Apartment Parking Lot Gardening in East Hollywood

July 31, 2014

...start a garden even if you don’t own a house and how an otherwise useless urban space can be put to good use. R.J. says: I wanted to be able to give my granddaughter the experience of gardening while she was growing up but as both my daughter and I live in apartments, and have no space for gardens I needed to come up with a solution . So based on the “Square Foot Gardening Book by Mel Bartholomew I built two 5 ft. x 1 ft. square foot garden boxes...

Read…

How Much Can You Carry on a Bicycle?

Mr. Homegrown

July 23, 2013

Bikes, Transportation

52 Comments

...s to climb hills even with heavy groceries. One need not be car-free to enjoy a cargo bike. For many years Kelly and I shared a car. The Xtracycle was a big part of making that car-light arrangement work. When people ask if urban homesteading saves money, the first thing I point to is the cargo bike, not the chicken coop. The problem? Cargo bikes are not nearly as sexy as the Playboy Land Yacht. That’s a problem I’ll get to in a future post....

Read…

Bucket Crapping

Mr. Homegrown

January 17, 2007

Humanure, Preparedness

Those ubiquitous five gallon buckets we’ve used to make self-watering containers are good for another purpose– an improvised crapper. When the shit hits the fan, you’ll need a place to shit and thankfully the fine folks at the World Toilet Organization have come up with a clever design for an improvised flush toilet using just a five gallon bucket, a coat-hanger, and a plastic bag. Now, not to be too graphic, but thanks to the Sierra Club we’ve h...

Read…

Quick Breads

Mr. Homegrown

February 20, 2007

Bread, Food

6 Comments

Here at the Homegrown Revolution compound we used to make our own sourdough bread. In fact we used the exhaustive, fetishistic and ridiculously detailed instructions to be found in Nancy Silverton’s book Breads from the La Brea Bakery. Silverton did for bread what Starbucks did for coffee, before she arrived on the scene America was a Wonder bread wasteland but now, in our coast to coast boho yuppified age, you can even find decent La Brea Bakery...

Read…

A Self-Watering Container in a Pot

Mr. Homegrown

July 25, 2007

Self Watering Containers

1 Comment

...e only way to grow water-needy vegetables reliably in a container. We have used them to successfully grow eggplants, tomatoes, collard greens and blueberries (note to the DEA: no cash crops at the Homegrown Revolution compound!). With our backyard looking fairly ugly this summer we’ve backpedaled on our earlier strident post about how we don’t care if our patio looks like a methamphetamine lab, and have dressed up one of our SWCs. Here’s how we di...

Read…