Two apps for choosing bike routes: one good, one bad

April 18, 2016

...anes and paths were. Now, there are apps for that. The Good: Google Maps In 2010, a bike option was added to Google Maps. While not perfect, it works surprisingly well. Combined with a little familiarity with what streets are good and bad to ride on, I now find that I rarely look at the city’s bike maps anymore. Here’s an example: one weekend this month, Kelly needed the car and I had to across town, from the La Brea Expo line station to the new W...

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Build a Ghetto Solar Cooker

Mr. Homegrown

September 29, 2006

Preparedness, Solar, Water and Power

Using crap we had laying around the homestead, SurviveLA fashioned a solar cooker based on plans from Backwoods Home Magazine, the Dwell of the Ted Kaczynski set. We just substituted an old cooler for the cardboard boxes, and we finished it off by using one of Los Angeles’ ubiquitous abandoned car tires as a cradle to keep the cooker oriented towards the sun. It ain’t pretty but it works. In our first test we reached 160º inside the oven, but we...

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010 Erica Strauss of Northwest Edible Life

Mr. Homegrown

July 30, 2014

Animals, Chickens, Food, Food Preservation, Gardening, Podcasts

1 Comment

...wide variety of topics: food preservation, gardening, keeping livestock in urban spaces, kitchen tips and home economic hacks. Some of the many topics we touch on in the interview include: How she got started homesteading Gardening in the Northwest United States Four season gardening Growing fruit in the Northwest Dave Wilson’s Backyard Orcharding Her viral blog post, The Terrible Tragedy of the Healthy Eater Meal planning for families Time manage...

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073 Permaculture From the Inside Out with Rachel Kaplan

Mr. Homegrown

January 20, 2016

Permaculture, Podcasts

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...nture are Kyra Auerbach, Delia Carroll and Cassandra Ferrera. Rachel wrote Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living (with K. Ruby Blume), and is currently working on a long-awaited book about community dance ritual with dance luminary Anna Halprin. Her website is: www.13mooncollaborative.com. Friend 13 Moon CoLab in Facebook here. During the show Rachel also mentions: Daily Acts, Starhawk and Mark Lakeman. If you want to leave a...

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What Does California’s Prop 64 Say About Home Marijuana Cultivation?

Mr. Homegrown

October 14, 2016

Gardening, Thoughtstylings

26 Comments

...ry it ended up in. This was before bookstores created separate shelves for urban homesteading. Unsurprisingly, we found it in the gardening section. What did surprise me was the other books in the garden category. The overwhelming majority were about growing marijuana. There were lavish coffee table books of bud porn, detailed encyclopedias edited by huge teams of experts and countless tomes covering the technical details indoor lights, fertilizer...

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