Start Your Urban Homestead for One Dollar

...The Lyth Cottage in Buffalo, purchased for $1. Photo: Buffalo Rising. Want to move to Buffalo, New York? If so the city has an Urban Homestead Program where you can get a house for a $1 plus closing costs. The rules–you’ve got to: Fix code violations. Live in the house for at least three years. Have $5,000 in the bank for repairs. Too cold a climate for me, but you can read more about the program and see some success stories at Buffalo Rising....

Read…

A Review of Masanobu Fukuoka’s Sowing Seeds in the Desert

...t makes a lot of sense. Fukuoka says that these desertified areas lack the seeds needed to recover on their own. Sowing Seeds in the Desert is a book steeped in a passionate Buddhism. The real desert is in the human heart. It’s our hearts that Fukuoka is trying to heal and by so doing, bring about that second Genesis. When people try to grow crops using human knowledge, they will never be anything more than farmers. If they can look at things with...

Read…

Urban Chicken Enthusiasts Unite!

...hicken keepers. And we often meet people who would like to know more about urban poultry. So I’ve decided to create a group of L.A. urban chicken enthusiasts. I used meetup.com to create the L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts group. I like Meetup because the point is to organize face to face meetings. Our group will get together every month or so, eat eggs dishes and talk about raising chickens, local food and sustainability. The L.A. Urban Chicken En...

Read…

Seed, nut and fruit energy bars

...ts and seeds. Consider using chia, hemp, flax, poppy, sunflower and sesame seeds. There are also lots of wild seeds that you’ll know about if you forage, and foraged seeds are often dull, so this is a good use for them. 4) Walnuts are a great choice for a base ingredient in any energy bar. They just have a nice consistency, and I’d recommend they have a place in almost any batch. A simple bar that’s half dates and half walnuts is classic and delic...

Read…

Urban Farm Magazine

...elly Yrarrazaval of Orange County. All of these fine folks have repurposed urban and suburban spaces to grow impressive amounts of food, a common sense trend popular enough to have spawned this new magazine. Editor Karen Keb Acevedo says, “Urban Farm is here to shed a little light on the things we can all do to change our lifestyles, in ways we think are monumental as a whole, yet at the same time, barely noticeable on their own.” The first issue...

Read…