We’ve taken the flowers out of our hair

...xus SUV at a filling station in Berkeley. More exciting to us was discovering that our base of operations in the Mission was a mere block from the infamous Symbionese Liberation Army safe house where heiress Patty Hearst became urban guerrilla Tanya. We have a feeling we’ll see the return of revolutionary noms de guerre in the coming few years and when that happens we’ll see Tom ditch the SUV for two wheeled transit on Berkeley’s many bicycle boul...

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Chicken Guantanamo

...ch and scratch down every plant they find edible behaving, as the Petaluma Urban Homesteaders put it, “like a pack of delinquent teenagers”. Our chicken housing consists of three zones. Zone one is the hen house–that aluminum structure on the right in the photo above. It contains a roost for the chickens to sleep on at night and a nesting box for the hens to lay their eggs in. Zone two is a secure run covered in 1/2 inch hardware cloth–the area le...

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Hen Pecked in Missoula

...Apologies, for the poultry fixation this past month, but we had to link to this story. It seems Missoula Montana is currently in the midst of a urban chicken controversy. New West Network’s Anne Medley and Jonathan Stumpf profile the dust-up in this video....

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Out of Water!

...Now!, the first book in Process Media’s Self-Reliance series (our book the Urban Homesteader, due out in May, is the third in this series). It’s one of the more expensive options in water storage, with new drums costing several hundred dollars, but avoids the problem of an off taste that plastic can impart. But while there’s something to be said for avoiding all sources of potential crankiness when the shit cometh down, stainless steel drums are a...

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Safety Films Night

...nter is located at 1200 North Alvarado Street @ Sunset Blvd. Map This ain’t a safety film and we won’t be showing this gem on Sunday, but it reminds us that we need to write about the aesthetics of urban homesteading. Something about the three-way nexus of Germans, country music, and “new wave” speaks to the notion of growing food and keeping livestock in the city:...

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