Saturday Tweets: Cats, Silicon Valley and DIY Bus Benches

...s living on 11 acres in the midwest without electricity or running water! #homestead pic.twitter.com/n00fv7UsBd — Gardenerd (@gardenerd1) November 29, 2018 UK retailer offers Christmas trees for cat lovers https://t.co/jem0367EEh — Root Simple (@rootsimple) November 29, 2018 Laugh/cry! https://t.co/sXT6C6aPz1 — Mollie Stratton (@MollieStratton) November 29, 2018 đź‘Ź Two Swedish mums have managed to persuade 10,000 people not to fly next year. Are yo...

Read…

Build a Ghetto Solar Cooker

Using crap we had laying around the homestead, SurviveLA fashioned a solar cooker based on plans from Backwoods Home Magazine, the Dwell of the Ted Kaczynski set. We just substituted an old cooler for the cardboard boxes, and we finished it off by using one of Los Angeles’ ubiquitous abandoned car tires as a cradle to keep the cooker oriented towards the sun. It ain’t pretty but it works. In our first test we reached 160º inside the oven, but we...

Read…

133 Trees of Power with Akiva Silver

...lk to Akiva Silver of Twisted Tree Farm, described in his author bio as a “homestead, nut orchard and nursery located in Spencer, New York where he grows around 20,000 trees a year using practices that go beyond organic.” Akiva’s background is in “foraging, wilderness survival and primitive skills.” He is also the author of Trees of Power: Ten Essential Arboreal Allies (Amazon, library) just published by Chelsea Green. In our conversation we discu...

Read…

Stirred, Not Shaken

...ties us to nature and I look forward to stirring preparations and perhaps making them with a few close friends. In fact, I’m much more excited about making preparations than it buying a package through the mail. Steiner’s set of herbs all grow well here and many of them I have already. But a cow is kinda hard to come by in Los Angeles. While it may be heresy to some, perhaps we’ll have to come up with some modifications to the rituals that make s...

Read…

Build Your Own Furniture

...ack in the 60s and 70s left a few highly useful and groovy how-to books on making your own suburban-workshop-modernist furniture with a humble 4 x 8 sheet of plywood. The amazing art/architecture collective Simparch tipped us off to the world of plywood modernism how-to books and we at Homegrown Evolution recommend the stunning Sunset Magazine produced Furniture You Can Build, which is sadly way out of print and very expensive on Amazon, but avail...

Read…