California’s Drought and What To Do About It

...e garden, in a way. I just made a major change to our laundry to landscape greywater system–more on this in another post. I’ve consulted historical irrigation data to more intelligently program our drip irrigation system. Keep in mind that 77% of California’s water use goes to agriculture (the media tends to forget this). Residential water use is a small part of the total. That being said, there’s a lot more we can do–the residents of Sydney Austr...

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Hops in Containers

...uitable place. I suspect that hops are a good candidate for pairing with a greywater source and I’m thinking about ways to do this. Now that I’ve grown hops, I’m tempted to go to the next level. The local Rite Aid? How about we replace it with a field of barley? I’m anxious to swing a scythe again. Stay tuned for info on a hops growing workshop with Boris Price and the folks at Silver Lake Farms to be hosted at the Homegrown Evolution compound thi...

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Edible Gardening Lecture at the Descanso Gardens

...ens. Here’s the description: Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, authors of “The Urban Homestead” and the blog rootsimple.com, discuss creating a garden that is not only beautiful but delicious! Part of “Get Dirty: A Garden Series by Descanso” on Third Tuesdays. Public admission to the Gardens and the lecture is free of charge the third Tuesday of the month. Hope to see some blog readers there–perhaps we can walk around the garden after the lecture. For...

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Saturday Linkages: Well Tended Fires, Gardening Myths and a Spartan House

...m/2014/06/thermal-efficiency-cooking-stoves.html … Grace and Gratitude, an urban homestead in Norfolk http://fw.to/kSevPBG ‘Hobbit house’ set to be knocked down http://bit.ly/1qttpPH 10 Gardening Myths Busted! http://www.thisoldhouse.com/toh/photos/0,,20815937,00.html … One for the honey: Beekeeping frame storage – IKEA Hackers http://po.st/IdBwgN A very low tech hearing aid: http://tinyurl.com/knbhgxr Spartan House http://smallhouseswoon.com/spar...

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Adam Parfrey 1957-2018

...f of the publishing team (with Jodi Wille), who put out our first book The Urban Homestead. At his memorial on Sunday he was remembered as someone who stood up for the principle of free speech, as a trickster, as the “last wild man of American letters,” and as a kind and caring husband, uncle and brother. I want to say just how much we enjoyed working with Adam and Jodi. One of the first events we attended, after our book came out, was a huge publ...

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