Camping and Solar Cooking

...g. With the carrying capacity of the cargo bike, we can get fancy with the food and libations, allowing us to skip the usual dehydrated camping chow. These sittin’ around type of trips, or even a lazy Sunday afternoon at home, are the perfect occasion to deploy a solar cooker. Best of all you can build a solar cooker yourself for pennies out of cardboard and aluminum foil. For some foods, such as rice, it’s actually easier to cook with a solar coo...

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Hops in Southern California

...planted with hops vines growing up string attached to the east side of the building. Homegrown Evolution’s own hop farming experiment ended in the spring of last year after we accidentally plopped some home built scaffolding on top of the tiny vine while undertaking the heinous task of scraping and painting the front of the house. Planting it in terrible soil doomed it to failure anyways. We’re experimenting with growing both Cascade and Nugget ho...

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Shelter

...xt (site, cultural, weather etc.) and the joy of putting hammer to nail to build something yourself even if you don’t know what the hell you are doing. Sometimes the most ramshackled comedies of architectural errors evolve into home. But Kahn’s encyclopedic work also celebrates craft, with many examples of builders who gathered their knowledge through many years of experience. I go through Shelter all the time for inspiration and was thrilled to f...

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Goat Tower of Power

...Thanks to Mark Frauenfelder for blogging about the goat tower, originated by the Fairview Wine and Cheese estate of South Africa back in 1981. Fairview puts the goat tower on their wine labels (how could you not?). There are, apparently, several imitators worldwide with their own goat towers. Now, who will build the first L.A. version? Can we adapt Frank Gehry’s Disney Hall? How about city hall?...

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What is Killing the Bees?

...that may be contaminated with pesticides) that does not allow the bees to build their own comb. Regulate (through the use of foundation) the amount of drones the queen can make. Drones may be a sacrificial first defense against mites. Use queen excluders to prevent the queen from moving freely through the hive. Kill the queen and re-queen every year, often using artificially inseminated queens. Import hives from other climates. Feed hives high fr...

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