Essential System #9 – Hydration

...ust a few hours without it. We’ve got a number of water sources around the homestead, with a few more back-ups in the works. First off it pays to have some plastic water jugs around – figure two liters a day per person minimum. There are stricter standards for tap water in this banana republic we call the USA than for bottled water so don’t go wasting any money on boxes of Evian. The Red Cross recommends changing out the water every six months. Wh...

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Breaking News

...foreground of the picture above–laid her first egg–that is, our very first homestead egg. Go Stewpot! Of course this event would happen when Mr. Homestead is out of town & in possession of the camera. The lay site was a difficult to access cranny behind the coop. It may not have been photograph-able anyway, but I will report that the egg was deposited quite attractively in a shallow bowl of yellow and brown leaves. I got it while it was still warm...

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So Much Poultry, So Little Time

.... -Someone needs to put together an urban version of the 4-H club to bring urban agriculture programs to the inner city. Maybe it’s already been done, but from what I’ve been told urban 4-H clubs are all about nutrition, science fairs, and maybe training guide dogs. Kids desperately need contact with nature and animals. Let’s grow some food! But we may need to hippify the uniforms a bit . . . -When the economy hits the skids people start thinking...

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Our new front yard: history

...ake, or a mistake that you’ve made publicly, or a mistake that you’ve been making for a long time. This is why people keep climbing Everest even when they see a storm is rolling in. This is why we ended up with an ugly yards full of struggling trees. The cactus, however, grew exponentially. Its position was front and center of the slope, so–for better or worse–it blocked the view of the rest of the yard from the street. For several years it was ve...

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Deep Work

...even when you’re waiting in line at the post office. Rather than schedule time away from distraction Newport suggests scheduling time to give into temptation. Go ahead and surf the web, just do it in a scheduled block of time. We are, after all, human and need to view the occasional cat video (or catch up on Root Simple blog posts!). But we can’t let those cat videos define our schedules and inhibit our ability to focus on a single task. Newport...

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