National Heirloom Expo 2013

...l full of great companies and organizations. I’ll be speaking on a panel on Wednesday September 11th at 2:00 pm on urban homesteading along with longtime friend Suzanne Mackey of Petaluma Urban Homestead and Trathen Heckman of Daily Acts and Transition USA. If you’re planning on attending please leave a comment and let’s try to meet up....

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073 Permaculture From the Inside Out with Rachel Kaplan

...nture are Kyra Auerbach, Delia Carroll and Cassandra Ferrera. Rachel wrote Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living (with K. Ruby Blume), and is currently working on a long-awaited book about community dance ritual with dance luminary Anna Halprin. Her website is: www.13mooncollaborative.com. Friend 13 Moon CoLab in Facebook here. During the show Rachel also mentions: Daily Acts, Starhawk and Mark Lakeman. If you want to leave a...

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What Does California’s Prop 64 Say About Home Marijuana Cultivation?

...ry it ended up in. This was before bookstores created separate shelves for urban homesteading. Unsurprisingly, we found it in the gardening section. What did surprise me was the other books in the garden category. The overwhelming majority were about growing marijuana. There were lavish coffee table books of bud porn, detailed encyclopedias edited by huge teams of experts and countless tomes covering the technical details indoor lights, fertilizer...

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The Tiny House

...can find a vacant lot, such a small house could be the ideal start of your urban homestead, leaving plenty of yard space for growing your own food. And these small building literally sip utilities making them ideal for hooking up to solar power and very cheap to heat and cool. They are also expandable as your needs or family grows. And perhaps most importantly, they prevent expansion of all the things we don’t need, the giant plasma screens, the i...

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Maggots!

Like a lot of the agricultural duties around our urban homestead, composting requires time and initiative. Unfortunately both our garden and our energy level are at a low point, both sapped by the record breaking heat – anyone see Al Gore’s movie? The result of this lack of effort has been the maggot party currently going on in our compost pile. The best compostin’ revolutionary I ever met, photographer Becky Cohen maintained a three pile system...

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