Search Results for: label/water conservation/page/34/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

678 results

Why Urban Farm?

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens
RLeave a comment
Nicolas Poussin’s “Et in Arcadia ego“ It’s been a challenging week at the Homegrown Revolution compound. We lost one chick, bringing our nascent flock down to two. We decided that since chickens are social animals to add two more in case of other unforeseen problems bringing our total up to four. Such are the cycles of life and death on the new urban homestead. Bryan Welch, who raises livestock and is also the publish...

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The Very First Urban Homesteading Book

Mr. Homegrown
Reviews
11 Comments
The urban homesteading shelf at your local bookstore, thanks to the great recession, sure has gotten crowded in recent years. There are many fine volumes now alongside our two books with a great diversity of authors opining on chicken coops, homemade soap and composting. This is a good thing–we need as many voices as possible. But there’s nothing new here. On a serendipitous trip to the library last week I stumbled across what must...

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Poo Salon and Urban Forage Classes with Nancy Klehm

Mr. Homegrown
Events
5 Comments
Our good friend Nancy Klehm is coming to town for a visit. We’ve invited her to be a guest lecturer at our “Academy of Home Economics” and she’s agreed to teach a couple of classes. If you live in the LA area, this is a chance not to be missed. First, who is Nancy? Nancy Klehm is a radical ecologist, designer, urban forager, grower and teacher. Her solo and collaborative work focuses on creating participatory social ec...

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Mistakes we have made . . .

Mr. Homegrown
Animals, Chickens, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings
13 Comments
reliably every year while growing in terrible alkaline soil with no added water or fertilizer. The problem with the prickly pear is that it is too prodigious, and that’s the kind of problem you can hope for as an urban homesteader. 3. Newspaper seed pots Those newspaper seed starting pots we linked to earlier this year . . . well, there seems to be a problem with them. I think the newspaper is wicking the water away from the soil. While in...

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Hay Boxes or Fireless Cookers

Mrs. Homegrown
Appropriate Technology, Food, Preparedness, Water and Power
26 Comments
Illustration from The Fireless Cook Book Mrs. Homegrown here: Jessica from Holland sent us a letter recently praising our work, but very, very gently scolding us not including the hay box, a groovy old energy saving technology, in our book. We do stand corrected! And her enthusiasm for hay boxes has reignited our interest, too. We actually considered hay boxes for Making It, but didn’t end up building one for a variety of reasons...

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Cleaning the Sink with Baking Soda and Lemons

Mrs. Homegrown
Cleaning, Domesticus
15 Comments
   Our sink, freshly cleaned and so darn photogenic!This is because you can’t see all the clutter just out of view.   A little green cleaning review here. It is possible to keep a sink white and shiny without bleach or other toxic cleansers. I took pictures this week while I was cleaning to prove it. Below is our grungy sink. A photo can’t quite capture that particularly scuzzy quality a dirty sink has, th...

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A Fast Bean Friday: Khichdi

Mrs. Homegrown
Bean Fest, Food, Recipes
6 Comments
Lame, lame, lame. I can’t even get it together to put up a picture. I’m just too crazy getting things together for the holidays. I suspect many of you are in a similar state. But I did want to post this, because I think you might want something wholesome and mild to eat over the next week, during your HRD (Holiday Recovery Period). I learned about khichdi, a lentil and rice dish, very recently. Our friend Ari sent me a link to a basi...

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

Mrs. Homegrown
Domesticus, Herbal Medicine, Herbs
13 Comments
Mrs. Homegrown here: I’ve had a bad cold for almost a week now. It’s gone through all the classic steps: the sore throat, then the snot factory, then the ghastly “productive cough” that keeps you awake at night, and on top of it all, the lost voice. Oh, the fun! I thought I was almost out of the woods, but then I seem to have hit a cul-de-sac involving the sinuses. Sinus trouble is a new malady for me–I’m jus...

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Using Greywater from your Washing Machine

Mr. Homegrown
Water and Power, Water Conservation
9 Comments
With our current bad drought conditions it makes no sense to pour perfectly good water down the sewer. So we just joined the greywater underground with our illegal washing machine surge tank, and the installation was a piece of cake. We built our washing machine surge tank based on the design in Art Ludwig’s book Create an Oasis with Greywater. The purpose of the surge tank is to prevent the built-in pump in the washing machine from burni...

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Planting a Mini-Orchard

Mr. Homegrown
Gardening, Water and Power, Water Conservation
2 Comments
Ignore the bucket in this illustration! See update below. Update 3/13/2011: I met Brad Lancaster last night and he told me that he and Art Ludwig no longer use the upside down bucket described in this post. The reason is that detergents can build up in the hole. In my experience the bucket was also an unnecessary step. While I have a clay soil, the hillside drains fairly well. A properly sized mulch basin should suffice to allow greywat...

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