Search Results for: label/uses for used tires

407 results

The Sound of One Hand Snapping

Mr. Homegrown
Tools
1 Comment
...and has a spring connecting the two ends which consist of a center punch and a nail set. You hold one end against a nail and pull the spring back. The spring bangs one end into the other, thereby driving the nail. We’ve used it for years, and driven hundreds of nails with it, hanging molding, fixing windows, making furniture, and countless other tasks. It’s possible, in fact, to drive nails with this thing without using a hammer and i...

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What’s Your Personal Food Policy?

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Thoughtstylings
13 Comments
...gs. It’s like a day that’s cold and snowy, and your clothes are wet too! One issue, however, that over the years I’ve come to feel strongly about is factory raised meat. I just can’t eat it anymore. It used to be that, out of courtesy, I’d eat anything served to me when I’m a guest at another person’s house. I’m not sure I can still do this. As Michael Pollan says, “Were the walls of our meat...

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Vermicomposting Class

Mrs. Homegrown
Composting, Events, Vermiculture
4 Comments
ore! Nancy Klehm is a long-time urban forager and grower, ecological system designer, artist and intrepid soil builder. She spent over five years designing and running a closed-loop vermicomposting project in Chicago that used 100’s of thousands of worms to digest 10’s of thousands of pounds of food and paper waste to create healthy soil. She started The Ground Rules, a community soil building center in North Philadelphia and developed and...

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Build a Worm Tower

Mrs. Homegrown
Composting, Vermiculture
13 Comments
...speaks of using PVC pipe for the tower. PVC is cheap and easy to work with, but it’s pretty well established that it leaches toxins as it degrades, so you might want to seek out pipe in other materials. As an aside, we used to use PVC pipe in our self-irrigating pots, still still have PVC in some of them, but are phasing it out in favor of metal or bamboo pipe. Yet we still have PVC lines as part of our irrigation system. This is somethi...

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The Big To-Do List

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
27 Comments
ations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” In the planning process for our first book The Urban Homestead we used a big piece of taped together paper to come up with our version of Heinlein’s skill set. Most of the subjects on that paper, everything from vegetable gardening to cargo bikes, ended up in the book or in our secon...

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Poultry Houses of the Ultra-Wealthy

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Design, Thoughtstylings
4 Comments
chicken house has ruffled a few feathers in Britain. But I have to admit that I share the same neo-classical pretensions. However, being on a more limited budget, my neo-classical chicken coop will have to be constructed with used futon frames and scavenged bags of stucco. Odey coop, south elevation. To that end, if you’d like to recreate Odey’s neo-classical chicken house in futon frames and stucco, you can download a pdf of...

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The High Cost of Golf

Mr. Homegrown
Lawns, Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
here in the southwestern U.S. that shows no signs of letting up soon. Modest water rationing requirements are in effect, but that municipal golf course green I was forced to visit looked, well, very green. The amount of water used to irrigate the world’s golf courses could support 4.7 billion people at the U.N.’s daily minimum according to the Worldwatch Institute. Let’s not even get into the deleterious effect of herbicides. An...

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Los Angeles: Swag Town USA

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes, Thoughtstylings
RLeave a comment
...County Bicycle Coalition, the MTA, the Department of Transportation, Bicycling Magazine, and a former Bike Town USA contest winner from Irvine. Unless I missed something, none of the speakers even hinted that a bike could be used for anything other than recreation. Now we’re all for getting exercise but we think it’s time to take the bike beyond just recreation, and into the realm of transportation – and prove that two wheels a...

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Strange brew: herbal steam for a chest cold and sinus pain

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Herbal Medicine, Herbs
13 Comments
7;t stand it any longer. Don’t throw out the pot contents. Just put the lid back on when you’re done and heat it up when you need it again. If it seems to be losing potency, throw in another handful of herbs. I used my pot for a night and a day before it began to look a little tired. It was also completely full of solid matter! At that point I dumped it out in the yard and started a fresh pot. Alternative herbs: You may not have...

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