Search Results for: label/solar energy

149 results

Pimp My Cold Frame

Mr. Homegrown
Design, Gardening, Seeds
19 Comments
While the climate here in Los Angeles is exceedingly mild–it rarely gets much below freezing–springtime can, some years, be too cold to get good germination of summer vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers. This was the case in 2010 when I was not able to get a single tomato seed to germinate until late May. To head off another seedling crisis I built a simple cold frame. In order to prevent the cold frame from becoming a solar...

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Sweatin’ Pipe

Mr. Homegrown
Tools
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Working with copper pipe is a skill that everyone should know, in fact SurviveLA thinks it should be taught to elementary school children. Home owners, renters and kids all should know how to put pipe together with a blow torch since you never know when a pipe is going to burst, not to mention being able to construct some of the solar water heating projects we touched on last week. The tools needed for this job are cheap, and thanks to youtube,...

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Emergency water storage

Mrs. Homegrown
Preparedness, Water and Power
24 Comments
...fter treatment. If you don’t, it’s not clean. Repeat the process. If you’re using iodine, use 10 drops per quart instead of 5. ETA: Forgot! Another way to disinfect water in an emergency situation is through solar water disinfection, or SODIS. Basically you fill up a clear plastic (PET) liter bottle–it has to be clear, and it can’t be bigger than a liter–and put it in intense sun for 6 hours. Filter the water f...

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The Tiny House

Mr. Homegrown
Design
RLeave a comment
...d a vacant lot, such a small house could be the ideal start of your urban homestead, leaving plenty of yard space for growing your own food. And these small building literally sip utilities making them ideal for hooking up to solar power and very cheap to heat and cool. They are also expandable as your needs or family grows. And perhaps most importantly, they prevent expansion of all the things we don’t need, the giant plasma screens, the i...

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Doomsday Preppers: Exploitative, Uninteresting, Unreal “Reality”

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness, Thoughtstylings
25 Comments
...ilizing, electronic wallpaper? I bring up Doomsday Preppers because many of its subjects are engaged in precisely the types of activities we write about on this blog and in our books: growing food, keeping livestock, building solar ovens, preserving food etc. And I finally got a chance to see the first episode and a few segments from later shows. Of the three “compounds” profiled in the first episode, the most interesting was the fami...

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Our Keyhole Vegetable Bed: What Worked and What Didn’t Work

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
9 Comments
This is what our keyhole bed looked like yesterday just before I fed the remaining vegetables to our chickens and the compost pile. Ignore the large pot–that’s a future solar powered fountain that will be incorporated in a new vegetable garden we’re working on. Here’s what the keyhole bed looked like just after I installed it back in October. Note the compost repository in the center of the bed. I used straw wattle (ava...

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Block Party Weekend

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
RLeave a comment
...led “intentional community” of folks who, basically, give a damn and are interested in improving our forlorn, polluted, and abused city. The block party featured ecologically savvy and self-reliant touches such as solar ovens to cook the vegetarian buffet and photovoltaic panels to power the amplifiers of the bands entertaining the crowds on Bimini Street. The fine folks at the Bicycle Kitchen had a repair stand to fix people’s...

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Introducing the Dehydrated Kimchi Chip

Mr. Homegrown
Fermentation, Food, Food Preservation
3 Comments
Our focus this week has been all things Japanese, but now we’re taking a detour to Korea…or at least to kimchi: What would be the fermentation equivalent of finding a new planet in our solar system, cold fusion and a unified field theory all wrapped into one new discovery? That tasty snack breakthrough could very well be the dehydrated kimchi chip. Oghee Choe and Connie Choe-Harikul of Granny Choe’s Kimchi Co.’s just won...

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Saturday Linkages: Straw Bales and Bike Hacks

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
8 Comments
Photo by Tracy Walsh/Poser Design Gardening Straw bale gardening in the New York Times: http://nyti.ms/10kt1Hf DIY How to fix a bicycle tube http://www.afrigadget.com/2013/02/22/how-to-fix-a-bicycle-tube/ … Bike headlight displays speed: http://boingboing.net/2013/03/20/bike-headlight-displays-speed.html Build-It-Solar Blog: A Inexpensive DIY Blower Door http://www.builditsolarblog.com/2013/02/a-inexpensive-diy-blower-door-that.html?spref=tw …...

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Saturday Linkages: Tiny Houses and Succulent Suprises

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
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Gardening Sunflower sutra | Garden Rant http:// gardenrant.com/2012/10/sunflo wer-sutra.html  … Succulent Surprise http://www. dudecraft.com/2012/09/succul ent-surprise.html  … DIY Build-It-Solar Blog: DIY Insulating Window or Door Shutters Using Astrofoil: http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/09/diy-in sulating-window-or-door-shutters.html?spref=tw  … Bikes Cargo cyclists replace truck drivers on European city streets: http://www. lowtechma...

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