Bee Trellis

...rellis to surround the hive boxes that reside next to her shed. In a small urban yard a trellis around your bees will keep everyone happy. Bees naturally tend to fly upwards after leaving the hive but the addition of a fence keeps the few sideways stragglers from negative canine and homo sapiens interactions. As usual, the design process around Root Simple begins with the realization that our 1920s house looks best when surrounded by fuddy-duddy l...

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Saturday Tweets: Rats, DIY Plastic Recycling and Old Flatbread

...unity gardens. https://t.co/ODWFffKZ8v pic.twitter.com/7Q54UUYa8y — UC IPM Urban Program (@ucipmurban) July 19, 2018 This sums up my problems with Steven Pinker: https://t.co/IGYey5ks2i — Root Simple (@rootsimple) July 18, 2018 Found: 14,400-Year-Old Flatbread Remains That Predate Agriculture. #carbup #carbsovercars #gathererdiet via @atlasobscura https://t.co/PVA8Z4zW7K — Matt Ruscigno (@MattRuscigno) July 17, 2018 Philip K. Dick and the fake hum...

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City Farm Chicago

...nevitable development comes, pull up everything and move on. Assuming that urban land is contaminated, the City Farm folks simply piled up about three feet of compost, soil and mulch right on top of the broken concrete and asphalt of its current location. All that soil will move when the yuppie condos replace the salad greens and radishes. City Farm is an idea that makes sense in big U.S. cities which, despite astronomical real estate prices, have...

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The High Cost of Golf

...rocess of settling the insurance claims. So what does this have to do with urban homesteading? A lot. It’s time for another anti-golf rant. Here are my problems with golf (especially municipal golf courses): 1. The colossal mis-allocation of land. Wouldn’t a lot more people benefit from a large community garden instead of a golf course? Most people in Los Angeles and many other big cities live in apartments and don’t have any space to grow their o...

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Problems Part I

The road to urban homesteading ain’t smooth and involves more than a few potholes along the way. Some of those potholes will swallow a bike tire while others are big enough for a Hummer. But with persistence it becomes easier to deal with the occasional bump, lessons can be learned and future mistakes avoided. With the popularity of our earlier blunders post, I’d like to begin regularly sharing problems as they develop. Here’s problem #1 for this...

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