Search Results for: label/lead/page/10/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

587 results

The Mystery of the Zero-Irrigation Squash

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Food, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
20 Comments
...e had no water for months. The chairs in the picture above are holding over 100 lbs (45+ kilos) of food grown with zero water inputs! To top that, this was one of the healthiest squash plants we’ve ever “grown” or rather allowed to grow. How did that work? And more importantly, how can we make it happen again? I have three thoughts: 1) Perfect timing. Volunteers know exactly when to come up. They’re rarely wrong. We humans schedule planting by whe...

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Compost Piles on Fire!

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Composting, Gardening
8 Comments
...sting facilities that covers this common problem. So what situation(s) can lead to a fire? Here’s what can happen with a low moisture, large pile with little air exchange, combined with water getting into the pile in a place where there is enough air to support biological activity and chemical oxidation, but not enough to cool the pile. An old, dry compost pile, or a pile of overs screened out of the finished product, is a case in point. Water see...

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Seat Weaving for Fun and Profit

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Design
6 Comments
...lightly different kind of woven seat. Learning to weave Scando chairs will lead you to the “profit” promise in this blog headline as you help supply all the Silver Lake Shamans with refurbished mid-century thrones from which to enjoy a $15 juice while Instagraming their house plants. Most chairs narrow at the back and you have to account for that when weaving the seat. Hammond shows this first step at the beginning of the video. My chair is square...

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On the 100th Birthday of Our House: The Past and Future of Housing in the U.S.

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Design
10 Comments
This year marks our home’s 100th birthday. Throughout the year I plan on writing a few posts on what it’s like to live in an intact and, mostly, unaltered 980 square foot 1920s era bungalow. Let’s start with the differences between a house in 1920 and now. In 1920 the average house size in the U.S. was just over 1,000 square feet. Square footage peaked a few years ago at around 2,600 square feet and has declined slightly since. The often forgotte...

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