Erik on HuffPost Live Tonight

...activities and sustainable living are back. Say Hello to Victory Gardens 2.0!” You can watch here. Guests include: Barbara Finnin Executive Director of City Slicker Farms Erik Knutzen Author of “The Urban Homestead” and Founder of Root Simple Rob Ludlow Owner of BackYardChickens.com The show will be archived and I’ll post a link when it appears on the HuffPost website....

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Edible Gardening Lecture at the Descanso Gardens

...ens. Here’s the description: Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, authors of “The Urban Homestead” and the blog rootsimple.com, discuss creating a garden that is not only beautiful but delicious! Part of “Get Dirty: A Garden Series by Descanso” on Third Tuesdays. Public admission to the Gardens and the lecture is free of charge the third Tuesday of the month. Hope to see some blog readers there–perhaps we can walk around the garden after the lecture. For...

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Essential System #10 – Shelter

...ures into our policy of having a back-up system for every necessity at our urban homestead. We like things lightweight for our grab and go bags, so we purchased a three pound backpacking tent, the two person MSR “Missing Link”. This tent is spacious for its low weight and uses either hiking polls or trees to stake it out. On the down side, we’re not sure how this thing would hold up in high winds and it requires a lot of room to stake out. The “Mi...

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3 Mules the Movie

...ed from my first encounter with the mule man on Sunset Boulevard. Sears is making a point about public space and our rights to travel and use the commons. It’s a stance that often puts him at odds with law enforcement, local governments and, perhaps, modernity itself. You can see some excerpts from McDonald’s film on YouTube and make a tax deductible contribution towards completing the project. You can follow Sears via his Facebook page 3 Mules. M...

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Tolkien and Trees

...abashed partisan of trees. A couple of quotes from him regarding trees are making the rounds on the internet, but I’ve learned to distrust popular quotations. They are often misattributed or downright made up. So I searched his edited letters for references to trees. There are many–he always mentions trees when he describes places, has funny things to say about artists who can’t draw trees, and has many trees of significance in his books, which he...

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