The Tiny House

...can find a vacant lot, such a small house could be the ideal start of your urban homestead, leaving plenty of yard space for growing your own food. And these small building literally sip utilities making them ideal for hooking up to solar power and very cheap to heat and cool. They are also expandable as your needs or family grows. And perhaps most importantly, they prevent expansion of all the things we don’t need, the giant plasma screens, the i...

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Come see us at the fair!

...on the San Vicente side of the park. 1:oo-2:00: We’ll be signing The Urban Homestead at the Feral House Booth/Sexy Groove Lounge with the Feral House Pixies. Other spectacular Feral House/Process authors will be signing throughout the day, too. Location: booths C8 & C9, in the “Imix” zone, which is sort of between the food court and the pool. 2:00-2:30: We’re doing a demo at the booth–making butter! Afterward we’ll just be hanging out for the rest...

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Maggots!

Like a lot of the agricultural duties around our urban homestead, composting requires time and initiative. Unfortunately both our garden and our energy level are at a low point, both sapped by the record breaking heat – anyone see Al Gore’s movie? The result of this lack of effort has been the maggot party currently going on in our compost pile. The best compostin’ revolutionary I ever met, photographer Becky Cohen maintained a three pile system...

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Of Gnomes and Peak Oil

...task to command gnomes, The earth is filled by gnomes even to its center, creatures of diminutive size, guardians of mines, treasures and precious stones. They furnish the Children of the Sages with all the money they desire, and ask little for their services but the distinction of being commanded. [Source: Arthur Edward Waite, Real History of the Rosicrucians] Apologies to Paracelsus for the comparison–he is a much better read than Frum. And, ju...

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Midnight in the Desert

...hole: the power to restore life to deceased animals, birth mysterious seal creatures from within the carcass of lambs and produce impossible objects such as 1943 Roosevelt dimes. During a commercial break on Water’s first appearance on Coast to Coast, listeners started searching the area around Ellensberg on an early internet satellite service called Terraserver. Mysteriously, Water’s property seemed to have been blacked out. Bell later claimed to...

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