Search Results for: label/picture sundays/page/15/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

549 results

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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The Boy Scouts Suck

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
24 Comments
t the girls have got to whore themselves selling cookies. 2. Let’s teach our kids to make the world a better place without the Norman Rockwell fascist veneer. 3. Hipper uniforms. We suggest something like this. 4. An urban cycling merit badge. 5. All activities are outdoors. Lots of nature experiences. No computer merit badges and certainly no copyright merit badges. 6. Lastly, the SurviveLA Scout mission statement, borrowed from Edward...

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Shamelessly Tooting Our Own Horn

Mr. Homegrown
Fitness
1 Comment
Unfortunately for the sedentary out there this new urban homesteading lifestyle involves a fair amount of physical fitness. We’ve found that the best way to keep up with SurviveLA’s strenuous fitness requirements is to have a goal such as a race, or a particularly difficult hike. This is why we’ve been obsessed over the years with the Ketchum Downtown YMCA’s oddball Stair Climb to the Top which involves a heart-pounding a...

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Essential System #3 – Sew Your Own Damn Clothes

Mr. Homegrown
Domesticus
RLeave a comment
you have second-hand slave laborer blood and sewing your own clothes. The big problem with the latter solution is that sewing is a bitch — it’s time consuming and at times incredibly frustrating. Nevertheless this homesteading revolution we propose won’t be a cake walk, and will be as much about rediscovering old techniques as it will be about new technologies. Fellow crackpot Daniel Pinchbeck in his funky new book The Return of...

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Problems Part I

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
16 Comments
The road to urban homesteading ain’t smooth and involves more than a few potholes along the way. Some of those potholes will swallow a bike tire while others are big enough for a Hummer. But with persistence it becomes easier to deal with the occasional bump, lessons can be learned and future mistakes avoided. With the popularity of our earlier blunders post, I’d like to begin regularly sharing problems as they develop. Here’s...

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The High Cost of Golf

Mr. Homegrown
Lawns, Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
le to trace Tiger Woods wannabe. We circled back to the club house to file a report with the manager of the course and begin the long tedious process of settling the insurance claims. So what does this have to do with urban homesteading? A lot. It’s time for another anti-golf rant. Here are my problems with golf (especially municipal golf courses): 1. The colossal mis-allocation of land. Wouldn’t a lot more people benefit from a lar...

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Salsa Dancing in a World Without Oil

Mr. Homegrown
Events
1 Comment
see which thrive and which perish, à la Survivor. LOVE APPLES is a collaboration between the art collective Fallen Fruit (www.fallenfruit.org) and Islands of LA (www.islandsofla.org). The artists of Fallen Fruit investigate urban space, ideas of neighborhood and new forms of located citizenship and community all through the lens of fruit. Islands of LA is an art project that is turning traffic islands into territories of art to create communit...

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Vermicomposting Class

Mrs. Homegrown
Composting, Events, Vermiculture
4 Comments
vermicomposting with a dry toilet or pet waste composting system* How to best use your castings in the garden* Tips for the apartment dweller* What to do with all those extra worms… And more! Nancy Klehm is a long-time urban forager and grower, ecological system designer, artist and intrepid soil builder. She spent over five years designing and running a closed-loop vermicomposting project in Chicago that used 100’s of thousands of worm...

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Far Side of the Stairs

Mr. Homegrown
Fitness
2 Comments
ncy-room”. But the brave folks at SoapboxLA were clearly up to the challenge and took first place in the categories of non-crocodile wrestling Australian and fiery high-horse Hungarian. But seriously, part of this urban homesteading thing is about whipping our communities into shape and LA needs a serious thrashing, and I don’t mean the sort delivered by the ladies in the back of the LA Weekly. We need to make LA a walkable, bike-able...

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