Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

July 10, 2017

...uraged the owners of vacant property to take care of it; everybody dropped seeds in waste places in an effort to cover unsightly places with a growth of some sort. With interest roused the leaders had little difficulty in furthering the movement for beauty, though it took an enormous amount of energy and enthusiasm to keep the contest going for a whole year. It is estimated that at least two hundred thousand dollars were expended on small improvem...

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Transcendental Taggers

Mr. Homegrown

September 4, 2006

Thoughtstylings

...g the amenities of rural life, i.e. nature and agriculture, to our lives here in this somewhat ugly but interesting place we call home, the City of Los Angeles. In short, we intend to put the Urban in Urban Homestead. By the way, to the transcendentalist gangbangers who did the tagging – nice handwriting – you are obviously not the product of the same public schools we are....

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The Survivor

Mr. Homegrown

January 4, 2007

Thoughtstylings

1 Comment

...ticles about rainwater harvesting for important breaking news at our urban homestead–the development of the SurviveLA signature cocktail–the Survivor. For a long time we’ve cursed the previous owners of our compound for their useless, inedible landscaping. One of the plants they left us that we’ve lived with for all these years is an ornamental pomegranate tree (Punica granatum) that, while attractive, we had previously assumed was useless due to...

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Maggots!

Mr. Homegrown

July 29, 2006

Composting, Gardening

2 Comments

Like a lot of the agricultural duties around our urban homestead, composting requires time and initiative. Unfortunately both our garden and our energy level are at a low point, both sapped by the record breaking heat – anyone see Al Gore’s movie? The result of this lack of effort has been the maggot party currently going on in our compost pile. The best compostin’ revolutionary I ever met, photographer Becky Cohen maintained a three pile system...

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Tippy Tap, Beta Version

Mrs. Homegrown

June 26, 2014

Domesticus, Water and Power, Water Conservation

9 Comments

...I gave the bottle a quick coat of paint because I couldn’t scrape off the label and couldn’t stand to wash my hands while that psychotic, chemical peddling teddy bear stared up at me. The mechanics of building a tippy tap are quite simple, but fairly situational, so you’ll have to improvise around the shape of the water bottle you choose, and decide on a hanging method which fits your needs. Some basics: You need support The bottle has to hang fr...

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