Urban Farming in Oakland

Public radio station KCRW has an excellent interview with urban farmer and writer Novella Carpenter. Carpenter has pigs, goats, ducks, chickens and more all on a small lot in Oakland, California. You can listen to the radio interview here (along with some other interesting segments on hunting caribou, cooking pasta, roasting peppers, and more) on chef Evan Kleiman’s show Good Food. You can also check out Carpenter’s blog, meaningfulp...

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Urban Livestock and Bikes!

India: chickens and bikes in a photo by Shabbir Siraj Urban Livestock Workshop Homegrown Evolution will be hosting an urban livestock workshop at our humble abode in Silver Lake on March 1st from 1-4pm. We’ll be talkin’ chicken, permaculturist Joan Stevens will be rapping about rabbits and Leonardo Chalupowicz will share his recent experience of becoming a “backwards” beekeeper. We’ll discuss how to integrate thes...

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Is Urban Homesteading Over With?

ot changed, specifically the uncertain future of fossil fuels. I’m not trading my trips to the feed store for a shopping spree at Hot Topic anytime soon. So I thought I’d plug a few search terms relating to urban homesteading into Google Trends to see what is going on. This is, of course, highly unscientific–Google Trends may just reflect media generated interest, not what people are actually doing. Here’s what I found:...

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Comrades

AfriGadget Alt Building Blog Another Roadside Attraction Autonomy Acres Avi Solomon Back to Basics Homestead Backwards Beekeepers Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds Blog Bikejuju BLD in MT Build It Solar Blog ClubOrlov Coco’s Variety Store Collected Quotidian CoMo Homestead Deaf Dogs and Gnomes Dinosaurs and Robots Dirt Time DIY From Scratch Dornob Dough on the Go! Dude Craft Elon Schoenholz Faultline Farm Five Gallon Ideas Food in Jars Garden R...

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It Quacks Like a Duck

The Happy Ducks of the Petaluma Urban Homestead It seems a new lifestyle is taking shape, in part born of the ashes of the World Trade Center, the aftermath of Katrina, and the endless resource wars our country feels the need to fight. There’s a great desire out there to “do something” and a refreshing DIY spirit of self-sufficiency is beginning to emerge. Two of the indicators of this new lifestyle seem to be the mixture o...

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The New Urban Forager

On a hot, humid day along Houston’s Buffalo Bayou, in the shadow of four abandoned concrete silos, a maggot infested corpse of a pit bull lies splayed across a sheet of black plastic. Nearby, a pile of asphalt roofing material blocks the path I’m taking down to one of the most polluted waterways in Texas. Not a promising beginning to an urban food foraging expedition.(Read the rest of our foraging essay via Reality Sandwich)...

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Urban Chickens and Lead

From the One More Thing To Worry About department, the New York Times has an article on lead levels in eggs laid by urban chickens “Worries About Lead for New York City’s Garden-Fresh Eggs.” According to the article, the lead levels found in New York City’s home grown eggs ranged from none to over a 100 parts per billion. Since the FDA does not have an acceptable lead level in eggs it’s difficult to interpret the results...

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Saturday Linkages: Off-Grid Living, Urban Velo, Meat Glue, Home Depot and Dandelions

Happy Cinco de Mayo! Amazing photos of people living off-the-grid in the United States: http://boingboing.net/2012/05/03/photos-of-people-living-off-th.html This week in TSA awfulness: a recap of recent American airport atrocities: http://boingboing.net/2012/05/02/this-week-in-tsa-awfulness-a.html New issue of Urban Velo: http://www.urbanvelo.org/issue31/index.html Meat Glue (not to be confused with pink slime): http://boingboing.net/2...

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Looking for Urban Farmers

From the photo archives of the Library of Congress: Oswego, New York. A citizen showing his wife vegetables from his victory garden as she starts on her way to church. Homegrown Evolution is writing a profile of urban farmers for a new magazine. We’ve got the West covered, but we are still looking for some folks to profile who: 1. Live in one of the five boroughs of New York City and grow edibles and/or keep livestock. 2. Live in Detroit....

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