Wake Up and Fight

...I were chasing clicks, I would have given up long ago. Almost all of the “urban homesteading” blogs like this one disappeared years ago. That’s the result of many factors. One is the rise of social media, as capital found a way to monetize posting and shift the fruits of that monetization away from creators and towards large companies like Meta (gag) and all the others: Twitter, TikTok, YouTube etc. I’m sorry to say that I bought into the optimis...

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2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

...apture at least one swarm of bees and hand them off to a friend who has an urban farm and apiary. Kelly and I have a pet sitting arrangement with some friends of ours. When we go away they watch our menagerie and when they go away I head out to Pomona to look after Harpo the parrot and his dog, cat and gecko companions. Random Wanderings When you see a display of fake plastic corn dogs you have to take a picture. I tried and failed to get through...

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Mistakes we have made . . .

...t is too prodigious, and that’s the kind of problem you can hope for as an urban homesteader. 3. Newspaper seed pots Those newspaper seed starting pots we linked to earlier this year . . . well, there seems to be a problem with them. I think the newspaper is wicking the water away from the soil. While in Houston recently, I took a class from a master gardener in plant propagation and we used regular plastic pots, a thin layer of vermiculite over t...

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What does the loving landscape look like?

...nd. And that’s our friend David Newsom trying to sneak off the edge of the picture. It’s appropriate that he’s in this post, because he has a great garden himself, and he’s also trying to get the word out about loving the land and the importance of protecting insects such as the honeybee and the monarch. For the heck of it, here’s another shot of the same yard, just a little more to the right, so you can see the birdbath. I love the mulch. Mulch m...

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Homegrown Revolution at the Alt-Car Expo

...150 year plus record of dependability. You need not wear Lycra and, as the picture above proves, sometimes skin-tight clothes can be a very bad idea. You don’t need to be an athlete or have special clothing or equipment. Just jump on and roll. In Southern California we don’t have the excuse of bad weather. Conditions are perfect for year-round cycling and the terrain is mostly flat. It’s a bit hilly in Homegrown Revolution’s neck of the woods, but...

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