Maggots!

Like a lot of the agricultural duties around our urban homestead, composting requires time and initiative. Unfortunately both our garden and our energy level are at a low point, both sapped by the record breaking heat – anyone see Al Gore’s movie? The result of this lack of effort has been the maggot party currently going on in our compost pile. The best compostin’ revolutionary I ever met, photographer Becky Cohen maintained a three pile system...

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Fish Don’t Fart

...ve it closer consideration. Aquaponics is profiled in the pioneering urban homesteading book, The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City and Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew’s book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-Ourselves Guide which comes out of their work at Austin’s Rhizome Collective. What all of these efforts have in common is a permacultural design principle of turning a waste product into a resource and closing...

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How to Get Skunks Out of Your Basement and Yard

Basements and crawl spaces under houses make idea dens for urban critters. If we could charge rent for all the skunks, raccoons and feral cats that have taken up residence under the house we’d have paid off the mortgage by now. Our particular crawl space critter B&B was opened by virtue of a flimsy access door. Some animal, most likely a raccoon, pried it open. The problem with this situation is that you can’t just close up the door. Some poor cr...

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Saturday Linkages: Logs, Invasives and Italian Veggies

...http://www.uvm.edu/~uvmpr/?Page=news&storyID=17209#.Ut8epeX8ggE.twitter … Urban Nature: How to Foster Biodiversity in World’s Cities by Richard Conniff: Yale Environment 360 from @YaleE360 http://e360.yale.edu/feature/urban_nature_how_to_foster_biodiversity_in_worlds_cities/2725/#.Ut78MbYkqKk.twitter … Building With Logs – 1957 USDA Government Pamphlet http://feedly.com/e/SggnDsK7 Milky The Marvelous Milking Cow toy (1977) – Boing Boing http://bo...

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Saturday Linkages: Killer Bees, Bikes and Cold Coffee

...17 … Stop Trying to Make Killer Bees Happen http://shar.es/IqK8T Designing Urban Agriculture: http://www.cityfarmer.info/2013/10/27/designing-urban-agriculture-a-complete-guide-to-the-planning-design-construction-maintenance-and-management-of-edible-landscapes/ … Why the Brain Prefers to Read on Paper http://www.notechmagazine.com/2013/10/why-the-brain-prefers-to-read-on-paper.html … HOWTO make a bike-charged emergency battery: http://boingboing.n...

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