Search Results for: label/rooftop gardening/2010/06/the-urban-homestead

667 results

Reforming City Codes

Avatar photo
Thoughtstylings
10 Comments
...Change the outdated codes that were enacted as a response to someone’s suburban utopian nightmare of manicured lawns and gumdrop shrubs! This is probably what will come of the Florida case. My City recently tried to legalize backyard chickens, someone started an anti-chicken campaign and the City Council lost it’s nerve and voted the amendment down………….Sometimes you just can’t win…….. DRBREW makes a good point. The City of Los Angeles just starte...

Read…

2013 in Review Part II

Avatar photo
Thoughtstylings
7 Comments
...and, other than harvesting tomatoes, summer here is not the best time for gardening. Time to contemplate closed vs. open floor plans and catch a crappy Hollywood movie. “Crappy Hollywood” is a redundancy, of course, as all Hollywood movies are crappy. September Mrs. Homegrown complained about my flour storage mess. I just bought a Komo mill and so this mess should diminish in the next few months. In the further interest of cleanliness, I blogged...

Read…

Village Homes: A Model for Sustainable Suburbs

Avatar photo
Design, Garden Design, Permaculture, Urban Farming
6 Comments
...limits–the almond crop is harvested every year and sold to support the the gardening services for the entire development. There are also community garden space available for those who wish to raise more food crops than their own yard space allows. The lush growth coupled with the reduced asphalt surfaces makes the whole development 10 degrees Farhenhiet cooler in the summer than the surrounding suburbs. I could go on and on, but perhaps the best w...

Read…

In Defense of the Paper Wasp

Avatar photo
Animals, Insects
12 Comments
Paper wasp building a nest. Image: Wikimedia. I really don’t like gardening advice that divides the natural world into lists of good and bad bugs. From nature’s perspective all creatures have a role, even the much despised paper wasp. Paper Wasp Biology 101 Wasps perform important duties: some wasps eat other insects, other wasps are scavengers, acting as nature’s garbage disposers. That’s not to say that wasps don’t earn some of their bad reputa...

Read…