Homegrown Revolution at the Alt-Car Expo

...erican Cyclists Road 1 class and Robert Hurst’s excellent book, The Art of Urban Cycling Lessons from the Street. Route choice, i.e. going out of the way if you have to to choose mellow streets, will also greatly reduce the hassle of dealing with impatient and distracted motorists. We’ll close our brief presentation with this image of a Ghanaian welder who created this tall bike. To ride it he first pushes it to get it going, climbs up high enough...

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Got Real Milk?

...ngeles, CA 90031 (323) 221-2255 www.sustainablehabitats.org When: March 3rd 2007 @ 10:00 AM for Introduction to Pemaculture Class and at 2:00 PM for “Got Real Milk?” Presentation. ************************************************************************ -Sustainable Los Angeles lecture series: * Part1: Free Urban Permaculture Design Course Introduction by David Kahn * Part2: Talk and Slide Show Presentation: “Got Real Milk?” by Mark McAfee Presiden...

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In Praise of Disorder

...club presents just the right level of civic inattention to allow the urban homesteader to get away with many of the illegal projects profiled in this blog: greywater, backyard poultry, and front yard vegetable gardening, to mention just a few. Ideally you have a balance between order and disorder–neither gunfire nor the prying eyes of city inspectors. Where I’m staying in Houston, with its flocks of loose chickens, packs of feral dogs, and broken...

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Loquat Season

...of these trees live in public spaces, the parkway and people’s front yards making them prime candidates for urban foraging i.e. free food. The tree itself has a vaguely tropical appearance with waxy leaves that look like the sort of plastic foliage that used to grace dentist office lobbies back in the 1960s. In short it’s a real tree that looks fake with fruit that nobody seems to care about. The loquat tree invites considerable derision from east...

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An Echo Park Weed Salad

There’s nothing like a little urban blight to produce an excellent salad. While not impoverished (not unless you consider dilapidated $600,000 bungalows a sign of destitution), our neighborhood ain’t exactly Beverly Hills, meaning that in terms of landscaping it’s a little rough around the edges. And the edges–parkways, cracks in the asphalt, neglected plantings were, on this warm February day, overflowing with weeds. Edible weeds. We explored th...

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