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

...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

...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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Maggots!

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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The Survivor

...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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Stickers for the Organic Gardener

...Boing a clever re-purposing: “Evil Mad Scientist Labs wants you to proudly label your organic garden with these handsome “Now Slower and with More Bugs!” stickers, originally produced to adorn software products. The influence of the Slow Food movement is increasing, and gardening is getting ever more popular. Even the tech bloggers are posting about local pollinators and getting beehives. In this environment, it is fitting that a new use has been...

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