Hexayurt

October 31, 2006

...gned by software engineer Vinay Gupta, who is working on this project full time, the “Hexayurt” costs somewhere between $200 and $500 to build, and requires only six cuts for each unit. The Hexayurt stacks flat for easy deployment in emergencies. Gupta has a suggested “Infrastructure Package” which includes heat, lights, water purification, and a composting toilet bringing the cost up somewhat, but still much less than FEMA’s $30,000 trailers. Whi...

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Save the World–Poop in a Bucket

Mr. Homegrown

January 30, 2008

Humanure

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...human waste, a number of other stories on the subject came out at the same time: Wasteland: A Journey through the American cloaca in Harper’s Magazine. Journalist Frederick Kaufman traces sewage from New York’s North River Solid Waste Treatment Plant to . . . [spoiler here!] bags of soil at Home Depot. A Mother Earth News reader submitted a photo and description of a handsome sawdust privy made out of an old garden hose box. Very clever! Science D...

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Siphon Your Bathwater

Mr. Homegrown

December 8, 2006

Water Conservation

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...ve siphoning devices available in hardware and auto parts stores made for siphoning gas, but SuviveLA has not tested them yet. If siphoning is too much effort for ya, it’s time to move on to more permanent solutions involving rerouting your plumbing that we’ll get into in subsequent posts....

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Kimchi Secrets Revealed

Mr. Homegrown

October 5, 2009

Fermentation, Food

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...i champion Granny Choe at Krautfest 2009 – photo from Eating L.A. The last time I tried to make the spicy Korean fermented cabbage dish known as kimchi it was such a disaster that Mrs. Homegrown exiled the batch to the back porch where it rotted for a good two months before we got around to sending it to the landfill. At Krautfest 2009, which we helped organize back in September, we had the great privilege of learning to make kimchi from kimchi en...

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Grow Italian!

Mr. Homegrown

September 2, 2006

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

It’s almost time to start planting seeds for the most productive growing season in Southern California – winter. While our friends in the cold parts of the country will be freezing their asses off we’ll be picking gourmet salads (sorry to rub it in). Since the climate here is like southern Italy, we like to plant Italian varieties. Which brings us to the source of many of our seeds at the Homegrown Evolution compound, Seeds from Italy. Italians d...

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