Search Results for: label/peak oil/page/3/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

494 results

What Do Microbes Have To Do With Homesteading?

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees, Fermentation, Food, Gardening, Soil, Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
  So what are the activities that microbes make possible around the homestead? To name just four: Fermentation Beekeeping Soil Fertility Human beings Pretty important stuff. In fact, new systems thinking, applied to our natural word, is demonstrating that things like human beings are really just symbiotic sacks of microbial life. An article in the Economist, “Microbes maketh man” discusses just how important microbes are to human...

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Saturday Linkages: Can Gardens, BOLs and Attack Geese

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
3 Comments
...oard Bike Rack // http:// korduroy.tv/shows/surf-suf ficient/diy-surfboard-bike-rack  … 80ft Tube Made From VHS Tape http://www. dudecraft.com/2012/08/80ft-t ube-made-from-vhs-tape.html  … Prepping Developing Raw Land into a Homestead or BOL Over Time | The Survival Podcast http:// bit.ly/NoacJJ Beekeeping Bees in a Paris park: http://www. backwardsbeekeepers.com/2012/08/viewer -mail-bees-in-paris-park.html  … Yow! Apple granted patent for loc...

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Build a Ghetto Solar Cooker

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness, Solar, Water and Power
RLeave a comment
Using crap we had laying around the homestead, SurviveLA fashioned a solar cooker based on plans from Backwoods Home Magazine, the Dwell of the Ted Kaczynski set. We just substituted an old cooler for the cardboard boxes, and we finished it off by using one of Los Angeles’ ubiquitous abandoned car tires as a cradle to keep the cooker oriented towards the sun. It ain’t pretty but it works. In our first test we reached 160º inside the...

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Plastic or Wood?

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
plastic on the ocean drives home the point that we need to drastically cut back our consumption of plastics and only use them for essentials] Okay, these are the new rules. We are going to phase as many plastics out of the homestead as we can. We won’t toss what we have in the landfill right now, but when it is time to replace it, this is how it’s going down: Wood and metal utensils instead of plasticGlass storage containers instea...

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Steve Solomon’s Soil and Health e-Library

Mr. Homegrown
Resources
1 Comment
I’m really enjoying the incredible variety of obscure old books being scanned and put up on the interwebs. Of interest to readers of this blog will be the archive of free e-books maintained by gardening author Steve Solomon. His Soil and Health e-library contains books on “holistic agriculture, holistic health and self-sufficient homestead living” You can download the books for free, but Solomon requests a modest $13 donation....

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Chickens in the House!

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
15 Comments
Mrs. Homestead here: I’d planned to give you all a progress report on the backyard redesign, which features such wonders as the Germinator ™, the Trough of Garlic ™, the Fan of Pharmacy ™ and the Screens of Discretion (also tm). But the camera crapped out on me. So, until I figure it out (Which means until Erik gets home and I can shove the darn thing at him and say, “Fix your camera!”),  I’m offering u...

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That ain’t a bowl full of larvae, it’s crosne!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Self Watering Containers, Vegetable Gardening
22 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown, justifiably, gives me a hard time for growing strange things around the homestead. This week I just completed the world’s smallest harvest of a root vegetable popularly known as crosne (Stachys affinis). Crosne, also known as Chinese artichoke, chorogi, knotroot and artichoke betony is a member of the mint family that produces a tiny edible tuber. While looking like any other mint plant, the leaves have no smell. The tubers...

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