Essential System #9 – Hydration

...y, we don’t have room for much rainwater storage to make a big difference, we plan on filling these drums with municipal water after the rainwater runs out. That way we will always have a few days worth of water for our vegetable garden should there be a service interruption in the warm summer months. The barrels will be hooked up to a drip irritation system designed for low-pressure gravity feed systems. While we would love to go off grid...

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grub

..., wait a minute–what happened to the “wastes”? There is absolutely no waste remaining after this conversion–it has all been transformed into valuable resource.” To raise Hermetia illucens you put vegetable and fruit trimmings in a container with a small opening for the black soldier fly females to fly in and lay their eggs and a method for the grubs to climb out of the compost. You can also feed them small amounts o...

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Contest Winners!

An excuse for another kitten photograph It’s the release day for Making It , and we’re celebrating by giving away two copies of the book. First, we want to say again how much we enjoyed reading all of your tips. They are excellent, without exception, and should be compiled into a book or something. We’re pondering on some way to highlight that post so that future readers can find the tips. Second, we’re glad we d...

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Pot o’ Goodness: Low, Low-Tech Water Conservation

...Another option is to re-use cooking waters as stock. This is something I don’t know much about. Sometimes I’ll take some nice bright green water leftover from steaming or blanching greens and use that to start a vegetable stock. But I’ve heard of people using pasta water as the base of soups. Have any of you tried that, or other techniques along those lines? Do tell. And let us know if you have any quirky ways of saving water....

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Backyard Rebirth

Our shack as spied by Google. Our yard is a disaster. There’s some randomly planted natives, vegetable beds lying fallow after a mediocre summer and large areas of, well, nothing. However, this ongoing landscaping disaster brought a valuable lesson: sometimes it’s best to bring in someone from outside the household for design advice, particularly if that person knows what they are doing. Thank you Tara Kolla of Silver Lake...

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A Prickly Harvest

...s. On the first anniversary of Homegrown Revolution, formerly known as SurviveLA, and a year after our last prickly pear fruit harvest season, we can now announce why, ironically, we’ve been too busy to keep up with our vegetable beds–next spring the good folks at Process Media will be releasing our book The Urban Homesteader. While we’ve been negligent in some of the small scale agricultural duties we profile in the book, at le...

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Urban Homesteading Thing Catching On

...trees, eight choke cherry bushes, a grape vine, covered deck, and enclosed fire pit with a private seating area. A perennial flower garden lines the path to the front yard. Three rain barrels provide ample water for large vegetable and flower gardens. get to know your neighbours at the nearby community hall and rink. The hall holds a variety of children, youth, and adult-focussed classes, programs, and events, such as free dog training; pl...

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Bean Fest, Episode 4: Frijoles Refritos

...me stuck) are simply cooked beans that are mashed in a frying pan along with some seasonings and fat. What makes them a little shady to the health conscious and vegetarian set is that they are traditionally fried in lard. But vegetable oil can be used just as well, and I’d add for the sake of fairness, that real, home cooked lard from well-raised pigs is not such a bad fat. For what it’s worth. To make refried beans you just need to h...

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Perennial Vegetables

For lazy gardeners such as ourselves nothing beats perennial vegetables. Plant ‘em once and you’ve got food for years. For novice gardeners, perennials are plants that, unlike say broccoli (an “annual”), don’t need to be replanted every spring. The best known perennial vegetable in the west is probably asparagus which, given the right conditions, will produce fresh stalks for years. But there are many thousands more...

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