Search Results for: label/time banking/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

706 results

Do Something Day

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
In honor of Buy Nothing Day, we present a memorable Craigslist ad found by our comrade, neighbor and art blogger Doug Harvey while looking for a refrigerator to replace the one that got fried in a freak electric storm the other night, “Never used, brand new 2008 GE Energystar fridge in original box. Blessed by his Holiness the Dalai Lama upon his last visit to Los Angeles, this fridge is sure to maintain the temperature and spiritual balan...

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How To Design a Garden Step II: Using Google Earth to Draw Up a Plan

Mr. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
5 Comments
So you’ve set the goals for your garden, as we outlined in a post earlier this week, and you’re ready to start putting pen to paper. Google Earth makes it easy to quickly create a plan to scale. Zoom in on the space you want to garden and print out an image. Next, take separate sheets of tracing paper and use them to map out: your goals existing conditions such as trees and buildings future plantings where water flows when it rain...

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Our Happy Foot/Sad Foot Sign

Mrs. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
16 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: Nothing about growing or making today–sorry to go off topic (Erik is wincing a bit as I post this), but I want to talk about our Foot.  It’s a very local sort of story, but isn’t localism what it’s all about? The podiatrist’s sign above marks the entrance to our neighborhood. It charmed us the first time we saw it: It’s a foot–with feet!  And we immediately named it the Happy Foot/S...

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Los Angeles Chicken Produces World’s Largest Egg

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
3 Comments
Well, I exaggerate a bit. Neighbor Lora Hall rushed over this afternoon to show us an egg as big as the Dodger Stadium parking lot produced by her hefty Cornish Cross hen who goes by the name “Chickenzilla”. It was the same day that we found a tiny shell-less egg in our chicken coop. For your amusement we’ve lined up a set of freakish and normal eggs above. From left to right, a banty egg, one of our Plymouth Rock’s eggs...

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Our Favorite Searches

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
Homegrown Revolution occasionally gets a laugh reviewing the search phrases that land people on this blog. At times the phrases resemble a kind of random internet haiku. We thought we’d review a few of them and respond. “is Roundup bad for cats” YES! Roundup, Monsanto’s ubiquitous herbicide, is bad for all living things . “how to survive living out of your car” We’d suggest a subscription to Dwelling Portabl...

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It’s Official: The End is Near

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
RLeave a comment
Cheese doodles sandwiched by two images from a Qatar Airlines ad Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that the price of corn has got so high due to its use for ethanol, that farmers are resorting to feeding livestock, “cookies, licorice, cheese curls, candy bars, french fries, frosted wheat cereal and peanut-butter cups.” GARLAND, N.C.–When Alfred Smith’s hogs eat trail mix, they usually shun the Brazil nuts. ...

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Shiitake Happens

Mr. Homegrown
Mushrooms
11 Comments
Well, actually, shiitake doesn’t happen. It’s back to the drawing board for our first experiment in mushroom growing. We ordered a kit and dutifully followed the directions, but a combination of high temperatures and too much or too little water resulted in the result you see above, what looks like a cake with a skin disease. And even if we got a crop the cost of the kit was too high to make the process economical. The kit came pre-...

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Dome Building

Mr. Homegrown
Design
2 Comments
Drop City Chicken Coop Whenever the entwined notions of sustainability, green building, environmentalism and the lingering remains of the 60s counterculture address architecture and the places we live in, inevitably Buckminster Fuller influenced forms seem to just spring from the landscape like mushrooms after a particularly wet winter. Perhaps the idealism of folks interested in saving the world, especially do-it-yourself types, lends itself...

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Advances in Gardening: The Trough of Garlic

Mrs. Homegrown
Garden Design, Gardening
7 Comments
Remember a while back I posted a picture of Erik in a manly pose, whomping our patio with his sledgehammer? He took out a strip of concrete and built this over the hole: a new planting bed.  That’s the Germinator on the right, butting up to it and my Fan behind it.  When we’re done with all this redoing, we’ll clean everything up and take some wider shots so it all begins to make sense. For now–believe me–it’...

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Power to the Peoplemover, a Zine About Riding the Bus

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings, Transportation
4 Comments
The cover of issue 2.0 of Power to the Peoplemover Many hours spent on the bus in the past two months, thanks to the dude who totaled our car, has reminded me of the conceptual ancestor of this blog, a zine about bus riding I edited in the early 1990s with Canadian artist Michael Waterman called Power to the Peoplemover (PPM). For the kids out there zines were, essentially, xeroxed blogs. We didn’t have the interwebs, but we did have some...

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