Learn to Build with Adobe

December 27, 2013

...mmunity College’s Adobe Construction Department: Class: ADOB 113 – Passive Solar Adobe Design Format: 8-Week Online Class Dates: January 21 to March 15, 2014 Credits: 2 Course #: 31660 Class: ADOB 111 – Adobe Construction Basics Format: 8-Week Online Class Dates: March 24 to May 17, 2014 Credits: 3 Course #: 31268 Class: ADOB 112 – Adobe Wall Construction Format: Web-Blended (4 Weeks Online + 2 Days of Intensive Live Instruction) Dates: April 19 t...

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Our New Straw Bale Garden–Part I

Mr. Homegrown

April 23, 2013

26 Comments

Straw bales–ready to prepare. Pot in the center will be a solar powered fountain. We’re going to experiment with a straw bale vegetable garden in our backyard, inspired by Michael Tortorello’s article in the New York Times. The plan is to grow in the bales and harvest the resulting compost for use in permanent raised beds (that have yet to be built). We’ll keep growing in bales until we have enough compost for the beds. The problems presented by...

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

Mr. Homegrown

April 17, 2013

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

10 Comments

...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 (available where professional irrigation supplies are sold) to form the sides of the keyhole. A month later in November a few...

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The Elf and Ethics

Mr. Homegrown

April 22, 2014

Bikes, Transportation

9 Comments

...YHRNG95duU The Elf is a kind of aerodynamic, electric assist tricycle with solar panels to charge the batteries. It’s a type of vehicle, somewhere between a bike and a car, that a number of inventors have tinkered with over the years. Good arguments exist for and against this type of transportation. On the one hand it uses far fewer resources than an automobile. But one could also argue, as does the owner of a bike shop in this video, that we’d al...

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Arduino Homesteading Projects

Mr. Homegrown

March 6, 2013

How-to

7 Comments

...UberFridge Controls Homebrewing Temperatures Cooking Sous-vide cooking Kitchen Timer Security Garage door monitor Arduino Security Hacks Communications Fun with a rotary phone! Miscellaneous Led candle (would look great in my hacked solar light) And a shout out to the amazing bloggers at Holy Scrap, masters of using microcontrollers in clever low-tech ways. Follow their blog! Please leave a comment with a link if you know of other projects that sh...

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