How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Grub

October 2, 2009

...rning you empty a bucket full of grubs for your grateful chickens or fish, making sure to reserve a few to ensure future black soldier fly generations. Adult black soldier flies don’t bite and are only interested in flying around looking for sex and, in the case of the females, to find a good place to lay eggs. At $179, the BioPod™ is above our humble slacker budget level, but you can make your own out of the ubiquitous five gallon bucket. While I...

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The #700 Bookshelf

Mr. Homegrown

December 3, 2018

Design

17 Comments

...art. The #700 bookcase as seen in the 1909 catalog. My latest project was making a copy of Gustav Stickley’s #700 bookshelf, originally manufactured in 1904. The $30 price in the 1909 catalog would be around $900 today, not cheap considering that a good salary at that time was between $2,000 and $5,000 a year. In my cranky opinion the pre-WWI Arts and Crafts era marks the pinnacle of American design. It’s all downhill from this point. The #700 bo...

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What You Can Do to Make Our Streets Safer

Mr. Homegrown

April 13, 2018

Transportation

13 Comments

...can think of at least two simple things you can do to begin the process of making our cities more livable and safe, especially for our children and elders. Burn Your AAA Card The Automobile Club likes to hide behind the cheery road trip facade epitomized by their magazines and free travel advice. But behind the scenes they are a lobbying group as powerful and nefarious as the tobacco industry. They’ve never seen a road they don’t like and have spe...

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Easy Scandinavian-Style Bread

Mrs. Homegrown

October 8, 2015

Food, Recipes

7 Comments

...ough starter, take on the mantle (or apron?) of Household Baker, and start making these loaves myself, but I’m already taking on extra chores with him off his feet, so I’m not inclined to take up this one as well. Yet we can’t live two months without good bread. What to do? Fortunately, I’ve found a solution to our bread crisis: a perfectly good yeasted recipe which makes a dense whole grain loaf with minimal effort. No starter. No kneading. No ri...

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023 Cleaning, Spam Poetry and Shoemaking

Mr. Homegrown

October 29, 2014

Domesticus, Podcasts

5 Comments

...icle on the laborers who moderate social media comments. Earth Skills Shoe making classes offered by laughingcrowe.com Sewing classes at Sew L.A. We’ll add a link for Randy’s website when he finishes it–in the meantime, if you’re within striking distance of Santa Barbara and are interested in shoe making lessons, go ahead and shoot us an email at rootsimple at gmail dot com and we’ll hook you up with Randy. If you want to leave a question for the...

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