Build Your Own Furniture

October 27, 2006

Design

...innovative architectural ideas may have great potential, but when it comes time to buy supplies at the lumber yard, the overly creative builder will soon realize the difficulty of utopian designs in a world of 4 by 8 sheets of plywood and drywall. That geodesic shape is hip, but what do you do with the rest of the plywood sheet once you cut it out? The same limitation applies to making furniture. Thankfully a generation of designers back in the 60...

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Kent’s Composting Tips and Secret Weapon

Mr. Homegrown

October 27, 2006

Composting, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

...perts say no fats should go in, I’ve yet to see (or smell) a problem. Each time I add new kitchen scraps, I add 1-2 shovels-full of dry leaves and some water if needed, turning and mixing the old and new stuff with a cultivator or shovel to aerate the pile. The proportion of dry to wet material is important. There should be enough dry leaves so the compost is kinda’ fluffy and moist, not soggy, but the dry material shouldn’t overwhelm the wet eith...

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Hexayurt

Mr. Homegrown

October 31, 2006

Preparedness

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...gned by software engineer Vinay Gupta, who is working on this project full time, the “Hexayurt” costs somewhere between $200 and $500 to build, and requires only six cuts for each unit. The Hexayurt stacks flat for easy deployment in emergencies. Gupta has a suggested “Infrastructure Package” which includes heat, lights, water purification, and a composting toilet bringing the cost up somewhat, but still much less than FEMA’s $30,000 trailers. Whi...

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Roundup

Mr. Homegrown

November 9, 2006

Thoughtstylings

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...t we have not evaluated the number of cancers potentially induced, nor the time frame within which they would declare themselves,” Belle acknowledges. There is, indeed, direct evidence that glyphosate inhibits an important process called RNA transcription in animals, at a concentration well below the level that is recommended for commercial spray application. There is also new research that shows that brief exposure to commercial glyphosate causes...

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Block Party Weekend

Mr. Homegrown

September 11, 2006

Thoughtstylings

...SurviveLA dropped in this weekend on a block party thrown by the apartment homesteading pioneers at the Los Angeles Eco-Village. Founded in 1993, the Los Angeles Eco-Village is a so called “intentional community” of folks who, basically, give a damn and are interested in improving our forlorn, polluted, and abused city. The block party featured ecologically savvy and self-reliant touches such as solar ovens to cook the vegetarian buffet and photov...

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