunflower Project

Help determine the health of urban bees with a citizen science experiment called the Great Sunflower Project. It̵7;s simple and free. Just register at the Great Sunflower Project website and you̵7;ll be sent a package of wild annual sunflower seeds ( Helianthus annuus). Twice a month you̵7;ll get an email to remind you to time how long it takes for five bees to visit your sunflowers. Sounds like it has drinking game potential, though...

Continue reading…

A Review of Williams-Sonoma’s Agrarian Line

Last week upscale retalier Williams-Sonoma announced an urban homesteady line of goods they call “Agrarian”. A number of Root Simple readers responded to the news after I linked to a Wall Street Journal article about the Agrarian line. One reader likened the “Agrarian” items to Marie Antoinette̵7;s 18th century cosplay mini-farm. Another hoped that mainstream acceptance of things like chicken coops and beehives might...

Continue reading…

Mulberries

nd and become convinced you̵7;re going to croak. We wonder if this is a myth, like the story about boy scouts roasting hot dogs on Oleander sticks (yes, Oleander is very poisonous, but apparently the boy scout story is an urban legend). We found the Mulberries sweet and delicious. It̵7;s a fruit that doesn̵7;t ship well, hence its absence in our crummy supermarkets....

Continue reading…

Saturday Linkages: The Calm After the Storm

getable_garden?id=YHQNAQAAMAAJ  …  Bikes ‘Getting Jerry Browned̵7; and other new phrases for Californians http://www. latimes.com/news/opinion/o pinion-la/la-ol-getting-jerry-browned-20121024,0,2854852.story  … New Urban Velo issue free online: http://www. urbanvelo.org/issue34/  The fox is guarding the hen house ! How the sugar industry defends itself against claims that sugar is unhealthy: http:// boingboing.net/2012/10/31/how -the-...

Continue reading…

Content Mills: Pimples on the Information Superhighway

Yes, there really is a “How to Get Rid of Pimples on the Buttocks” video on eHow. If only they had a how to get rid of eHow article. Google̵7;s powerful search engine has become an essential component of the urban homesteading toolbox. From diagnosing tomato diseases to cooking Ethiopian injera Google has the answers. In recent years, unfortunately, low quality “content mills,” such as ezinearticles and suite...

Continue reading…