Saturday Tweets: Mountain Lions, Chunky Gravel and Living in a Dumpster

...a @NatGeo — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 5, 2015 Back to the land on an Urban Homestead http://t.co/ES3mJJEmjP http://t.co/QyQILBx3oK — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 5, 2015 Toronto tunnel dug by 2 men as 'man cave', police say http://t.co/2PugkySbw7 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 5, 2015 What living in a dumpster for a year taught this professor about the things we don't need http://t.co/sBGKL35TD2 — Root Simple (@rootsimple)...

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Off to Baghdad by the Bay

...Homegrown Revolution is heading to San Francisco in our PPV on art business for a few days and to visit our comrades at Petaluma Urban Homestead. On our return we’ll post about our new illegal greywater strategy and our evolving thoughts on chicken housing. In the meantime check out our musings on guerrilla gardening over at Realty Sandwich....

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Mullein (Verbascum thapsus)

Every time we visit the nice folks at Petaluma Urban Homestead they send us home with some strange plant. Thanks to PUH, who are busy actually doing things as opposed to blogging about doing things, we now have a beautiful flowering mullein plant (Verbascum thapsus). Verbascum thapsus is one of those plants that most people think of as a weed. Native to Europe and Asia, Verbascum thapsus was introduced to North America because of its many medicin...

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Build a Rocket Stove

...echo Research Center, a non-profit organization devoted to improving conditions in third world countries through the development of low cost, simple cooking and heating technologies have developed a number of rocket stoves that you can build for your urban homestead. They have a simple model called the VITA Stove made with sheet metal (note the better soundtrack music on the video) and an institutional model made with a 50 gallon drum. We think we...

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The Survivor

...ticles about rainwater harvesting for important breaking news at our urban homestead–the development of the SurviveLA signature cocktail–the Survivor. For a long time we’ve cursed the previous owners of our compound for their useless, inedible landscaping. One of the plants they left us that we’ve lived with for all these years is an ornamental pomegranate tree (Punica granatum) that, while attractive, we had previously assumed was useless due to...

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