Food Storage Revisited

...e a big vegetable garden you will need a larger pantry or basement. We are urban dwellers with, at best, a tiny vegetable garden (which has been neglected this year while I work on the house). That said there are some big differences between the kitchens of the 1920s and the kitchens of today that present new challenges. Some of those changes: We have a lot more kitchen gadgets and consumer electronics. With the ascendancy of the personal automobi...

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The Great Beekeeping Debate

...t applying technological solutions. As Nassim Taleb has pointed out in his books The Black Swan and Anti-fragile: Things That Gain from Disorder, monkeying with complex systems from a point of ignorance leads to horrible, unintended consequences. Take the issue of varroa mite treatments. Let’s say you test a miticide’s toxicity on bees. You expose the bees to the miticide. The mites die and the bees live. Success! But . . . the unforeseen. What if...

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Will We Keep Keeping Chickens?

...operations. There’s a lot of negatives for keeping chickens in our small, urban backyard. We have lead and zinc in the soil, so many predators that the hens have to live in what I call “chicken Guantanamo,” and a small irregular piece of property that makes using a chicken tractor impossible. While I built a generous run for our four hens, I really wish that they could wander more freely, but that’s just not possible where we live. Another big ch...

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Saturday Tweets: Coffee, Bees and Bog Butter

...@rootsimple) June 17, 2016 A 67-Mile Hiking Trail Just Opened Through LA’s Urban Mountains https://t.co/tZg1QA0kEU — Root Simple (@rootsimple) June 18, 2016 Building a #garden wash station https://t.co/7VDEZ3oIYD #gardening — Tenth Acre Farm (@tenthacrefarm) June 18, 2016 Giant 2,000-year-old hunk of bog butter just found – and it’s still edible https://t.co/YDyjqBxyVZ — Root Simple (@rootsimple) June 13, 2016 Solid reclaimed Wood Chair https://t....

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Saturday Linkages: Fire Plows, Kite Fishing and Roundup-Ready Turfgrass

...ers à la carte http://shar.es/QRHOf Google hangout with Lloyd Kahn, master urban homesteader: http://boingboing.net/2014/02/12/google-hangout-with-lloyd-kahn.html … 3 MAKE projects to help you fight for your online privacy: http://boingboing.net/2014/02/11/3-make-projects-to-help-you-fi.html … Frugal Digital: Repairing, Hacking, and Repurposing Electronics http://feedly.com/e/x1zb0NgL Low-Tech Kite-Fishing in the Indo-Pacific http://feedly.com/e/v...

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