Search Results for: label/solar energy/page/3/2010/06/the-urban-homestead/2011/04/making-it

672 results

Shamelessly Tooting Our Own Horn

Mr. Homegrown
Fitness
1 Comment
Unfortunately for the sedentary out there this new urban homesteading lifestyle involves a fair amount of physical fitness. We’ve found that the best way to keep up with SurviveLA’s strenuous fitness requirements is to have a goal such as a race, or a particularly difficult hike. This is why we’ve been obsessed over the years with the Ketchum Downtown YMCA’s oddball Stair Climb to the Top which involves a heart-pounding a...

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Essential System #3 – Sew Your Own Damn Clothes

Mr. Homegrown
Domesticus
RLeave a comment
ssible solutions to this moral dilemma, shopping at thrift stores, in which case you have second-hand slave laborer blood and sewing your own clothes. The big problem with the latter solution is that sewing is a bitch — it’s time consuming and at times incredibly frustrating. Nevertheless this homesteading revolution we propose won’t be a cake walk, and will be as much about rediscovering old techniques as it will be about new t...

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Problems Part I

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
16 Comments
The road to urban homesteading ain’t smooth and involves more than a few potholes along the way. Some of those potholes will swallow a bike tire while others are big enough for a Hummer. But with persistence it becomes easier to deal with the occasional bump, lessons can be learned and future mistakes avoided. With the popularity of our earlier blunders post, I’d like to begin regularly sharing problems as they develop. Here’s...

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Far Side of the Stairs

Mr. Homegrown
Fitness
2 Comments
ng, and I don’t mean the sort delivered by the ladies in the back of the LA Weekly. We need to make LA a walkable, bike-able and livable place just like the folks in the other great cities of the world have done. Why is it that LA suffers from low self-esteem and low expectations? Why is it that when our downtown skyline appears in a movie, the image is shorthand for crime infested ghetto hell-hole? Why is it that when you point out the ped...

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The Boy Scouts Suck

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
24 Comments
of whom also stayed up until 2:30 engaged in a loud multi-player game boy tournament while others chased desert mice, and a special thanks to the Scout who accidentally kicked out the supports of our tent at midnight causing it to collapse upon us. While we applaud the dads for getting the kids out in the wilderness for the weekend, we at SurviveLA just can’t get behind the vile and outdated Boy Scouts, whose ongoing attempts at being more...

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Mulberries

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
8 Comments
er if this is a myth, like the story about boy scouts roasting hot dogs on Oleander sticks (yes, Oleander is very poisonous, but apparently the boy scout story is an urban legend). We found the Mulberries sweet and delicious. It’s a fruit that doesn’t ship well, hence its absence in our crummy supermarkets....

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The Great Sunflower Project

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
5 Comments
Help determine the health of urban bees with a citizen science experiment called the Great Sunflower Project. It’s simple and free. Just register at the Great Sunflower Project website and you’ll be sent a package of wild annual sunflower seeds ( Helianthus annuus). Twice a month you’ll get an email to remind you to time how long it takes for five bees to visit your sunflowers. Sounds like it has drinking game potential, though...

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Car Free in the City of Cars

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes
RLeave a comment
ecutive Director of Velo Mondial who does the stunning bike blog at http://velomondial.blogspot.com/ You will hear and see how other challenged cities have moved forward with bicycling infrastructure and the culture to match it. Bring your hardest questions on what is holding LA back from becoming one of the “best cycling cities in the world.” Other websites that Pascal is associated with include: www.velo.info and http://spic...

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Content Mills: Pimples on the Information Superhighway

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
8 Comments
u and Ehow, which you can use on your own web site, please don’t hesitate to contact me. All the videos on Ehow include links to your website, a bio of the expert, and Google Search result optimization. Google adjusted its algorithms last week to bump down content mill sites. A study, released this past weekend by Sistrix, shows how that adjustment has changed search results. The results are mostly positive. In Sitrix’s “visibi...

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Garden Like a Pirate

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
1 Comment
for growing food crops. The first bit of land we hijacked was our own parkway, that bit of dirt between the sidewalk and the street that technically belongs to the city, but is the responsibility of the homeowner to maintain. It’s yet another space, like the vast asphalt hell of parking lots, garages, freeways, car lots, auto repair shops, and junkyards in our car-obsessed city dedicated to the needs of the personal automobile. We decided t...

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