Search Results for: label/gardening/page/2/2010/06/the-urban-homestead/2011/04/making-it

727 results

Eat This City

Mr. Homegrown
Foraging
1 Comment
From the Sky Full of Bacon podcast, a video on Chicago urban foragers Art Jackson and Nance Klehm: Sky Full of Bacon 07: Eat This City from Michael Gebert on Vimeo. Be sure to check Nancy’s website Spontaneous Vegetation for information on her projects and upcoming foraging classes in the spring....

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Nitrogen Deposition

Mr. Homegrown
Vegetable Gardening
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Thanks to the millions of SUV driving knuckleheads out there we may not have to take a whizz in our compost pile after all. It turns out we have ample free nitrogen fertilizer in the form of air pollution which settles back down to the earth in a process science types call nitrogen deposition. According to Edith Allen, a professor of botany at UC Riverside, “Nitrogen deposition occurs at high levels in southern California, and is fertilizi...

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Is Peat Moss a Sustainable Resource?

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Seeds, Thoughtstylings
27 Comments
loss. When degraded peatlands are restored, the ability to hold water is improved but CO2 continues to be released by high levels of bacterial respiration, which represents the decomposition of mulch and other organic matter. It takes a number of years for the photosynthetic rate of new peatland plants to outpace the respiratory rate: until this happens, even restored peatlands represent a net loss of carbon to the atmosphere and thus contribute...

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Waking up on New Year’s Day with the world of long crowing roosters

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
9 Comments
tenko (red crower) and a Tomaru. Somewhat perversely, the long crowing trait makes for lower fertility in eggs and greater susceptibility to disease in chicks. As Humans have bred long crowing roosters for thousands of years, it’s a reminder that people have been placing fun and entertainment before utility for a long time. An anthropology professor I once had speculated that the musical bow came before the hunting bow. Other anthropologis...

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DIY Outdoor Shower

Mr. Homegrown
Water Conservation
4 Comments
y will you be saving water and burning less fossil fuels to heat that water, but your body odor will soon separate your real friends from superficial hangers-on. But we urban homesteaders don’t need to be stinky since it’s possible and easy to build an outdoor solar shower. There are two reasons this makes sense, particularly in a place with as warm a climate as LA. First of all, you can direct the water straight into the garden and...

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Backwoods Home Magazine

Mr. Homegrown
Resources
1 Comment
Imagine Martha Stewart as a gun-toting radical libertarian and you’ll have some idea what the always informative and entertaining Backwoods Home Magazine is like. Even though its primary emphasis is rural off-grid living, every issue has something to offer for the urban homesteader. The current January/February issue features a detailed article on how city dwellers can maximize their vegetable production in small spaces. Even the article on runn...

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Car Free in the City of Cars

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes
RLeave a comment
ecutive Director of Velo Mondial who does the stunning bike blog at http://velomondial.blogspot.com/ You will hear and see how other challenged cities have moved forward with bicycling infrastructure and the culture to match it. Bring your hardest questions on what is holding LA back from becoming one of the “best cycling cities in the world.” Other websites that Pascal is associated with include: www.velo.info and http://spic...

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The Great Sunflower Project

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
5 Comments
Help determine the health of urban bees with a citizen science experiment called the Great Sunflower Project. It’s simple and free. Just register at the Great Sunflower Project website and you’ll be sent a package of wild annual sunflower seeds ( Helianthus annuus). Twice a month you’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...

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Mulberries

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
8 Comments
er 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. It’s a fruit that doesn’t ship well, hence its absence in our crummy supermarkets....

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Photo Tour of the Root Simple Compound

Mr. Homegrown
Design
16 Comments
New, as yet unnamed, kitten enjoying homebrew. Photo by Emily Ho for re-nest. In case you’ve tired of the continuous coverage of Osama Bin Laden’s compound, how about a look at ours? Writer and photographer Emily Ho sure did a nice job putting together a photo tour of our crib over at re-nest in a post entitled “Kelly and Erik’s Urban Farm.” Funny, when I look at our house I see all the work I have left to...

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