Compost Outlaws

December 29, 2008

...rhood comrade Tara Kolla, who grows sweet peas for farmer’s markets in her urban backyard, has been busted for . . . composting! Specifically for composting fruit and vegetable scraps from a local restaurant. From last Friday’s Los Angeles Times: Tara Kolla said she was doing a good thing for her Silver Lake Farms business while doing the right thing for the planet by filling a garbage can each week with produce scraps from a nearby restaurant and...

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How to Get Skunks Out of Your Basement and Yard

Mr. Homegrown

March 19, 2014

Animals, Gardening, Pests

4 Comments

Basements and crawl spaces under houses make idea dens for urban critters. If we could charge rent for all the skunks, raccoons and feral cats that have taken up residence under the house we’d have paid off the mortgage by now. Our particular crawl space critter B&B was opened by virtue of a flimsy access door. Some animal, most likely a raccoon, pried it open. The problem with this situation is that you can’t just close up the door. Some poor cr...

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Cycling in the US from a Dutch perspective

Mr. Homegrown

September 4, 2013

Bikes, Transportation

12 Comments

...and it gathered widespread support among mainstream commentators and young urban political activists. In Amsterdam in the early 1970s, there were already organisations with the aims of demotorising cities, improving public transport, preventing the bulldozing of heritage sites and controlling pollution. These campaigners opposed the statist interventions of the Left and the laissez-faire economics of the Right, both of which they felt threatened t...

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Picture Sunday: Images of Detroit

Mrs. Homegrown

June 30, 2013

Picture Sundays

4 Comments

...e. (One of the lots she gardens on cost $210.) She also says that there’s a 170 acre forest at the edge of her neighborhood, which makes it feel more like the country than the city. Looking at Google images of the Brightmoor areas, I agree. It does have a country feel. There’s lots of open space, lots of green lushness — along with the blighted houses and other signs of urban decay. You can also see this in her work, of course. It looks like a pla...

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How to make your soup wonderful: Wild food soup stock

Mrs. Homegrown

March 26, 2013

Food, Food Preservation, Foraging, How-to

6 Comments

We’ve mentioned urban foragers and foodie extraordinaires Pascal Baudard and Mia Wasilevic before. They not only forage food, but go on to make really good stuff with it. One of their websites is Urban Outdoor Skills, and I like to go there to check out a section called the Food Lab, where they talk about food products they’re experimenting with, and give how-to’s. A few months ago Erik brought home a beautiful bouquet of nettles. I decided to tr...

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