DIY Outdoor Shower

...r will soon separate your real friends from superficial hangers-on. But we urban homesteaders don’t need to be stinky since it’s possible and easy to build an outdoor solar shower. There are two reasons this makes sense, particularly in a place with as warm a climate as LA. First of all, you can direct the water straight into the garden and in so doing irrigate some plants and keep that water from uselessly running down the sewer line. Secondly, p...

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Got Real Milk?

...******************* -Sustainable Los Angeles lecture series: * Part1: Free Urban Permaculture Design Course Introduction by David Kahn * Part2: Talk and Slide Show Presentation: “Got Real Milk?” by Mark McAfee President, Organic Pastures,LLC. “Today’s milk is accused of causing everything from allergies to heart disease to cancer, but when Americans could buy Real Milk, these diseases were rare. In fact, a supply of high quality dairy products was...

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Make Your Own Damn Cheese

...mes it works and sometimes it doesn’t even with the calcium chloride. Milk labeled “ultra-pasteurized” will definitely not work. Now pasteurization is for wimps and worry warts. All of the tainted milk scares in the past few years have been with pasteurized milk. Those factory farm dairy cow concentration camps out there that produce most of the milk in this country figure that they don’t have to be clean since they are pasteurizing everything. Fo...

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Nitrogen Deposition

...ation chief Gloria Jeff for insisting that those trucks must keep moving and doing everything she can to keep LA the smog-spewing auto-addicted poster child for bad urban planning. So Gloria-will you be joining us for salad tonight? Don’t bother bringing any dressing....

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Loquat Season

...ces, the parkway and people’s front yards making them prime candidates for urban foraging i.e. free food. The tree itself has a vaguely tropical appearance with waxy leaves that look like the sort of plastic foliage that used to grace dentist office lobbies back in the 1960s. In short it’s a real tree that looks fake with fruit that nobody seems to care about. The loquat tree invites considerable derision from east coast types. Blogmeister, extrem...

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