Urban Homesteading: What Went Wrong

...es of future posts I’d like to look back at the ideas in our two books The Urban Homestead and Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post-Consumer World. I’ll consider both the broader ideas in the books as well as what might have changed in terms of specific methods in subjects such as gardening and beekeeping. First let me peel back the curtain for those of you have have never written a book and describe how awkward and weird it can be to read your o...

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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...

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Searching for Energy Vampires

...ir way to becoming compost, but this also probably saves a small amount of energy. And it’s a smallish fridge. Joining the radical fridge-free partisans of the homesteading movement would knock the power bill way down but I’m just not in the mood to give up my cushy first world lifestyle. The modem/wi-fi router/desktop computer combo that keeps this blog humming consumes around $18.15 a year (with the computer off). I’d love to have a large, theat...

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DIY Solar Space Heating

...thern hemisphere it’s time to consider heating. The always useful Build-It Solar blog has a detailed link to a DIY solar space heating system in Virginia (pdf). Collector panels mounted on the roof heat a reservoir which is circulated through a floor-based radiant heating system. It even has an Arduino based data acquisition component that tracks performance. There should be a DIY Nobel Prize for this project! If you live in a place that’s both co...

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Build a Ghetto Solar Cooker

...chocolate pudding” which ended up with the consistency and taste of warm cake batter. We’ll test out some other recipes in the next few days, sun permitting, and keep you, our loyal readers, informed. For more information on solar cookers check out the superb Solar Cooking Archive. You can also purchase a commercially made solar oven called the Global Sun Oven, but why do that when you can make one with cardboard, aluminum foil, and a black pot?...

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