Urban Homestead Wins Book Award

Our book, The Urban Homestead just won a gold medal in the Independent Publisher Awards. To celebrate we’ll throw in a back issue of Ripples magazine for the first twenty folks who buy a copy of our book off of this website. Ripples is, “A Revolutionary Journal of Seasonal Delight” published by the nice folks at www.dailyacts.org. Now that’s enough tooting our own horn. We’ll get back to posting when the dust settles after Earth Day and talk abou...

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Urban Chicken Enthusiasts Unite!

...hicken keepers. And we often meet people who would like to know more about urban poultry. So I’ve decided to create a group of L.A. urban chicken enthusiasts. I used meetup.com to create the L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts group. I like Meetup because the point is to organize face to face meetings. Our group will get together every month or so, eat eggs dishes and talk about raising chickens, local food and sustainability. The L.A. Urban Chicken En...

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Book Review: The Urban Bestiary

...estiary is an exploration of the intimate intersection of humans and other urban animals, such as coyotes and raccoons and opossums and squirrels. In The Urban Bestiary, Haupt introduces us to our close neighbors, the animals which share our land, and sometimes even our homes. She gives us a naturalist’s overview of their behaviors, physiology and life cycles, interspersed with personal anecdotes and interviews with wildlife experts. The resulting...

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Urban Farm Magazine

...elly Yrarrazaval of Orange County. All of these fine folks have repurposed urban and suburban spaces to grow impressive amounts of food, a common sense trend popular enough to have spawned this new magazine. Editor Karen Keb Acevedo says, “Urban Farm is here to shed a little light on the things we can all do to change our lifestyles, in ways we think are monumental as a whole, yet at the same time, barely noticeable on their own.” The first issue...

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The Manzanita Miracle, or, why you should love native plants if you live in a dry climate

...nzanita. Manzanitas (Arctostaphylos) are handsome native California plants–native to the West in general– known especially for their glossy red bark and twisting limbs. They appear as both ground cover and shrubs, and some of the happier shrubs can get big enough to resemble small trees. As a class we ran the calculations needed to figure out how much water a particular manzanita would need in a particular place. These calculations are never gener...

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