Visit the Eco-Home

Julia Russell is Los Angeles’ original urban homesteader. If you haven’t visited her beautiful “Eco-Home”, now is the time. She’s a pioneer in edible landscaping, solar power, and many other things we all now take for granted. Best of all, you can take a tour:

“Since the 1970’s, April has been home to Earth Day. The theme for this year’s Earth Day is “the Green Generation,” and what better way to strengthen your role as part of this movement than by learning how to make your own life more earth-friendly and sustainable by joining us for an Eco-Home tour this April.

Visit Eco-Home for one of this April’s Eco-Home Tours on Sunday, April 12 and Sunday, April 26 from 2 P.M. to 4:30 P.M. In addition to learning how to begin or expand your personal urban garden, the tour will also display new technologies that will help turn any house into a green environment.

The Tour is conducted by Eco-Home Network, a non-profit dedicated to educating the public on how to make lifestyle choices that protect the environment and improve quality of life. The Eco-Home is located in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. Call 323-662-5207 for reservation and directions. Requested donation for the tour is $10 per person. Please make your reservations by the Friday before the tour.”

For more information, visit the website at ecohome.org.”

Why Lycra is a Bad Idea

Robert Hurst, author of the how-to book on how to ride a bike in the city, The Art of Cycling: A Guide to Bicycling in 21st-Century America says, “the thought of cyclists pedaling around in their standard everyday garb is heartening. The more riders who do this, the more obvious it will be to the general public that cycling is about straight utility in addition to recreation and exercise, an important point that has yet to penetrate the thick skull of American society.”

We’re all for utility, but how about utility with style? It looks like the Brits are ahead of us in this department with the recent revival of riding tweeds. There’s a Tweed Cycling Club, a funny article in The Chap (pdf), a photogenic London tweed ride, and let’s not forget our stylish American friends Hen Waller (of chicken fame) who operate vélocouture and are also fans of tweed.

As I prepare to step on a train to head to San Francisco with my bike and usual slovenly attire, I only wish the journey could be as stylish and civilized as this old film the folks at the Tweed Cycling Club dug up:

See part II of that film here.

Homegrown San Francisco Events


Homegrown Evolution will be in San Francisco this week to speak at the Studio for Urban Projects. The talk will be on Sunday, April 5 at 2:00 pm. We’ll rap about what we’ve been up to and do a brief demo about self irrigating planters, the ideal way to grow food when you don’t have any dirt to call your own. The Studio for Urban Projects is located at 3579 17th St., San Francisco (between Dolores & Guerrero).

Also, in San Francisco this coming weekend make sure to catch the folks at How To Homestead on Saturday, April 4 at the Other Cinema at 8:30 PM for some brand new homesteading movies, homebrew tastings, and the “butt-shaking musical antics of the Goat Family.” The Other Cinema is located at ATA Gallery, 992 Valencia (@ 21st).

Borage (Borago officinalis)

Borage, just about to bloom.

Borage is an ugly sounding name for a beautiful and useful plant. The moniker is probably a corruption of the Andalusian Arabic abu buraq or “father of sweat”, a reference to it’s diaphoretic qualities1. Both the leaves and the blue flowers (sometimes white flowers) are edible and have a refreshing cucumber like taste. Borage is an annual herb that we plant in the late fall here in Los Angeles for an early spring bloom, but in most other parts of North America you’ll plant it in the spring after the last frost. Ours survived a winter outbreak of aphids, but is now thriving.

We toss the flowers and leaves into salads as a flavoring. In fact we enjoyed a memorable borage spiked salad on a recent Greyhound bus trip to Las Vegas we took for a book appearance. Thankfully for our fellow passengers, we did not break out into a borage induced sweat.

For more on the medicinal qualities of borage, including “dispelling melancholy” (useful for bus layovers in Barstow, incidentally) see the borage entry in the Plants for a Future database.

Veggie Trader

Media theorist Douglass Rushkoff has a great new radio show and podcast on WFMU called Media Squat. On the first episode he speaks eloquently of the power of developing local currencies through concepts such as time banking (see our local Echo Park Time Bank for a great example of that) and how these local efforts could be the way out of our current economic morass. Rushkoff is especially interested in the roll the Internet can play in setting up new local economies.

Homegrown Evolution just got an email about a nice example of the potential for using the Internet for localizing. Veggie Trader is a new web based service for distributing and trading excess produce.

“Using Veggie Trader is free and easy. It works like classified advertising. You post a listing describing the excess produce you have and what you’d like in return, and then you wait for a response…

Or, if you’re looking for local produce, you simply enter your zip code and see what your neighbors have available. You can also post specific produce you’re looking for in our Wanted section and see which of your neighbors answers your request.”

We plan on speaking to the folks behind it to get more details and hope to post the first Homegrown Evolution podcast about it soon. It will be interesting to see if the Veggie Trader takes off.