The Known Unknown

...and about. The answer was, universally, no. As for life here at the urban homestead, we get avocados and eggs from our yard but we get most of our food from our local Vons via their pickup service. You do your order with an app and head to their parking lot when the order is filled and they load the groceries into your car. It’s not perfect but it works. I made one trip to a local lumber yard to get some wood for some bookshelves I’m making for K...

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Root Simple is 10 Years Old

...ance on two first time authors. The book that they commissioned, The Urban Homestead, published in 2008, went through many printings and is still selling copies. After the success of the first book we got a lot of offers to write a sequel (or just another version of the same book for bigger publishers!). We ended up writing a how-to book for Rodale called Making It. Thank You! Root Simple is a group effort and there are many people to thank: our w...

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TV Turnoff week April 23 – 30, 2008

We don’t come from the sackcloth and ashes wing of the urban homestead movement. There’s no forced austerity around the Homegrown Evolution compound, no sufferfests, no “more-meek-than-thou” contests. It’s about pleasure not denial, after all. But, to use the “d” word, one thing we denied ourselves for many years was television. And during this TV Turnoff week, we thought we’d share our struggles with the tube. Ten years ago, when we moved into o...

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How to Bake a Traditional German Rye Bread

...tered water. Let sit for between 8 to 12 hours at room temperature. Second build: add 75 grams of rye flour and 75 grams of room temperature filtered water to the first build. Let sit for 8 to 12 hours at room temperature. You will end up with 250 grams of rye sourdough starter to use in your dough. Mixing, proofing and shaping Combine the 250 grams of starter you made with 475 grams of warm water (80 to 85º F). Mix in the rest of the ingredients...

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Netflix Before Netflix: The Tabard Inn Library

...ion (especially this one). While searching for just the right bookshelf to build, I discovered a very odd piece of furniture that turned out to be the “Netflix of books,(1)” a short lived subscription business called the Tabard Inn Library dating from 1902. It was the thoughtstyling of Canadian born businessman Seymour Eaton, who launched many different publishing related schemes in his lifetime in addition to writing the hit children’s book The R...

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