Author: Mr. Homegrown

Homegrown on Homegrown

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Visit HOMEGROWN.ORG

The folks behind Farm Aid have launched a new social networking site, HOMEGROWN.org that readers of this blog will definitely enjoy. From their press release:

“HOMEGROWN.org is now a place where we can learn from each other, share our questions, and show off how we dig in the dirt, grow our own food, work with our hands, and cook and share our meals – all things that we call HOMEGROWN.

  • Did you cook a kick ass meal with stuff from the farmers market?
  • Is there a mysterious veggie in your CSA box?
  • What is the soundtrack for your potluck dinner?
  • Are you thinking about growing okra?
  • What’s in your fridge right now?
  • Do you have a DIY tip to share?

That’s the spirit of HOMEGROWN.org. A spirit that will mean more visits to the farmers markets, more backyard BBQs, more dirt under nails…more talking, touching, smelling, tasting. It will mean a more fulfilling life that people everywhere will come to call HOMEGROWN.

Things you can now do on HOMEGROWN.org:

  • Post photos
  • Post videos
  • Create groups
  • Join groups
  • Create discussions
  • Join discussions
  • Link to your own blog
  • Create a new blog
  • Make new friends
  • Invite old friends
  • Promote events
  • Learn about events in your area
  • Create playlists
  • Post a member badge on your Facebook or MySpace page
  • and more…”

We’ve joined up (become our HOMEGROWN.org friends here) and we hope all of you readers will join up as well. The important step beyond the DIY activities on this blog and in our book is developing healthy and happy communities and joining together to build a better world. We wish HOMEGROWN.org good luck in networking our urban homesteads.

Garden Swap

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Gardening
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Growing your own vegetables is a great way to add flavor, nutrition and, if done carefully, save money in our uncertain economic times. But what if you live in an apartment and don’t have any land to call your own? Homegrown Evolution’s in-box contained an answer to that problem for folks in the Los Angeles area. We love this idea:

“Cultivating Sustainable Communities (CSC) is launching its newest project. GardenSwap is an opportunity to pair up urban gardeners with their neighbors who have yard space in order to grow and share in the profits of urban food gardens.

Urban gardens are not only fun; they support low-carbon food production, create economic development, inspire healthful eating, build community, create opporunities for education, address watershed health concerns, create productive green open space, and beautify communities.

CSC is currently taking requests for participation in this program. If you’d like to participate either as a gardener or a land owner who is willing to share yard space (and some garden profits!) with a neighbor (we’ll help you find a neighbor), please contact me at [email protected]”

Full contact info:

Gabriela Worrel, Executive Director
Cultivating Sustainable Communities
117 Bimini Pl. #110 Los Angeles, Ca 90004
(310) 452-5356
[email protected]

Homegrown Evolution at Modern Times San Francisco

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Thoughtstylings
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Mrs. Homegrown Evolution will be delivering a talk and doing a book signing of our book The Urban Homestead at Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco this Wednesday October 15th at 7:30 p.m (Mr. Homegrown will be resting his polyester clad derriere back at the urban homestead in Los Angeles). Modern Times is located at 888 Valencia Street in the beating heart of the Mission District. Come on out and support this indepedent, collectively owned bookstore which has been in business since 1971 and hear Mrs Homegrown talk about vegetables, chickens and much more.

Plymouth Rock Monthly

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Animals, Chickens
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What magazine had 40,000 subscribers in 1920? Answer: the Plymouth Rock Monthly, a periodical devoted to our favorite chicken breed. We have two “production” Barred Plymouth Rocks in our small flock of four hens, and we’ve found them to be productive, friendly and, with their striped plumage, an attractive sight in our garden. While the internet is an amazing resource for the urban homesteader, there are a few holes in this electronic web of knowledge. In short, would someone out there please get around to scanning and putting online the Plymouth Rock Monthly? All I can find are images of two covers lifted off of ebay.

The February 1925 issue, at right, promises articles on, “Selecting and Packing Eggs for Hatching”, a poetically titled essay, “The Things We Leave Undone”, “Theory and Practice in Breeding Barred Color”, “White Plymouth Rocks”, “The Embargo on Poultry”, and “Breeding White Rocks Satisfactorily”. Incidentally, the Embargo article probably refers to a avian influenza outbreak of 1924-1925 that repeated in 1929 and 1983.

By the 1950s interest in backyard and small farm flocks vastly decreased and the Plymouth Rock Club of America, the publisher of the Plymouth Rock Monthly, collapsed down to 200 members from a peak of 2,000. Thankfully, interest in keeping chickens is now on the rise again and an informative magzine, Backyard Poultry has been revived. Plymouth Rock fans can read an artcile about the breed in the latest issue of Backyard Poultry.

Speaking of poultry, the American Poultry Association will be holding their annual meet in nearby Ventura, California on October 25th and 26th. More info here. You can bet that Homegrown Evolution Root Simple will be there, blogging (tweeting?) live and picking up some fine schwag, such as the amazing patch on the left. What a nice symbol–a feather through a wishbone. We hope that the A.P.A never updates that nice logo! Get one for yourself in their “virtual shopping mall“. And take down that faded Nagel print and pick up their handy poultry breed chart for your living room.

Friday Afternoon Linkages–Some Fun, Some Scary

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Thoughtstylings
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Life is like a seesaw with a rusty bolt–a good kid on one end and a bad kid on the other and no way to tell whose ass is gonna hit the ground hardest. On the fun side of life’s pesky algebra equation this week:

Mark Frauenfelder is experimenting with a unique way of drying persimmons using a traditional Japanese method as pictured on the left.

Meanwhile, in a busy month of blogging, the intrepid urban homesteaders over at Ramshackle Solid show you how to make depression style candles, sweet potato and yam chips, and acorn flour. All great projects for our world’s ongoing “deleveraging”.

And, speaking of deleveraging, on the oooooh, scary we’re all going to die side of the equation:

David Khan of Edendale Farms has a video from peak oil partisan Matthew Simmons on a run on the gas station scenario that we’ll let you all ponder.

And in the really scary department, Dr. Oerjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University, aboard the Russian research ship Jakob Smirnitskyi in the Arctic Ocean, reports:

“We had a hectic finishing of the sampling program yesterday and this past night. An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface.”

No comment other than . . . yow! Full story here.