Goat Worship: A Halloween Exclusive!

Dance with me in the witches’ grove! Bwah ha…ha…er…. Well, okay, if you’re not so into that, I’ll take an apple instead. This Saturday our friends Gloria Putnam and Steve Rudicel at the Mariposa Creamery in Altadena gave a free, two-hour class on the basics of goat keeping. I was there with bells on. I’ve always wanted goats. It was a wonderful afternoon–about forty “goat curious...

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Bar Codes on Veggies

...n the QR code on the label. The code links to a mobile website detailing origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer content percentage (as opposed to chemical), use of pesticides and herbicides and even the name of the farm it was grown on. Consumers can also access the same information over the Ibaraki Agricultural Produce Net website by inputting a numbered code on each label.” Though we’re not Luddites, we have mixed feelings abo...

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Adventures in Gardening Series: Wrap up on the Hippie Heart: Growing lentils and flax

The Hippie Heart got a crew cut We’re clearing out our cool season crops for the warm season ones, so it’s time for some reporting on the new beds we’ve been profiling under the “Advances in Gardening” series. We’ll start with the Hippie Heart. The Hippie Heart is a heart-shaped bed where I was intending to experiment with planting seeds straight out of the pantry, ill-advised as that might seem,...

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There Will Be Kraut Part II–Full Day Hands-On Fermentation Workshop at the Greystone Mansion

...™ packed full of spices and flavorings to make your pickle unique. SPECIAL OFFER!  Purchase Together: Friday Evening Lecture + Full-Day Workshop for only $200 ! Erik Knutzen:  Co-author of The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World, co-founder of the Los Angeles Bead Bakers collective. Hae Jung Cho: After recovering from a career in nonprofit management, Hae Jung has been working in the food industry since...

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How to Make Amazake

...megrown Revolution compound earlier this week. You can find amazake in the isles of upscale health food stores thanks to the same generation of hippies who brought tofu to the flyover states back in the 1960s. Or you can make it yourself and save some dead presidents. Here’s how: 1. Get your Aspergillus orzae in the form of inoculated rice grains called koji. We found our koji in the refrigeration cabinet of our local Japanese supermarket....

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Three Mules in Los Angeles

UPDATE 01/21/13: We’ve been informed via the comments that a volunteer has set up a Facebook page for the Mule Man–and with his approval. It’s called 3 Mules. So if you Facebook you can go there for more info., or to post pictures or stories. There’s even video interviews. Of course, you are very welcome to continue post your sightings or thoughts here, too–especially those of you who don’t do Facebook. We&...

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Press

...m in the heart of Los Angeles. They are the keepers of the popular DIY blog, Root Simple, and the authors of The Urban Homestead (2008), which the New York Times calls “…the contemporary bible on the subject” and Making It (2011) a project book for post-consumer society. In addition to their writing and blogging, Kelly and Erik teach and speak on the topics of self-reliance, urban gardening and sustainability. Other Info: Contact us: roots...

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Free Preparedness E-Books

Camp loom, for making mats and mattresses from the 1911 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook Through a circuitous bit of aimless interweb searching I came across a huge list of downloadable urban homesteading/gardening/survivalist manuals on a site called hardcorepreppers.com. Unfortunately, this site is so popular that it seems to be down every time I’ve checked. But thanks to Google’s caching feature I was able to access a li...

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December Homegrown Evolution Events

Bread Making If you’re in the Southern California area, come on down to Good Magazine’s splashy digs for a bread making demo we’ll be doing on Monday December 15th at 12:30 p.m. We’ll be showing how to bake our favorite wild yeast bread (in our book and on our website here). Come at 11:30 a.m. and catch our organic gardening pals at Silver Lake Farms do a talk on winter vegetable crops. Stick around for puppets! Good Mag...

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Passport to Survival

...notable Thanksgiving with gluten drumsticks.” I have the 1969 edition of Passport to Survival that I picked up on Amazon. There’s a more recent edition written by two of her daughters, but I haven’t seen it. Should you be inspired to try your hand at wheat gluten cookin’, here’s some step by step instructions on making your own seitan from scratch on the Forkable blog. Update 1/15/2010: I was just thumbing throug...

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