The Homegrown Mailbox: How and Where Do I Get My Soil Tested?

...aboratories 365 Coral Circle El Segundo, CA 90245 (310) 615-0116 www.bettersoils.com Test results very scientific No recommendations Soil and Plant Laboratory, Inc. 1594 N. Main Street Orange, CA (714) 282-8777 FGL Environmental 853 Corporation Street Santa Paula, CA (805) 525-3824 USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service 44811 N. Date Avenue Lancaster, CA 93534-3136 (661) 945-2604 Here’s a dirt cheap (pun intended) test for soil ph that you ca...

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Urban Homestead Book Signing and Lecture

...rban Eco-Villages and the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition present THE URBAN HOMESTEAD Talk, Slide Show and Book-Signing with Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen Thursday June 26th 2008 7:30pm at Los Angeles Eco-Village 117 Bimini Place, LA 90004 Directions at www.laecovillage.org Suggested donation $5, no one turned away for lack of funds Books sold separately for $15 Come hear the authors of the Homegrown Evolution blog and get yourself a copy of t...

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What is green water?

...and hold rain water rather than ejecting it straight to the street. We leave the leaves. We keep our clippings and fallen leaves on our land, and let them return to the soil. Mulch is is vital to living soil, while bare soil is dead soil. We make our yards lush. Soil life occurs around the root zones of plants, so more plants means better soil. We plant trees, which the founder of TreePeople, Andy Lipkis, calls “living cisterns.”...

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Start Your Urban Homestead for One Dollar

...The Lyth Cottage in Buffalo, purchased for $1. Photo: Buffalo Rising. Want to move to Buffalo, New York? If so the city has an Urban Homestead Program where you can get a house for a $1 plus closing costs. The rules–you’ve got to: Fix code violations. Live in the house for at least three years. Have $5,000 in the bank for repairs. Too cold a climate for me, but you can read more about the program and see some success stories at Buffalo Rising....

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Urban Homestead Wins Book Award

Our book, The Urban Homestead just won a gold medal in the Independent Publisher Awards. To celebrate we’ll throw in a back issue of Ripples magazine for the first twenty folks who buy a copy of our book off of this website. Ripples is, “A Revolutionary Journal of Seasonal Delight” published by the nice folks at www.dailyacts.org. Now that’s enough tooting our own horn. We’ll get back to posting when the dust settles after Earth Day and talk abou...

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