Search Results for: label/solar/page/8/2011/04/making-it

416 results

Harvesting and Drying Calendula

Mrs. Homegrown
Body Care, Calendula series, Gardening, Herbal Medicine, Herbs, How-to
32 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: Okay, so in a previous post I talked about growing Calendula. This post I’m going to talk about harvesting and drying it. The next post I’ll do on the topic will be about making a skin-healing salve from the dried petals, olive oil and beeswax. When to harvest:  Start harvesting your Calendula as soon as the first flush of flowers is in full bloom. Don’t try to “save” the flowers. The more you...

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Essential System #9 – Hydration

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
RLeave a comment
As we’ve noted before you can go about three days without water, but you’ll be feeling mighty crabby after just a few hours without it. We’ve got a number of water sources around the homestead, with a few more back-ups in the works. First off it pays to have some plastic water jugs around – figure two liters a day per person minimum. There are stricter standards for tap water in this banana republic we call the USA than f...

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Appropriate Tech is the New High Tech

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
217;ll dig up some more books and links. In the meantime, I can think of one other free downloadable book, David Bainbridge’s The Integral Passive Solar Water Heater Book, that you can access for free via the Build It Solar website at: http://www.builditsolar.com/Projects/WaterHeating/ISPWH/ispwh.htm If any of you know of more appropriate tech books, blogs or resources worth looking at, please leave a comment. And thanks to the Homegro...

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SurviveLA Visits Simparch’s Utah Compound

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
RLeave a comment
SurviveLA is in Wendover, Utah this weekend on business and it’s here, in this hallucinogenic landscape of salt flats and casinos, that the artistic/architectural thoughtstylist collective known as Simparch has established a self-sufficiency experiment they call Clean Livin’. Located on the remote South Base section of the historic Wendover Airfield on land leased by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Simparch’s project p...

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My Trip to Maker Faire

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes, Solar, Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
...ad to speak extemporaneously. This worked out for the better, as I was able to pull up a member of the audience to demonstrate her solar cooker–much more fun than showing pictures of solar cookers. And, after all, maybe it’s time we retire PowerPoint. Some of the things I spotted at Maker Faire: Long lines for the tiny house. I’ll review Lloyd Kahn’s awesome tiny house book later this week (he gave a talk just before me)...

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Saturday Linkages: Keeping It Cool

Mr. Homegrown
Saturday Linkages
2 Comments
Watering the roof. One of the low-tech home cooling tips on the Build It Solar Blog. Tiny Home in Italy made out of pallets http:// bit.ly/NGWlPS Build-It-Solar Blog: Cooling Without Power http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/07/coolin  … Build-It-Solar Blog: DIY Solar Water Heating for 7 Unit Apartment http://www. builditsolarblog.com/2012/07/diy-so  … Measure for Measure – Beth Schaleben’s Yardstick Table http:// bit.ly...

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June: National Bathroom Reading Month

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
2 Comments
By bikin’ friend Colin informed me last week that he had heard a report on National Public Radio about June being, “National Bathroom Reading Month”. Doing a little digging revealed that, sadly, it was just a publicity stunt for a series of un-funny bathroom humor books and did not have the backing of our congress, senate or president. Nevertheless we thought we’d celebrate bathroom reading month anyways with a look at wh...

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Free Preparedness E-Books

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness, Resources
10 Comments
Camp loom, for making mats and mattresses from the 1911 edition of the Boy Scout Handbook Through a circuitous bit of aimless interweb searching I came across a huge list of downloadable urban homesteading/gardening/survivalist manuals on a site called hardcorepreppers.com. Unfortunately, this site is so popular that it seems to be down every time I’ve checked. But thanks to Google’s caching feature I was able to access a li...

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Countdown

Mrs. Homegrown
Events
24 Comments
Our new book comes out just about a month–April 26th–and today two super-advance copies came to us by mail. Believe me, it’s awfully strange to see something that has existed only as computer files suddenly materialize on your porch! We realize we haven’t given our new book a formal introduction yet, so here goes.  Making It: Radical Home-Ec for a Post Consumer World is our follow up to The Urban Homestead . The...

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Doomsday Preppers: Exploitative, Uninteresting, Unreal “Reality”

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness, Thoughtstylings
25 Comments
Doomsday Preppers, a series on the National Geographic channel, is part of a cloud of meaningless cable drivel that envelopes our national psyche like the smog that hangs over Los Angeles. In many ways Doomsday Preppers is indistinguishable from countless other low rent reality TV shows. Does anyone really sit down and watch this endless parade of house flippers, dance moms and custom motorcycle enthusiasts? Or is it all a kind of background, t...

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