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

696 results

The Upside Down Fire

Mrs. Homegrown
How-to, Preparedness
17 Comments
This is how I make a campfire fire now. I used to use the teepee method, or some half-assed rendition of the teepee method, and I often had trouble with such fires. They required babying, rebuilding, etc., and they burned fast. This fire is built in the opposite direction: heavy stuff on the bottom, lighter stuff on top, tinder on the very top. Basically, the finished product looks like a bird’s nest sitting on a log cabin. This style...

Continue reading…

Great Seeds Grow Great Gardens

Homegrown Neighbor
Gardening, Seeds, Vegetable Gardening
3 Comments
Homegrown Neighbor here: I have a very exciting announcement to make. As you may recall, I volunteer at a school garden at North Hollywood High. Well, it is more than a garden. There is an orchard, a flower and herb garden, a pig and a goat. We are almost done with our chicken coop and hope to get some hens in there in the new year. I have been trying to think of ways to raise money to support our school garden project. So we have partnered wit...

Continue reading…

Other People’s Poo: Biosolids in the Garden

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening, Thoughtstylings
18 Comments
It’s people! Why not use city compost in your garden? Ecological designer Darren Butler, at a class I was sitting in on, showed a soil report from a site that had used compost from the city of Los Angeles. LA’s compost contain biosolids, a euphemism for sewage. The soil test showed high levels of: zinc 196 ppm copper 76 ppm sulfur 5,752 ppm The problem isn’t human waste, it’s all the other stuff that ends up...

Continue reading…

SurviveLA becomes Homegrown Revolution!

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
For the kids out there, the woman in the picture above is operating a ditto machine, what we children of the 60s and 70s used before the internets came out. Perhaps we’ll revert back to it when the shit goes down. In the meantime, SurviveLA is in the process of going international and to facilitate this we’re changing our name to Homegrown Revolution (www.homegrownrevolution.org). Stay calm, our content will stay the same. All the ol...

Continue reading…

Friday Quiz Answer

Mr. Homegrown
Miscellaneous
3 Comments
The answer to our “Freaky Friday Fungal Quiz”: slime mold. And I should not have used “fungal” in the title. Slime molds are no longer classified as fungi. But I’ll stick with “freaky.” According to UC Berkeley, slime molds fall into three categories, Plasmodial slime molds, like Physarum . . ., are basically enormous single cells with thousands of nuclei. They are formed when individual flagellated ce...

Continue reading…

Bicycles and GPS

Mr. Homegrown
Bikes
6 Comments
So at a time when the whole hipster stripped-down fixed-gear bike phenomenon has just passed its inevitable pop cultural zenith, this post will come across as impossibly nerdy. Yesterday I finally got around to strapping my small handheld GPS unit to the handlebars of my road bike and I can say that this particular combination of 19th century technology and 20th century electronics rocks. The only sane way to get around Los Angeles and most lar...

Continue reading…

Simple Tech

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
RLeave a comment
At the intersection of third world need and our first world’s gadget obsession lies a number of non-profit organizations attempting to help poor folks through the development of clever low-tech interventions. The rocket stove we featured earlier exemplifies this approach. With a rocket stove, which is made out of simple, easy to repair materials, you can burn twigs, newspaper and scrap wood rather than cutting down whole trees to make char...

Continue reading…

Going Wired

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
10 Comments
Cat 5 o’ nine tails via BoingBoing The dangers of radiation from cellphones has been in the news lately and, from what I understand, existing studies are either inconclusive or deeply flawed. But it got me thinking about the safety of wireless internet networks–should I be concerned about possible health effects? In terms of a direct physical effect, probably not.  Dr Michael Clark of Britain’s Health Protection Agenc...

Continue reading…

Return of Bean Friday: Bean Broth or “Tuscan Crazy Water”

Mrs. Homegrown
Bean Fest, Food, Recipes, Reviews
5 Comments
Yep, Bean Friday rears its head again–or is it Frugal Friday? Whatever it is, I’ve got this thrifty idea for you. I read about in The Italian Country Table , by Lynn Rossetto Casper. We’ve had this book for years and years, and it has some really good recipes in it that have become standards in our house, along just with a couple of duds. I’d not paid attention to her entry on “Crazy Water” before, but by her...

Continue reading…

A Sonora and Kamut Wheat Field in Los Angeles County!

Mr. Homegrown
Bread, Events, Food, Wheat
7 Comments
Sonora wheat The Los Angeles Bread Bakers, of which I’m a co-founder along with Teresa Sitz and Mark Stambler, have teamed with farmer Andrea Crawford, of Kenter Canyon Farms, to plant what I think may be the first wheat field in Los Angeles County in many years. Wheat used to be widely grown here, especially Sonora wheat, a drought tolerant variety originally bought to the Southwest by the Spanish. Along with Sonora, we planted...

Continue reading…