Search Results for: label/time banking/page/4/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

743 results

All Haste Is of the Devil: Carl Jung as Homesteader

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
11 Comments
Carl Jung pumping water in the Tower at Bollingen. From the Library of Congress. It’s a holiday here in the US, so we’ve turned things over to a special guest blogger, Dr. Carl Jung, who comes to us via the special astral internet plan we get from AT&T. As it turns out, Jung was quite the off-grid homesteader when it came to building and living in his special retreat tower in Bollingen, on the shore of Lake Zürich. I...

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Kent’s Composting Tips and Secret Weapon

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
RLeave a comment
Today in our continuing dialog on composting, a guest post from Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition board member, Kent Strumpell who we met up with at this week’s inspiring LACBC awards gala: I’m sure there are more correct procedures, but this is what I’ve found works. I use a compost bin that has direct soil contact. I think this allows the introduction of soil organisms and serves to drain the pile if it gets too wet. I’ve done this same proc...

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

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
9 Comments
This is what our keyhole bed looked like yesterday just before I fed the remaining vegetables 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 (ava...

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Lessons In Beekeeping: Remember To Wear Boots

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bees
4 Comments
 Bees in a wall This weekend I assisted beekeepers Maurice and Roger in relocating a very large beehive from a wall in an abandoned shed in the Hollywood hills. First we had to do quite a bit of demolition work, removing shelves and an old workbench. Then we carefully peeled back the wall paneling, to expose the bee’s comb. We smoked the bees to calm them down and proceeded to cut the comb out, putting the honeycomb into a five gallon bu...

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Don’t be so quick to clean up

Mrs. Homegrown
Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
5 Comments
A lot of magic happens in the “dead” parts of a garden. Flowers gone to seed feed birds. Dead stalks support important insect life–from spiders to pollinators. Fallen leaves and sticks give habitat to lizards and toads and mushrooms and myriads of invisible creatures. Yet dead growth is not attractive to the human eye, and around about this time of year we’re all itching to make a clean sweep of all that brown stuff. I...

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Roundup

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
1 Comment
SurviveLA is embarrassed to admit that we used to have a bottle of Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller around the compound. Embarrassed because one of Project Censored’s top 25 censored stories of 2006 includes this piece on the evils of this product: Third World Resurgence, No. 176, April 2005 Title: “New Evidence of Dangers of Roundup Weedkiller” Author: Chee Yoke Heong New studies from both sides of the Atlantic reveal that Roundup, the...

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Barefoot Running: No Shoes, No Problem

Mr. Homegrown
Fitness
22 Comments
Photo by Magalie L’Abbé Beekeeper Kirk Anderson has a simple message, lets bees be bees. Let them form their own comb, raise their own queens and generally go about doing what they want to do. In short, work with nature rather than try to control her. “Duh,” one might say, but Kirk’s beekeeping method just so happens to run counter to a hundred years of conventional beekeeping practices and “expert” advice....

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Sun Bleaching Really, Really Works

Mrs. Homegrown
Cleaning, Domesticus
20 Comments
Line drying in the sun is a time honored means of brightening whites. But I had never guessed how effective it can be. I have a pair of white bath towels which developed mysterious, spreading yellow stains all over them, stains which I could not remove no matter what I tried (Borax, oxygen bleaches, stain removers), and which I may have actually worsened by a final, desperate flirtation with chlorine bleach a few years ago. The towels were in...

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