Search Results for: label/water conservation/page/2/2011/04/making-it/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

802 results

Kent’s Composting Tips and Secret Weapon

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
RLeave a comment
Today in our continuing dialog on composting, a guest post from Los Angeles Bicycle Coalition board member, Kent Strumpell who we met up with at this week’s inspiring LACBC awards gala: I’m sure there are more correct procedures, but this is what I’ve found works. I use a compost bin that has direct soil contact. I think this allows the introduction of soil organisms and serves to drain the pile if it gets too wet. I’ve done this same proc...

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Hexayurt

Mr. Homegrown
Preparedness
2 Comments
SurviveLA reader jbjhill, responding to our rant about designing for a world dominated by 4 x 8 building materials, sent a link to this unique yurt-shaped emergency shelter which can be built out of 4 x 8 sheets of nearly anything (the globe shaped thing on the right is an inflatable satellite dish). Designed by software engineer Vinay Gupta, who is working on this project full time, the “Hexayurt” costs somewhere between $200 and $5...

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Infinite Green Onions

Mrs. Homegrown
Food, Gardening
16 Comments
Here’s a handy little tip. I’m pretty sure I heard it first from Mr. Jack Spirko: Save the root ends of your green onions (aka scallions) ̵2; the parts you cut off when you’re cooking. Plant those, roots down, under about an inch of soil and they will generate new green onions. Keep this cycle going throughout your growing season and you should have an endless supply of green onions for your table. It’s much easier t...

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Tomato Review #1 Red Currant–The World’s Smallest Tomato

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Tomatoes, Vegetable Gardening
5 Comments
Due to poor planning in our garden this year we’ve had a bit of a “need to get produce at the supermarket” gap. Ironically, the first bit of homegrown produce to appear this summer came in the form of what we’re calling the world’s smallest tomato: an heirloom variety Mrs. Homegrown Evolution picked up at this year’s Tomato Mania sale called Red Currant (Solanum pimpinellifolium). This is a domesticated versi...

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Terror of Tiny Town

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Gardening, Self Watering Containers, Vegetable Gardening
4 Comments
The Homegrown Evolution in-box overfloweth this week with news of the cute and the tiny. Yesterday’s post about our miniature Red Currant tomatoes prompted Bruce F of Chicago to inform us that he’s working on the world’s smallest kale plant. He’s growing them in self-watering containers made with old pop bottles (more info on how to make a pop bottle self-watering container here and here). These pop bottle containers look...

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The Return of the Paper Collar?

Mr. Homegrown
Thoughtstylings
3 Comments
During the summertime in the warm climate we live in I often find myself wishing for the return of the paper collar. What better way to deal with ring around the collar than to just throw out the old collar and put on a new one? I have a theory (unproven, admittedly) that using paper collars would have less environmental impact than all the water and detergents we use to scrub out ring around the collar. Of course, the best solution would be to...

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Broadleaf Plantain

Mr. Homegrown
Food, Foraging
5 Comments
Today we introduced some weeds into our garden, planting some broadleaf plantain (Plantago major) seeds that we collected on our bike camping and wild food excursion with Christopher Nyerges. As Nyerges noted, this is one of those plants that Martha Stewart hates, and that makes the purveyors of toxic herbicides and lawn care products rich. You can’t eat your lawn folks. You can, however, eat broadleaf plantain. The young leaves are edible...

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Comopost, Compost, Compost

Mr. Homegrown
Composting, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
6 Comments
As if I didn’t need a reminder of how important compost is to a vegetable garden, note the tomato above. It’s on its way out, but it grew with no supplemental water in hard-packed clay soil contaminated with lead and zinc in a hot side yard. Why did it do well while the rest of my vegetable garden did not do as so good this summer? Homemade compost. I didn’t have enough compost for the rest of the veggie garden so I bought som...

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Rainwater Harvesting and Beyond

Mr. Homegrown
rainwater harvesting, Water and Power, Water Conservation
4 Comments
If you live in a dry climate like we do here in Los Angeles your bookshelf should have a copy of one of Brad Lancaster’s amazing books. Through very simple techniques, most of which can be executed with a shovel and a free afternoon, Lancaster shows you how to turn a barren landscape into a Garden of Eden. Lancaster empasizes earthworks which capture and channel water where you want it to go, instead of uselessly sending it down the gutter...

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Sun Bleaching Really, Really Works

Mrs. Homegrown
Cleaning, Domesticus
20 Comments
Line drying in the sun is a time honored means of brightening whites. But I had never guessed how effective it can be. I have a pair of white bath towels which developed mysterious, spreading yellow stains all over them, stains which I could not remove no matter what I tried (Borax, oxygen bleaches, stain removers), and which I may have actually worsened by a final, desperate flirtation with chlorine bleach a few years ago. The towels were in...

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