Picture Sundays: California Bike Map 1895

...Via Paleofuture: The 1895 map rated each road for its condition: Good (G), Fair (F), Poor (P), and Very Poor (VP), as well as rating its grade: Level (L), Rolling (R), Hilly (H), and Mountainous (M). Even a cursory glance at the map below shows that a good, flat road was rare — especially outside of California’s urban areas....

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Picture Sundays: Do You Believe In Magic?

...I really like this mural that just appeared in our neighborhood near the corner of Sunset and Coronado. Bunnies tumble out of a magic hat and there’s a silhouette of a coyote and crow (common urban wildlife here). The text, “do you beleav [sic] in magic” brought a smile to my face as I waited for the bus. My day had been re-enchanted by this symbolic bit of street art....

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Urban Homesteading: What Went Wrong

...es of future posts I’d like to look back at the ideas in our two books The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World. I’ll consider both the broader ideas in the books as well as what might have changed in terms of specific methods in subjects such as gardening and beekeeping. First let me peel back the curtain for those of you have have never written a book and describe how awkward and weird it can be to read your o...

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Urban Farm Magazine

...elly Yrarrazaval of Orange County. All of these fine folks have repurposed urban and suburban spaces to grow impressive amounts of food, a common sense trend popular enough to have spawned this new magazine. Editor Karen Keb Acevedo says, “Urban Farm is here to shed a little light on the things we can all do to change our lifestyles, in ways we think are monumental as a whole, yet at the same time, barely noticeable on their own.” The first issue...

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The Original L.A. Urban Homestead

...ring the environmentally friendly aspects of her home and garden. Julia is pictured here in front of her Gordon apple tree which bore over 500 lbs. of apples last year. (We counted, seriously.) The Los Angeles Eco-Home Network has been educating Angelenos about simple ways to conserve energy and other resources, grow their own food and live a happier, healthier lifestyle, since 1988. The house is a charming bungalow full of warm dark wood. It feat...

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