Start Your Urban Homestead for One Dollar

...The Lyth Cottage in Buffalo, purchased for $1. Photo: Buffalo Rising. Want to move to Buffalo, New York? If so the city has an Urban Homestead Program where you can get a house for a $1 plus closing costs. The rules–you’ve got to: Fix code violations. Live in the house for at least three years. Have $5,000 in the bank for repairs. Too cold a climate for me, but you can read more about the program and see some success stories at Buffalo Rising....

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Urban Chicken Enthusiasts Unite!

...hicken keepers. And we often meet people who would like to know more about urban poultry. So I’ve decided to create a group of L.A. urban chicken enthusiasts. I used meetup.com to create the L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts group. I like Meetup because the point is to organize face to face meetings. Our group will get together every month or so, eat eggs dishes and talk about raising chickens, local food and sustainability. The L.A. Urban Chicken En...

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O79 Growing and Breeding Tomatoes with Fred Hempel

...reeding project over to an eight year old. We also talk about how to water tomatoes and prepare soil. During the podcast Fred mentions: Dumont #4 tweezers And two tomatoes bred by Fred that you can get seeds for: Blush Tomato Orange Jazz tomato I’ve had the pleasure of tasting these tomatoes at a lecture Fred does at the Heirloom Expo in Santa Rosa and they are really amazing. Fred’s website are: Artisan Seeds and Artisan Seeds in Facebook and Bai...

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Why it’s Better to Pressure Can Tomatoes

...factors are why the recommended hot water bath canning time for raw packed tomatoes is 85 minutes. I’ve hot water bath canned tomatoes and got great results (especially with San Marzano tomatoes). But 85 minutes is a long time. You can cut the processing down considerably and get better results by pressure canning tomatoes. Here’s a raw pack recipe that includes both hot water and pressure canning instructions. Note that you still need to acidify....

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Urban Farm Magazine

...elly Yrarrazaval of Orange County. All of these fine folks have repurposed urban and suburban spaces to grow impressive amounts of food, a common sense trend popular enough to have spawned this new magazine. Editor Karen Keb Acevedo says, “Urban Farm is here to shed a little light on the things we can all do to change our lifestyles, in ways we think are monumental as a whole, yet at the same time, barely noticeable on their own.” The first issue...

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