Search Results for: label/rooftop gardening/page/3/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

743 results

Supper for a buck?

Mrs. Homegrown
Bean Fest, Food
16 Comments
Recently someone asked me how much it cost us to make a loaf of no-knead bread. I had no idea, but was intrigued by the question, so I went home and did the math on the flour. We buy our flour in bulk from fine company called Central Milling through the Los Angeles Bread Baker’s Club. A 50lb bag of general purpose flour costs $30.00. This works out less per pound than the cheap-0 flour at the supermarket. We actually go through so much fl...

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I like my chamomile stressed

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Herbs, Mistakes
22 Comments
This poor, abused little seedling is flowering like crazy. Mrs. Homegrown here: I made a mistake–I predicted a while ago that this would happen, and here it is. When we remodeled the yard and I set aside space for The Phan of Pharmacy ™ my goal was to maximize the production of herbs and flowers.  I prepped the ground in the fan like a fine flower or veg bed: double dug and richly amended. It was only aft...

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Mud for the People! Building an Adobe Garden Wall

Mr. Homegrown
Design
6 Comments
ive courses for a structure is good for a day. Let it dry and it will be ready to continue the next day. At the end of the workshop we went into a little “homesteader’s” cabin on the property. The deal with homesteader cabins is that back in the 1950s that the government would give you a five acre parcel if you built a shack with the minimum dimensions of 12 by 16 feet. So people built tiny shacks to just those dimensions! Kur...

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Seltzer Works Doc Screens on PBS

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
5 Comments
Photo by Film First Co/ Ben Wolf Seltzer Works, a seven minute mini-documentary about one of the last seltzer fillers, Kenny Gomberg of Brooklyn, will screen Tuesday August 24th at 10 p.m. (check local listings) on PBS’s Point of View series. Filmmaker Jessica Edwards, directed this engaging short. Photo by Film First Co/ Ben Wolf The thick glass bottles Gomberg uses allow him to carbonate at much greater pressure than ei...

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LED Light Bulbs

Mr. Homegrown
Domesticus
2 Comments
The geeks over at BoingBoing have jumped on the LED light bandwagon with a post about the C. Crane Company’s CC Vivid and CC Vivid+ LED light bulbs. While it’s great that folks are beginning to think about conservation, it’s disappointing that this interest seems to be about chasing the latest new techno-gadget. As concerns about impending climate and ecological disaster increase, it’s prudent to greet all new technical s...

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Boycott Hollywood!

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
31 Comments
Photo by Carlos Morales from LA Streetsblog In a story that made international headlines last month the film industry voiced its disfavor with a bright green bike lane the City of Los Angeles painted downtown. Hollywood’s complaint? An editorial in the LA Times claims that “the green lane spoiled the shots that made Spring [Street] the perfect stand-in for Anytown, USA.” To add insult to injury, film production vehicl...

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California Homemade Food Act Signed Into Law!

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
17 Comments
Soon to be legal to sell. A bit late to report this, but AB 1616, the California Homemade Food Act was signed into law by Governor Brown last week. The bill will allow Californians to produce “non-hazardous foods,” such as such as jams, jellies, bread and honey, in a home kitchen and sell them. The bill takes effect in January. There is still, however, a lot of work to be done to figure out exactly how local health departme...

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Return of Recipe Friday! Spicy Korean Tofu

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
7 Comments
Ummm…Our food stylist is on vacation! This was lunch today. It would look much better if the tofu sheets were reclining whole on snowy rice and artfully sprinkled with green. We’ve been eating a lot of this lately. It’s Erik’s favorite meal these days, in fact. I make it for him whenever he’s grumpy and he perks right up. I like it too, and I especially like that it’s fast cooking and I usually have a...

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The Sound of One Hand Snapping

Mr. Homegrown
Tools
1 Comment
We’ve had to do a fair amount of carpentry around the compound – part of that self-sufficiency thing – and countersinking nails with a nail set, those pen like things you use to get the nail head below the surface of the wood, is a pain in the ass. Which is why we think that this tool, the “Noxon Two Bit Snapper” by the mysterious Spring Tools Corporation may be the handiest tool in the SurviveLA compound tool box....

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Phoebe Update and a Question: Is Pet Insurance Worthwhile?

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Cats
30 Comments
...njoy every day we have with her, but that we should not expect her to live for more than nine months from now. She is on a few inexpensive medications to make her days comfortable. She’s slowed down a bit and is showing the first signs of heart failure (an occasional cough), but otherwise acts like a normal cat, playing with Trout and enjoying long afternoon naps. She is a daily reminder that we should not take life for granted, that we hav...

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