Ridin’ On

...to force our cities and police departments to make cycling safer. It’s an urban homesteader’s duty to be involved with our communities and a big part of that duty is making our cities more bikable. What a tragedy it is to see people who drive to a gym so that they can ride a stationary bicycle! Unfortunately, the City of Los Angeles does not take cycling seriously. Senator Barbara Boxer speaking at the Mobility 21 summit in Los Angeles last month...

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The Great Water Conservation Grift

...onceived water conservation policies have gone poorly when it comes to our urban landscapes. Take, for instance, LA’s horrible lawn replacement rebate program that ended up in the hands of fly by night operators who exploited their workers and left us with acres of gravel and plastic lawns. Or, since most homeowners don’t have any understanding of climate or horticulture, we just get dead lawns or, at best, decomposed granite and a few sad cacti....

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Saturday Tweets: Compressed Air, Digging Down and Orange Marmalade

...8,000 acres of urban forest, according to a study published in the journal Urban Forestry & Urban Greening. https://t.co/eZw5XXnE5c via @AnthropoceneMag — Thomas Rainer (@ThomasRainerDC) May 17, 2018 'A pool in the basement is a clear marker of wealth': how the super-rich are digging down https://t.co/1zYqP2ALRl — Root Simple (@rootsimple) May 15, 2018 More amazing work from garden mosaic master Jeffrey Bale: https://t.co/B0kueZQOGM — Root...

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The Rat of the Land

...ry and Global Positioning System (GPS) rarely work because of interference from buildings and hard surfaces. At the end of his blog post Frye has a nice collection of research papers on urban wildlife. I highly recommend one of those articles, which was published in Science a few years ago, Evolution of life in urban environments....

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So Much Poultry, So Little Time

.... -Someone needs to put together an urban version of the 4-H club to bring urban agriculture programs to the inner city. Maybe it’s already been done, but from what I’ve been told urban 4-H clubs are all about nutrition, science fairs, and maybe training guide dogs. Kids desperately need contact with nature and animals. Let’s grow some food! But we may need to hippify the uniforms a bit . . . -When the economy hits the skids people start thinking...

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