Search Results for: label/solar cooking/page/10/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

548 results

Is Urban Homesteading Over With?

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bread, Chickens, Food, Gardening, Thoughtstylings, Transportation
23 Comments
ot changed, specifically the uncertain future of fossil fuels. I’m not trading my trips to the feed store for a shopping spree at Hot Topic anytime soon. So I thought I’d plug a few search terms relating to urban homesteading into Google Trends to see what is going on. This is, of course, highly unscientific–Google Trends may just reflect media generated interest, not what people are actually doing. Here’s what I found:...

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Back to the Ranch

Mr. Homegrown
Events
7 Comments
Ranch photo from the Huntington’s Ranch blog. I’ve never had so much fun at a symposium as I did at the Huntington’s urban agriculture blow-out this weekend. The two day event launched the Huntington’s new experimental urban agricultural station known as the “Ranch” and featured a diverse bunch of speakers. The Ranch will provide much needed information on edible landscapes and food forestry, particul...

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Solar Water Disinfection (SODIS)

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
7 Comments
Via Afrigadget, a visual explanation of how to disinfect water with just a PET plastic bottle. The diagram, developed by Unicef, pretty much speaks for itself. Too much gunk in the water? Let it settle and filter through some cloth. At least six hours of sunlight will be enough UV to kill bad buggies. Using solar water disinfection, or “SODIS”, replaces the need to boil water, thus reducing deforestation to supply fire wood. Obviousl...

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Essential System #9 – Hydration

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
RLeave a comment
As we’ve noted before you can go about three days without water, but you’ll be feeling mighty crabby after just a few hours without it. We’ve got a number of water sources around the homestead, with a few more back-ups in the works. First off it pays to have some plastic water jugs around – figure two liters a day per person minimum. There are stricter standards for tap water in this banana republic we call the USA than f...

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Barley Water

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Recipes
27 Comments
Being an American, barley water is not part of my mental landscape. Perhaps it was big in the U.S. back in the Victorian era, but it seems to have faded from our national consciousness. Indeed, if you’re one of our American readers, you may be asking now: what the heck is it? My fellow Americans, barley water is a drink made from barley, lemon and sugar, known to be cooling and refreshing in the summer and perhaps somewhat healthy. Meanw...

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Saturday Linkages: Cat Houses, Office Gyms, Cooking in Compost and More . . .

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
1 Comment
A cat house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright Makin’ Gourmet meal cooked in compost: http://www.7dvt.com/2012earthiest-roast … The Fixer’s Manifesto http://manifesto.sugru.com  Short film about Safecast, the hackerspace-created, crowdsource radioactivity monitoring project http://boingboing.net/2012/11/21/short-film-about-safecast-the.html … Vintage Cat House Designed by the Office of Frank Lloyd Wright – http://www.moderncat.net...

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Saturday Linkages: Making Things and Herding Ducks

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
1 Comment
Herding ducks. Via The Tangled Nest. DIY Simple Swiss fences for the homestead: http:// dirttime.com/?p=2687 via Practical Parsimony Build-It-Solar Blog: Comparing the Performance of Two DIY Solar Water Heaters http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/07/compar ing-performance-of-two-diy-solar.html?spref=tw  … Build-It-Solar Blog: Using Your Lawn Sprinkling Water to Cool the House… http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/08/using- yo...

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Turnip Greens via The Silver Spoon

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Recipes, Vegetable Gardening
4 Comments
It took us way to long to discover that turnip greens are edible. They’re better than the turnips themselves, in our opinion. So how did we finally figure this out? The answer is by thumbing through a cookbook everybody interested in growing their own vegetables should own, The Silver Spoon*, which has a section devoted just to turnip green recipes. The Silver Spoon is a 1,263 page cookbook recently translated into English. It’s the...

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Book Review: An Everlasting Meal

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Reviews
6 Comments
An Everlasting Meal: Cooking with Economy and Grace, by Tamar Adler, is  a popular book. I had to wait in a queue of 40 people to get it from the library. So I suspect some (all?) of you have already read it. I know someone mentioned it in the comments lately. But I thought I’d mention it for others who, like me, are always the last to know what’s going on. The theme of the book is also on track with last week’s posts about ch...

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