Mistakes we have made . . .

...t is too prodigious, and that’s the kind of problem you can hope for as an urban homesteader. 3. Newspaper seed pots Those newspaper seed starting pots we linked to earlier this year . . . well, there seems to be a problem with them. I think the newspaper is wicking the water away from the soil. While in Houston recently, I took a class from a master gardener in plant propagation and we used regular plastic pots, a thin layer of vermiculite over t...

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The High Cost of Golf

...rocess of settling the insurance claims. So what does this have to do with urban homesteading? A lot. It’s time for another anti-golf rant. Here are my problems with golf (especially municipal golf courses): 1. The colossal mis-allocation of land. Wouldn’t a lot more people benefit from a large community garden instead of a golf course? Most people in Los Angeles and many other big cities live in apartments and don’t have any space to grow their o...

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Problems Part I

The road to urban homesteading ain’t smooth and involves more than a few potholes along the way. Some of those potholes will swallow a bike tire while others are big enough for a Hummer. But with persistence it becomes easier to deal with the occasional bump, lessons can be learned and future mistakes avoided. With the popularity of our earlier blunders post, I’d like to begin regularly sharing problems as they develop. Here’s problem #1 for this...

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Gardening in an Apartment Windowsill

...controls or the weight of the food harvested. It’s about a love for beauty, an attention to detail and an appreciation of good food. Imagine if all our unused or neglected urban spaces were as beautiful and useful as Helen’s garden. We’d live in a world transformed, one windowsill at a time....

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A Recipe for Injera

...ation by Sandor Ellix Katz. This is a life changing recipe book that every urban homesteader should own–so go out and buy a copy! So here’s how we made injera based on Katz’s recipe: Ingredients 2 cups sourdough starter (check out our post on an easy way to keep and maintain a sourdough starter) 5 cups lukewarm water 2 cups whole-wheat flour 2 cups teff flour (an Ethiopian grain available from Bob’s Red Mill at Whole Foods) 1 teaspoon salt 1 teasp...

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