Is the Detroit Urban Farm Revolution Over?

...David and Sky Brown’s house. It appears that a young couple, David and Sky Brown, who bought a $2,000 house in Detroit last May ran afoul of an Animal Control officer on Wednesday. The couple’s goats and chickens were seized over the tearful pleas of their owners. There’s more on the story here. The Browns have asked for help on their blog. If any Detroit area readers know more about this story please leave a comment. Update: there’s a petition....

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Denver and Los Angeles Experience Crowds Staring at Chicken Coops

...ts with the handy networking tool known as the internet. Above, the Denver Urban Homesteading meetup group. If you’re in the Denver area (where Mrs. Homegrown Evolution spent her formative years) get to know these fine folks at: http://www.meetup.com/Greater-Denver-Urban-Homesteaders/ LA Urban Homesteaders looking at a chicken coop. Photo by Elon Schoenholz In a strikingly similar photo, our urban livestock workshop that we hosted yesterday featur...

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What’s Buried in Your Backyard?

...e’s a handy page for dating bottles, scans of antique bottle catalogs, and page after page of bottle types. My unintended archaeological efforts have yielded no Spanish doubloons, viking graves or Anasazi ruins, but I have found lots of glassware, mostly broken milk bottles. I’ve also discovered what I think are cheap perfume bottles like the one above. If you know what this bottle contained please leave a comment. I suspect perfume, because this...

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Rain Barrels

...’s still nice to have citrus trees, salad greens, rapini, beets, and other fruits and vegetables that do need supplemental irrigation. For these types of plants it’s possible to supplement municipal water with rainwater collected in barrels. You can purchase commercial barrels made of this purpose, but it’s also possible to construct your own using surplus barrels with the same improvised bulkhead fitting we described in our post on washing machin...

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