Is the Urban Homesteading Trend Over?

...ikes that coincide with canning at the end of summer. Unsurprisingly, most homesteading topics revolve around seasons. Seasonality, by the way, is one of things I really like about this movement. A digression here–the flatness of time (see Charles Taylor)–is one of the things I don’t like about modernity. “Home canning” searches “Home canning” searches show a more dramatic decline. “Backyard Chickens” searches People research backyard chickens in...

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Root Simple: 2015 in Review

...p. I’m not optimistic about this but I hope to be proved wrong. Honesty in Urban Homesteading We don’t do nearly enough blogging about the many hair brained notions and failed projects that transpire here at the Root Simple Compound and Labs. We did mange to chronicle a few of our shortcomings, such as our lack of a clothes line (Busted: Drying Racks, Clothes Lines and Cheese Puffs), the train wreck that was our summer garden (Our Disasterous Summ...

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Essential System #9 – Hydration

...tructions for purifying water with iodine or chlorine can be found on this page. Filters, however, do not kill viruses which include hepatitis A., Norwalk virus, and rotavirus and are present when water becomes contaminated by the feces of affected individuals. In other words, bad dookie in the water. To kill viruses you need to use either iodine, bleach or expensive filters which also use iodine or electrostatic charges. Boiling water for at leas...

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Cat Litter Compost, Installment #3

...Box. (And that name is pretty dubious, btw, because I spend plenty of time cleaning the boxes still.) Anyway, it’s basically a nesting system, two trays nested together. The inside tray has a perforated floor. The lower tray is solid. The way it works is that pine litter, when it meets moisture, expands and crumbles into sawdust. This dust just builds up in a regular box, but in these perforated boxes the dust falls through to the bottom bin. You...

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