Search Results for: label/appropriate%20technology/2010/06/the-urban-homestead/2011/04/making-it

871 results

Build a Solar Dehydrator

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Appropriate Technology, Preparedness, Solar
22 Comments
...several years ago and have used it each season for tomatoes, figs and for making dried zucchini chips. You can find plans for this “Appalachian Dehydrator”, designed by Appalachian State University’s Appropriate Technology Program, in the February/March 1997 issue of Home Power Magazine. The February/March 1999 issue of Home Power features a refinement of this plan, but we just built the original design and it works fine. The original plans and i...

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A viewing suggestion from the media arm of Root Simple

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Domesticus, Food, Gardening, Preparedness, Resources, Thoughtstylings
34 Comments
...outside world, to the electric light burning beside me. Bless the BBC for making Tudor Monastery Farm (a title which I believe would not fly on American television). This is a quiet series showing three historians/archeologists at play in the Weald & Downland Open Air History Museum, trying out some of the skills they’d need to be tenant farmers to the local monastery. It has some of the structure of a reality show, but it seems that no one reall...

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A Parvati Solar Cooker

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Solar
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...by Shobha Ravindra Pardeshi that can be found here. Pardeshi, who runs an “appropriate technology” company with her husband in India has another design for a similar dish-shaped cooker here. We found both of these cookers (and many more) via the amazing Solar Cooking Archive. For the Parvati cooker, we cut the cardboard according to the plans, and affixed the aluminum foil with spray glue. For our first pot of rice we used a black enamel pot to be...

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Grief is the pathway to action

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Back to the Garden, Thoughtstylings
28 Comments
...ut these things because we don’t want to be a downer. Nor do we want to be labeled morbid, pessimistic, impractical, oversensitive or even (gasp!) a tree-hugger. (FYI I was reprimanded in kindergarten for repeatedly arriving at school covered in sap because I’d been hugging trees all the way to school.) But the grief is there, the endangered elephant in the room, which we walk around and talk past, and do our best to ignore by making our lives eve...

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

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Gardening, Straw Bale Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
10 Comments
...ecause his philosophy demands that you to focus intent on the garden, thus making the act of gardening a kind of sacred duty. But, this winter, I’ve still got a lot of tasks to complete and don’t have time to develop either a biodynamic compost pile or, gasp, thoughtstyle my way to some new, alternative method of sacramental gardening. So I decided to try straw bale gardening again. My last attempt, that I blogged about and even did a video of, wo...

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