Search Results for: label/rocket stove/page/3/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

460 results

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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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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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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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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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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Mistakes we have made . . .

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings
13 Comments
reliably every year while growing in terrible alkaline soil with no added water or fertilizer. The problem with the prickly pear is that it is too prodigious, and that’s the kind of problem you can hope for as an urban homesteader. 3. Newspaper seed pots Those newspaper seed starting pots we linked to earlier this year . . . well, there seems to be a problem with them. I think the newspaper is wicking the water away from the soil. While in...

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Looking for a Hardware Store Interview Subject

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
Image from the new CLUI Morgan Cowles Archive Hey all, I’m working on an article for the May issue of Urban Farm magazine on the subject of businesses to patronize before they disappear. One of those businesses is your local independent hardware store. If you either own or work at a hardware store and have opinions, I’d like to interview you. Send me an email at [email protected] For the rest of you, if you...

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Garden Amendments as Placebos

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Soil, Thoughtstylings
9 Comments
I just finished writing an article for Urban Farm Magazine on the subject of aerated compost tea (ACT for short). It proved to be one of the most contentious subjects on which I’ve ever tried to, as Mark Twain liked to say, “corral the truth.” It got me thinking about other controversial soil additives popular in organic gardening and farming circles right now such as rock dust, mycorrhizae additives, and biochar. Now I pr...

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Clicker Training Chickens

Mrs. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
12 Comments
ere’s a video of a chick learning the basics. You can find others of this sort on Youtube: You might be able to find a chicken training seminar in your area, probably under the banner of dog training. With the rise of urban chicken-pets I think there is opportunity to be had in offering classes for would be chicken trainers. Googling around, I found this one in Lake Oswego, Oregon which is booked months in advance. Have you trained your c...

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