Humanure Dry Toilet Made From a Milk Crate

Modern toilets take two valuable resources, water and nitrogen rich human waste, and combine the two to create a problem: sewage. In a dry or “humanure” toilet, you cover your deposits with a layer of non-toxic sawdust. Once the toilet is full you dump the contents into your outdoor humanure pile and compost the waste at high temperatures for at least a year. You can then use that compost as fertilizer for plants. The ubiquitous five gallon bucke...

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Creating a Moon Garden

...t pollinators and other wildlife. Bornstein had a number of great tips for making a garden interesting at night: Consider color. White flowers, of course, will pop out under moonlight. But yellow flowers stand out even more. We’re lucky in Southern California to have a lot of native plants with silvery grey leaves (an evolutionary adaption of dry climate plants). Masses of silvery grey leaves stand out well at night. Include a contrasting backgrou...

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Block Party Weekend

...ust transform or die. Sooner or later it must generate its own food, fuel, water, wood and ores. It must use these at the rate that nature provides them. It can . . .” -Paul Glover Los Angeles: A History of the Future as quoted in the LAEV Overview SurviveLA dropped in this weekend on a block party thrown by the apartment homesteading pioneers at the Los Angeles Eco-Village. Founded in 1993, the Los Angeles Eco-Village is a so called “intentional...

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Fallen Fruit

...uld burst with ripe produce. Great sums of money are spent on young trees, water and maintenance. While these trees are beautiful, they could be healthy, fruitful and beautiful. WE ASK all of you to petition your cities and towns to support community gardens and only plant fruit-bearing trees in public parks. Let our streets be lined with apples and pears! Demand that all parking lots be landscaped with fruit trees which provide shade, clean the a...

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Chicken Nipple Waterering Systems

...ean as a result. Chickens are certainly expert at fouling (fowling?) their water source. Which is why many people use nipple waterers like the one above. Chickens learn to use them quickly (they like to peck at things, after all). I’ve seen two DIY options: the simplest is a suspended five gallon bucket with nipples stuck in the bottom (as in the image at top), and the other is a five gallon bucket hooked up to a pipe with a line of nipples (as in...

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