Search Results for: label/solar energy/page/4/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

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Got Real Milk?

Mr. Homegrown
Events
RLeave a comment
or 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 President, Organic Pastures,LLC. “Today’s milk is accused of c...

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Santa Monica Legalizes Beekeeping

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
8 Comments
Last night the Santa Monica city council voted to amend their municipal code to allow beekeeping on single family properties. Now, legalizing beekeeping is a bit like legalizing sunshine. Bees, after all, do their thing whether or not the government permits it or not. For every beekeeper in an urban area there must be hundreds of feral bee colonies living in walls, roofs and compost bins. Nevertheless, Santa Monica took a big step forward, join...

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Five Lessons We Learned About Lead in Soil

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Lead
18 Comments
As regular followers of this blog may recall, we did some soil tests last year that revealed elevated levels of lead and zinc in our backyard. The cause? Most likely, paint from our 92 year old house and nearly a hundred years of auto exhaust and dust from brake linings. Applying a little alchemy to turn lead to gold, I think the most productive thing I can do is to help get the word out about lead soil and how common this problem is in urban a...

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The Boy Scouts Suck

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
24 Comments
t the girls have got to whore themselves selling cookies. 2. Let’s teach our kids to make the world a better place without the Norman Rockwell fascist veneer. 3. Hipper uniforms. We suggest something like this. 4. An urban cycling merit badge. 5. All activities are outdoors. Lots of nature experiences. No computer merit badges and certainly no copyright merit badges. 6. Lastly, the SurviveLA Scout mission statement, borrowed from Edward...

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Why Did We Change Our Name?

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
18 Comments
m. “Everything changes and nothing remains still …. and … you cannot step twice into the same stream.” as Hereclitus says. The publishing and blogging world is getting a bit crowded in the “urban homesteading” category. It’s time to expand the conversation and explore some new home ec related topics. We don’t want to become stale. Having a new book coming out later this spring, Making It: Radical Ho...

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Moringa!

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Permaculture
1 Comment
Photo by Harvey McDaniel One of the big inspirations for starting our front yard urban farming efforts at the SurviveLA compound is a Philippino neighbor of ours who has turned his entire front yard and even the parkway into an edible garden featuring fruits and vegetables from his native land, most of which we have never seen before. This morning, while walking the dog, I found him cutting hundreds of long seed pods off of a small attractive...

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The High Cost of Golf

Mr. Homegrown
Lawns, Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
le to trace Tiger Woods wannabe. We circled back to the club house to file a report with the manager of the course and begin the long tedious process of settling the insurance claims. So what does this have to do with urban homesteading? A lot. It’s time for another anti-golf rant. Here are my problems with golf (especially municipal golf courses): 1. The colossal mis-allocation of land. Wouldn’t a lot more people benefit from a lar...

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Whiteflies

Mr. Homegrown
Pests
2 Comments
c zones, numbered one through five, with the first zone being our house and kitchen gardens and the outer zones being less cultivated and more wild spaces. Mollison and Holmgren’s zones are easily miniaturized for small urban yards. Trees that don’t need much attention can go towards the back, the chickens a little closer and the vegetables and herbs can benefit from being close at hand. For additional information on whiteflys see the...

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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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