How to Get Skunks Out of Your Basement and Yard

March 19, 2014

Basements and crawl spaces under houses make idea dens for urban critters. If we could charge rent for all the skunks, raccoons and feral cats that have taken up residence under the house we’d have paid off the mortgage by now. Our particular crawl space critter B&B was opened by virtue of a flimsy access door. Some animal, most likely a raccoon, pried it open. The problem with this situation is that you can’t just close up the door. Some poor cr...

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Fish Don’t Fart

Mr. Homegrown

June 21, 2009

Aquaculture, Preparedness

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...ve it closer consideration. Aquaponics is profiled in the pioneering urban homesteading book, The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City and Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew’s book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-Ourselves Guide which comes out of their work at Austin’s Rhizome Collective. What all of these efforts have in common is a permacultural design principle of turning a waste product into a resource and closing...

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Hipster Compost

Mr. Homegrown

June 30, 2014

Composting, Gardening

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An updated, urban version of the soil food web. In the nearly sixteen years we’ve lived here we’ve seen our local stretch of Sunset Boulevard go from boarded up storefronts and auto body shops to restaurants, bars and cafes. Along with those new businesses and artisinal facial hair, comes a great new set of compost sources. Some of my enterprising neighbors, one in particular, have been creating what could be called hipster compost or, at least,...

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Got a Critter Question?

Mr. Homegrown

September 3, 2014

Animals, Podcasts

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...Our guest on the next episode of the Root Simple Podcast will be Lyanda Lynn Haupt, author of The Urban Bestiary: Encountering the Everyday Wild. We’re interviewing her tomorrow (Thursday) so if you have a question about coyotes, moles, raccoons, opossums, squirrels, rats or any of the other creatures that visit our urban backyards, leave a comment....

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Our new front yard, part 3: design

Mrs. Homegrown

November 17, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

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...sses, shrubbery and trees, which is to say, the elements of the classic suburban yard. 3. The forest, which is design in cooperation with stands of trees. They take apart each archetype in detail and discuss the design considerations for each, the possibilities and potential problems. I focused on the grassland section, because I had already decided that I wanted my slope covered with low growing, meadow-type plants. As I’ve already discussed, we...

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