Steve Solomon’s Soil and Health e-Library

October 23, 2012

...ntains books on “holistic agriculture, holistic health and self-sufficient homestead living” You can download the books for free, but Solomon requests a modest $13 donation. You can find this amazing resource at: www.soilandhealth.org. The “Radical Agriculture” part of the archive contains many early organic ag classics by authors such as Sir Albert Howard, J.I. Rodale and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. The “Homesteading” part of the library contains tomes...

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What are trees worth?

Mrs. Homegrown

August 20, 2015

Fruit Trees, Gardening, Nature Awareness, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings, Trees

21 Comments

...ich cools the ground, which cools the environment at large, countering the urban heat island effect. They also cool the air by passing water through their leaves. A healthy urban forest makes for a much more liveable city for us all. (The city of Melbourne understands this.) And trees clustered around your own house make your home cooler in the summer, reducing your energy bills. Low lying cactus and succulent plants do little or nothing nothing t...

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A Sports Utility Bicycle

Mr. Homegrown

July 15, 2006

Bikes

...bike without front suspension, which adds weight and is not necessary for urban riding. And remember that the kit does not work on bikes with rear suspension. I would, however, recommend buying straight from the company as the kits don’t seem to be selling on ebay at a significant discount. Putting it together was relatively simple – it took two trips to the Bicycle Kitchen, an extra length of chain, a rear derailleur cable made for tandem bikes,...

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Our new front yard, part 3: design

Mrs. Homegrown

November 17, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...rsist long after the bloom. Filler plants: These are the transitory, often self-seeding plants which pop up opportunistically to fill empty spaces. Wild flowers are a good example. They will fill open space in the garden in the early spring, while the perennials are getting up to speed. By the time the perennials shade them out, the wildflowers are pretty much done anyway. How I started: I started by considering the site, the light and the soil co...

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Fish Don’t Fart

Mr. Homegrown

June 21, 2009

Aquaculture, Preparedness

20 Comments

...ponics is profiled in the pioneering urban homesteading book, The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City and Scott Kellogg and Stacy Pettigrew’s book Toolbox for Sustainable City Living: A do-it-Ourselves Guide which comes out of their work at Austin’s Rhizome Collective. What all of these efforts have in common is a permacultural design principle of turning a waste product into a resource and closing a loop. Fish make fertilizer an...

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