Essential System #9 – Hydration

August 21, 2006

...tructions for purifying water with iodine or chlorine can be found on this page. Filters, however, do not kill viruses which include hepatitis A., Norwalk virus, and rotavirus and are present when water becomes contaminated by the feces of affected individuals. In other words, bad dookie in the water. To kill viruses you need to use either iodine, bleach or expensive filters which also use iodine or electrostatic charges. Boiling water for at leas...

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Breaking News

Mr. Homegrown

December 1, 2007

Animals, Chickens

6 Comments

...foreground of the picture above–laid her first egg–that is, our very first homestead egg. Go Stewpot! Of course this event would happen when Mr. Homestead is out of town & in possession of the camera. The lay site was a difficult to access cranny behind the coop. It may not have been photograph-able anyway, but I will report that the egg was deposited quite attractively in a shallow bowl of yellow and brown leaves. I got it while it was still warm...

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Rain Barrels

Mr. Homegrown

January 9, 2007

rainwater harvesting

1 Comment

...want to discourage anyone from making an attempt at it, but for most urban homesteaders it won’t be economical or practical given the space requirements and weight of thousands of gallons of stored water. Thankfully, there are simpler strategies for harvesting rainwater. Rainwater used for irrigating plants does not need filtering or purification, and since outdoor watering accounts for the number one household water use, you’ll be using that wate...

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Spam Poetry Sunday

Mrs. Homegrown

June 26, 2016

Picture Sundays

4 Comments

In lieu of our usual picture Sunday, we offer instead a beautiful word picture from our friends the spammers. Our software blocks thousands of these every day, but some get through and we have to hand prune our comment sections: We wish to thannk you yett agai ffor the gorgeous ideas you offered Janet when preparing her own post-graduate research and, most importantly, pertaining to providing masny of the ideas in a blog post. If we had been awar...

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How to Make a Hexagonal Raised Bed

Mr. Homegrown

April 30, 2018

Design, Gardening

4 Comments

...s of marauding mammals that nightly assault our backyard even in this very urban part of Los Angeles. You can see in the first picture that I ended up creating a sort of bamboo teepee to provide support for beans and tomatoes and on which to attach bird netting (which the marauding mammals easily breeched). I’ve posted about the pros and cons of raised beds in the past. Unless you have a compelling reason to build raised beds I think it’s always b...

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