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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I Made an Enzo Mari Table and So Can You

...s fantasy plays out in the furniture I’ve build for the inside of the house. Such is the fate of attempts at revolutionary design within our post-modern age. Everything gets subsumed within a vast parade of styles and one can easily imagine this table on sale at Urban Outfitters at your local mall. Mari, who we lost to COVID in 2020, had the genius and grace to acknowledge the contradictions in his own work while not letting this discourse get in...

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Digital Farming- What’s The Deal?

Homegrown Neighbor here: So here in the world of urban homesteading things can get pretty busy. We can become so preoccupied with work, chickens, vegetable gardening, cooking, cleaning, blogging duties and email that we can miss some of the things going on in the world. I do like to occasionally check in with the world at large by reading the newspaper. I just read an article that I have to comment on. A recent New York Times article titled, ‘To...

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California Dreaming

...o fall into the gloomy, apocalyptic trap of some of the other folks in the urban homesteading movement. After a enjoyable evening last night at a fundraiser for the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, my dark mood lifted as I was reminded that good things are happening out there. Change comes slowly, one step at a time, requiring great patience. Like gardening, bread baking and home brewing there will be mistakes and setbacks. But there will als...

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Best Practices for Gardening in Contaminated Soil

...agriculture will increase incidences of elevated blood Pb for children in urban areas. This is due to the high likelihood that agriculture will improve soils in urban areas, resulting in reduced bioavailability of soil Pb and reduced fugitive dust. Plant uptake of Pb is also typically very low. The exceptions are low-growing leafy crops where soil-splash particle contamination is more likely and expaneded hypocotyl root vegetalbes (e.g. carrot)....

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