In Praise of Disorder

March 29, 2008

...club presents just the right level of civic inattention to allow the urban homesteader to get away with many of the illegal projects profiled in this blog: greywater, backyard poultry, and front yard vegetable gardening, to mention just a few. Ideally you have a balance between order and disorder–neither gunfire nor the prying eyes of city inspectors. Where I’m staying in Houston, with its flocks of loose chickens, packs of feral dogs, and broken...

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The Root Simple 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

Mr. Homegrown

November 23, 2016

Thoughtstylings

1 Comment

...thought I’d offer some suggested gifts, mostly obtainable online, for the urban homesteady types in your life. Most of the links are to Amazon, and we get a small cut of the proceeds, which helps keep our webmaster in kibble. But First . . . Charity Of course, rather than buying unneeded crap that will only clutter our already messy houses, we could agree to give to a charity instead. This season, due to our national “orange swan” event, Kelly is...

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New Sill Plate and Joists

Mr. Homegrown

May 28, 2018

Design

13 Comments

...ld have spent doing the things that normally take up the time of glamorous urban homesteading bloggers in the big city such as pondering avocado toast recipes or dehydrating loquats. After much all caps thinking, I came to the conclusion that we need a kind of time traveling Dr. Who character whose sold mission would be to stop misguided remodeling projects in the past. He’d spend a lot of time in the 1960s and 70s halting bad patio pours, stoppin...

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Mistakes we have made . . .

Mr. Homegrown

May 24, 2008

Animals, Chickens, Permaculture, Thoughtstylings

13 Comments

...t is too prodigious, and that’s the kind of problem you can hope for as an urban homesteader. 3. Newspaper seed pots Those newspaper seed starting pots we linked to earlier this year . . . well, there seems to be a problem with them. I think the newspaper is wicking the water away from the soil. While in Houston recently, I took a class from a master gardener in plant propagation and we used regular plastic pots, a thin layer of vermiculite over t...

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Paper Wasps: Your New BFFs

Mrs. Homegrown

October 31, 2016

Gardening, Insects, Nature Awareness

10 Comments

...ative European variant is more the wasp you will likely be dealing with in urban/suburban North America, because unlike their native counterparts, Euro wasps aren’t shy. They are the ones who will build a nest by your back door, or on the side of your mailbox. Paper wasps build those distinctive, easy to recognize papery nests made of many cells. There are other types of native wasps which build with different materials, such as mud. Honeybee colo...

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