SIPS and Kraut at Project Butterfly

...zen will introduce you to how to grow your own food, make pickles, ferment beer, keep chickens, bake bread and turn your waste products into valuable resources. By stepping into the DIY movement, we’ll create a paradigm shift that will improve our lives, our community and our planet. Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, authors of The Urban Homestead, have become increasingly interested in the concept of urban sustainability since moving to Los Angeles i...

Read…

Saturday Linkages: From Bananas to Laird’s Laws

...h sperm whale death linked to UK supermarket supplier’s plastic http://gu.com/p/3eb3b/tw Solicitor George Cooper’s diaries give insight into Victorian life with his watercolour paintings http://bit.ly/yFANsU Recreation of ancient beer suggests it was really, really gross http://io9.com/recreation-of-ancient-beer-suggests-it-was-sour-and-ful-572664886 … Laird’s Laws http://shar.es/OPik9 For these links and more, follow Root Simple on Twitter: Follo...

Read…

The Heineken World Brick

...a that never got beyond a run of about 100,000–Heineken’s “World Bottle”–a beer bottle that doubles as a building material. It was a collaboration between Alfred Heineken and Dutch architect John Habraken back in the early 1960s. The story goes that the idea came when Heineken saw tons of his own beer bottles washed up on a Caribbean beach that also lacked affordable building materials. It would be great to see more reusable packaging like this. A...

Read…

Moonshine

...preferably from a source that will lend itself to a pretty picture on the label — bottle it, and you’re in the vodka business.” As it turns out there is an art to good homemade moonshine — a far cry from the soulless mouthwash Archer-Daniels-Midlands turns out. Here’s some excerpts from an interview of ex-moonshiner John Bowman conducted by the Coal River Folklife Project from “Tending the Commons: Folklife and Landscape in Southern West Virginia...

Read…

DIY Sage Deodorant

...this in the original bottle, which is, happily, glass with a pump top. The label from the bottle even peeled off easily! Thank you, Weleda. Then I added about 20 drops of essential oils to the bottle, which holds 100 ml/1/2 cup. I used a blend of sage, lavender and tea tree. I can’t tell you how much of each, because I was fiddling with it as I went, but the sage and lavender dominate. I held back on the tea tree because it has such an assertive o...

Read…