Urban Farming in Oakland

Public radio station KCRW has an excellent interview with urban farmer and writer Novella Carpenter. Carpenter has pigs, goats, ducks, chickens and more all on a small lot in Oakland, California. You can listen to the radio interview here (along with some other interesting segments on hunting caribou, cooking pasta, roasting peppers, and more) on chef Evan Kleiman’s show Good Food. You can also check out Carpenter’s blog, meaningfulpursuit.com. W...

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Book Review: The Blood of the Earth: An Essay on Magic and Peak Oil

...P it is no steal, either. All forms of the book are available on this here page. The paperback version is (sorta)(sometimes) available at Amazon. A good, free way to get to know Geer’s thinking is to read the archive of his weekly blog, The Archdruid Report. Right now he’s doing something a little different, a series of fictional pieces to illustrate an idea, but you’ll find many of the concepts from The Blood of the Earth in his blog posts, espec...

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I Made a Mallet

...odwork is paradoxically about metal work: the use and maintenance of metal tools. I’ve done a lot of carpentry over the years such as building sheds, chicken coops, laying floors, repairing joists and hanging molding. I’ve done this all with hand held power tools. But I have very limited experience with chisels and planes as well as shop machines such as table saws and bandsaws. And I’ve never paid enough attention to the details. Kelly is thrille...

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Plum Lemon Tomato Power’s Heirloom Tomato

...1,840 confirmed cases of food-borne illnesses in domestic tomatoes. Again, urban homesteading revolutionaries, GROW YOUR OWN! We found that label and it’s a tomato called “Power’s Heirloom”. Here’s how the Seed Saver’s exchange catalog copy describes it, “First offered in the 1990 SSE Yearbook by Bruce McAllister from Freedom, Indiana. His seed originated in Scott County in southwest Virginia over 100 years ago. Heavy yields of 3-5 oz. yellow past...

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Before and After Permaculture

...An aspirational alternative to the future of jetpacks and space colonies I blogged about yesterday, came to me via the folks at Petaluma Urban Homestead. Noting that I said I was going to sit in on Larry Santoyo’s Permaculture Design Course (PDC), Suzanne of Petaluma Urban Homestead sent me before and after photos of her backyard saying, “This is what happened after I took my PDC!”...

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