Saturday Linkages: From Plastic Bottle Kayaks to Canine Staircases

...Stings. – http://www. backyardecosystem.com/backwards-beek eeping/happy-bees-equals-happy-beekeeper-how-treat-bee-stings/  … Whatever happened to common sense?  Not to be outdone by Canada, another city wants to ruin an urban garden. Please help! http:// chn.ge/RimMiZ   What do USDA inspectors do? Undercover video shutters another dairy cull slaughterhouse in Calif. | barfblog http:// barfblog.foodsafety.ksu.edu/blog/155879/12 /08/21/what-d...

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Backwoods Home Magazine

Imagine Martha Stewart as a gun-toting radical libertarian and you’ll have some idea what the always informative and entertaining Backwoods Home Magazine is like. Even though its primary emphasis is rural off-grid living, every issue has something to offer for the urban homesteader. The current January/February issue features a detailed article on how city dwellers can maximize their vegetable production in small spaces. Even the article on runn...

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Problems Part I

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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Car Free in the City of Cars

ore info: Joe Linton 213/220-1608 This talk is sponsored by L.A. Eco-Village in association with: CICLE, the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, and CRSP in support of the Los Angeles Bike Summit planned for the fallby the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College. And a special thanks to Joe Linton and everyone at the L.A. Eco-Village for inviting us to speak last night!...

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June: National Bathroom Reading Month

who drive somewhere to ride their bikes (note the cover) feature lots of god-awful candy-colored spandex outfits, $5,000 mountain bikes and nutritional supplements. Precisely the items you don’t want for getting around urban Los Angeles. This particular catalog featured something new, however, his and hers matching bikes from Schwinn called, we kid you not, “Sid and Nancy“. Sid and Nancy feature automatic shifting since either...

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Upcoming Classes: Edible Gardening and Vermicomposting

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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The Great Sunflower Project

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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