Book Review: A Feast of Weeds by Luigi Ballerini

...for an Italian to make. For some odd reason only the people of the New World eat the pads of prickly pear–in the Mediterranean and Middle-East, where the plant has been imported, only the fruit is consumed. I’m looking forward to cooking up some of the recipes, which were contributed by Ada De Santis, who runs a farm on the Salentine peninsula of southern Puglia. Thanks to A Feast of Weeds, there will be many future evenings, “gathering, cooking a...

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Crapper Livin’

...e, there is less convenience with a building like this. With a very simple solar water heating system showers need to be taken at the end of the day and the very modest solar panel would not be able to power any major appliances. But these are minor sacrifices compared to the enormous benefits of self-sufficiency, namely one’s freedom. An aside here – SurviveLA encourages a trip out to beautiful Santa Rosa Island to enjoy the natural wonders and t...

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Essential System #9 – Hydration

...takes care of 99.9% of the bad stuff and the Simparch folks have created a solar still as a part of the border art shindig InSite. Solar stills can also be improvised. One homestead project that is in the planning stages, pending our long wait for the corrupt Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety to approve our foundation repairs, is the construction of a rainwater storage system. We plan to feed one of our roof downspouts to several fifty...

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June: National Bathroom Reading Month

...level. Some things look useful, but there’s a lot of dubious stuff such as solar hat fans and electric scooters. And we suspect you can get many of the items in the catalog cheaper elsewhere, though we’re intrigued with the solar attic fans. Backwoods Home Magazine. We love Backwoods Home for its informative articles, unedited and rambling letters to the editor and for the outsider artist who does all the illustrations. Imagine Martha Stewart Livi...

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Prickly Pear Fruit Chips

...en drying either since there’s not enough air flow and you run the risk of cooking rather than dehydrating. A dehydrator, either electric or solar, is a great investment if you’ve got food to put up. When the prickly pear fruit has a leather-like consistency, enjoy. You swallow the hard seeds, making prickly pear fruit somewhat an acquired taste for some. Chumacero also mentioned that the young pads, “nopalitos” in Spanish, can also be dried for l...

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