Straw Bale Garden Part V: Growing Vegetables

...seedlings. Others, like this cucumber, I sowed directly into the bales by making a little hole and putting in the seed with some home made seedling mix. Again, the vegetables in the bales are doing better than veggies in my two remaining raised beds. The reason, I believe, is that the beds are depleted and the compost I added to them was low quality. While more resource intensive than growing in the ground or raised bed, straw bale gardening has...

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On Living in Los Angeles Without a Car: A Debate

...ay with the issue at hand, which is whether or not we buy a new car. Erik: Making cities safe for walking and biking is exactly the kind of issue where individuals, working with city officials, can make a difference. In short, we need more moms to show up with their kids at meetings and demand safer streets. Kelly: Great. I’ll just live my Grey Gardens existence until the moms of LA mobilize and make this city into the Amsterdam of the West. Credi...

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2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

...inez campaign. Thankfully Hugo won in November and has already got to work making our streets safer and helping tenants and unhoused people. Tech I put up a 10 meter and 2 meter radio and did a little bit of amateur radio stuff. I’m not great at it but did manage to make digital contacts as far away as Indonesia with ancient Radio Shack equipment. I also figured out how to decode airline data transmissions but did not figure out why I would want t...

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Discover the Magic of Home Milling this Saturday

...environment. Where The King’s Roost in Silver Lake is LA’s first and only urban homesteading store and learning center. We believe it is the only brick and mortar store in the country that carries a full line of home grain mills. We provide classes and supplies not just for milling and baking, but also for chicken keeping, bee keeping, soap and candle making, brewing, fermenting, and aquaponics. For more information contact: Roe Sie at roe@kingsr...

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The Sound is Forced, the Notes are Few

...ally deadly disease that is killing people all over the world). As a urban homesteading/DIY blogger and author I’ve attempted a few of those how to “be” under quarantine hot takes and I’ve even spent part of my time making bad watercolors. I even wrote a post about that later effort (part of a longer post about learning old school architectural drawing) but never hit the publish button because it just didn’t feel right. A large part of that bad fe...

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