Homestead Academy: A Two Day Course in Kitchen Self-Reliance

...ead baking, vinegar brewing, yogurt making and more. The event, which will take place on July 6th and 7th is presented by Growcology and the Emerald Village and will take place in Vista, CA. This weekend intensive is designed to catapult you into a life of self-reliance through homesteading. Join Growcology and the Emerald Village Volunteers as we share the simple and effective ways to make: yogurt, cheese, butter, bread, home cleaning products, b...

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054 Digital Design Tools on the Homestead

Our topic this week is using digital design tools such as Sketchup to conceptualize and build simple projects around your house or apartment. Our guest is designer John Zapf, proprietor of Zapf Architectural Renderings and the genius behind our chicken run. During the podcast we discuss: Why you should draw up plans before you build something Architectural Graphics Standards Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) technology John’s Cat Bed 7 (pictu...

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Urban Chicken Enthusiasts Unite!

...hicken keepers. And we often meet people who would like to know more about urban poultry. So I’ve decided to create a group of L.A. urban chicken enthusiasts. I used meetup.com to create the L.A. Urban Chicken Enthusiasts group. I like Meetup because the point is to organize face to face meetings. Our group will get together every month or so, eat eggs dishes and talk about raising chickens, local food and sustainability. The L.A. Urban Chicken En...

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107 Urban Beekeeping with Terry Oxford

...systemic neonicotinoid pesticides such as Imidacloprid. Terry’s website is Urban Bee San Francisco. We get into a lot of topics including: Keeping bees on rooftops in San Francisco Ants and small hive beetles Natural beekeeping Splitting Natural beekeeper Michael Bush’s website Pesticide activism Treatment of nursery trees with neonicotinoids Senate bill 602 that would have required labeling of nursery plants treated with neonicotinoids How the Ca...

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

..., gasp, thoughtstyle my way to some new, alternative method of sacramental gardening. So I decided to try straw bale gardening again. My last attempt, that I blogged about and even did a video of, worked great. If you’ve never tried it, the process is simple. You get straw bales, water them, add nitrogen in the form of either blood meal (organic) or urea (conventional) for a few days and then let them sit for a month while keeping them moist. For...

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