Search Results for: label/uses for used tires/page/5/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

702 results

Parkway Plantings

Mr. Homegrown
Vegetable Gardening
1 Comment
The cow dookie in the spinach scandal of the past month (for more on that read this excellent article) should prompt everyone to consider planting your own garden. Hopefully Homegrown Evolution won’t be buying any bagged vegetables this winter since we just planted our parkway garden this afternoon after installing a drip irrigation system (more on the drip system in a later post). Winter is the best growing season for vegetables here in L...

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Sundiner

Mr. Homegrown
Solar
8 Comments
Beekeeper Dennis made one of those once in a lifetime garage sale finds earlier this year: a solar oven from the 1960s called the “Sundiner.” I couldn’t find much on the interwebs about it except for a brief mention in the  April 1963 issue of Desert Magazine, “Here’s a new product that suits desert living as few others can—it collects and concentrates the heat of the sun and allows outdoor cooking without fuel...

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Growing Your Own Food is Like Printing Your Own Money: Ron Finley’s TED Talk

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Thoughtstylings
12 Comments
Please take a moment and watch gangster/guerrilla gardener Ron Finley’s inspiring Ted talk. I first heard about Ron after he got busted for planting a vegetable garden in what used to be a weed strewn parkway. He’s gone on to plant many more gardens around Los Angeles. The end of this talk really hit home for me, “Don’t call me if you want to sit around and have meetings. If you want to meet with me come to the gard...

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Carlo Petrini and Slow Food: A Joyful Revolution

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini gave the keynote address at the National Heirloom Exposition last Tuesday. For those of you who don’t know, the Slow Food movement began out of protests against a McDonald’s that was slated to open near the Spanish Steps in Rome in the 1980s. Slow Food has since grown into an international organization that promotes food biodiversity and traditional farming practices. Petrini spoke eloquently and with...

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Behold the Western Electric 500

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
14 Comments
There’s much to love about the Western Electric 500 telephone. It’s easily serviceable and built like a tank. Why? When it was manufactured you didn’t own your phone, the telephone company leased it to you. This relationship served as a powerful incentive to manufacture a device that would last. In the 90s I went through three or four cheap cordless phones that broke after a few months of service. I switched back to an old tou...

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How to Process Carob

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging, Recipes
6 Comments
Before. Photo by Bill Wheelock. Our neighborhood has an abundance of carob (Ceratonia siliqua) trees that, around this time of year, drop thousands of pounds of pods. Now many of us may have unpleasant associations with carob as a 1970s era chocolate substitute, but the tree has a long history in the Middle East, where it’s used to make a tea, as a source of molasses, as a vegetable and as animal feed. The “locusts” th...

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The End of California Citrus?

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Gardening, Pests
17 Comments
As small as an ant, the Asian citrus psylid is big trouble! When I spotted state agriculture agents on our street I knew something was wrong. It turns out that a specimen of the dreaded Asian citrus psylid showed up in our neighborhood. The Asian citrus psylid is not a problem in itself, but carries an incurable bacterial disease called huanglongbing (HLB). HLB, first reported in Asia in 1919, renders citrus fruit inedible and eventually kills...

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Mad Hen

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Bikes, Chickens, Events
2 Comments
One of our hens will be featured in the new Coco’s Variety ad campaign. What’s Coco’s Variety you ask? “Coco’s Variety’s primary business is bicycles. Additionally, we sell Japanese figural pencil erasers, used bike parts, old toolboxes, books worth owning, bike pumps, balsa wood gliders, pocket knives, Lodge cast iron frying pans, glass water bottles, Park bicycle tools, wicker bike baskets and Dutch...

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World’s Largest Chard Grows in SIP

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Self Watering Containers
12 Comments
The story of SuperChard: Its origin is unknown. It might come from Bountiful Garden seed, or perhaps Franchi. It volunteered in a corner of one of our backyard beds, in a bed we were resting. We didn’t water it. It grew all summer long anyway, despite having no rain at all.  In fact, it grew huge and lush. We never harvested it, though, because it was growing in our lead contaminated soil. So we continued to ignore it and it continued to...

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Erik’s EDC

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
12 Comments
It’s about time I listed my “everyday carry” or “EDC” for short. For those of you not familiar with the EDC subculture, there are entire websites devoted to posting, critiquing and obsessing over the items you carry every singe day (not, say, just when going on a hike). I went through somewhat of an EDC mid-life crisis last month and emerged on the other side with the following items: 1. A nice Saddleback Leather W...

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