Self-reliance in LA: backyard farming + radical home ec

kirstendirksen

Published on May 20, 2013

Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne have been farming their yard in Los Angeles for over a decade. In addition to a mini orchard and extensive veggie garden, they have all the instruments of an urban homestead: chickens, bees, rainwater capture, DIY greywater, solar fruit preserver, humanure toilet, rocket stove, adobe oven. But they don't like to talk about sustainability of self-sufficiency, instead they prefer the term self-reliance.

"I don't like the goal of self-sufficiency, I think it's a fool's errand to chase that goal," explains Knutzen. "I think we live in communities, human beings are meant to live, and trade and work together. I think self-reliance is okay, in other words, knowing how to do things."
Knutzen and Coyne share their tinkering, DIY and small scale urban agriculture experiments on their blog Root Simple and in their books "The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City" and "Making It: Radical Home Ec for a Post Consumer World". They believe in the value of shop classes and old-school home economics (back when you learned how to make things, not shop for things).
For the couple, their true goal with all of this self-reliance is freedom to live as they please. By growing their own and canning, pickling, preserving, freezing and baking their own breads and beans, they live frugally. They also only own one car (plus a cargo bike), one cellphone and no tv. "I think a lot of it has to do with our overdriving ambition to be free," explains Coyne, "makes being cheap fun, because it means you can be free".
Root Simple: http://www.rootsimple.com/
Original story: http://faircompanies.com/videos/view/...
*Cameraman Johnny Sanphillippo also films for the site Strong Towns: http://www.strongtowns.org/

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• Urban Homesteaders Produce 6,000 Pounds of Food on 1/10 Acre
• See How One Couple Squeezes An Entire Farm Onto Their Small Los Angeles Property

Vertical Gardening Techniques for Maximum Returns

You can grow bigger, better cukes, beans, tomatoes and cantaloupes with simple, sturdy trellises

By Barbara Pleasant
December 2010/January 2011

Clockwise from top left: Rigid livestock panels do double duty as a fence and support for tomatoes, plus they can be bent to create an arched entry; saplings or bamboo poles are easy to use for pole bean tipis; pea tendrils love to cling to twiggy brush; and so-called “tomato” cages work better to support peppers and eggplants.


ILLUSTRATION: ELAYNE SEARS

Whether your garden is large or small, you can make better use of every square inch by using vertical gardening techniques to grow upright crops. Pole beans typically produce twice as many beans as bush varieties, and the right trellis can double cucumber yields. Then there are crops, such as tomatoes, that need some type of support to keep them above damp ground, where diseases have a heyday. All properly supported plants are easier to pick from and monitor for pests, plus you’ll get help from bug-eating birds that use trellises as hunting perches.

How Plants Climb

Plants that benefit from garden trellises use a variety of methods to cling to support, including curling tendrils, twining stems or, in the case of tomatoes, long, ropy branches that form roots in places that touch the ground.
Curling tendrils produced by peas and cucumber-family crops will twist around whatever is available, so you have plenty of versatility when supporting these crops. Tendrils cling to horizontal and vertical parts of a trellis, so netting woven from biodegradable string attached to posts often works well. Twining stems spiral around their support, growing steadily upward until they turn back on themselves — a growth habit seen in hops, pole beans, Malabar spinach and yard long beans.
Twining stems have little use for horizontal lines, so they do best with trellises composed mostly of poles or an upright fence. (See illustration in the Image Gallery.)
Tomatoes like to throw themselves over their support. They must be trained and tied to an upright trellis, which isn’t as easy as growing them in wire cages. The larger, more robust the tomato plant, the more you need a sturdy tomato cage that provides support on all sides.

Temporary or Permanent?

In my experience, a truly sturdy upright garden trellis must be anchored by T-stakes or vertical 4-by-4 posts (or 3-inch-diameter saplings from the woods), sunk 18 inches deep. Installing this semi-permanent garden structure takes time and muscle. In my garden, the most versatile trellises are about 8 feet wide, stand 4 to 5 feet high, and are made of woven wire fencing or a livestock panel attached to two posts. Allowing 4 inches of clearance between the bottom of the fencing and the ground makes the area easier to weed and cultivate. The advantages of such a trellis are the ready availability of the structure each spring and the option to make an attractive permanent feature in the garden.
The drawback of this or any other long-lasting vertical gardening supports (like an existing fence) is that it limits rotations to peas, beans, tomatoes and cucumber-family crops. Temporary trellises, such as bamboo tipis, give you more flexibility in terms of what you plant where, but they need to be taken down and stored in a dry place through winter to keep them from rotting. If you gather trellis parts and bind them together with string or strips of cloth in the fall and store them over the winter, they will go up quickly the following season.

Read More  Here

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• Trellises, trellises, trellises!
• Bad soil? No soil? Plant in straw bales instead
• Trellis
• A Cat's Cradle for Tomatoes An easy technique to train your tomatoes.
• Chevron Trellis DIY

 

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This is  an  awesome idea that  I use  at  home.  Although,  instead of placing  the  bucket underneath the  sink and  messing with the  piping  to  collect the  water.  I simply  use dish  totes ( the kind they  use  in restaurants for  busing  tables).  I  place  them in the  sink with  hot  soapy water and  the other  with  hot rinse  water.  I  wash the  dishes in one tub and  then  rinse  them in the other.  No  water is  wasted and the  water from the  tubs are  transferred to the 5  gallon  bucket when the dishes  are  done.  I  wanted  to  share  it  with  you.  The  more people  start  to  conserve  water  then  more   fresh  water  there  sill be.  Not  to  mention learning to  conserve  water  so that  you  already  know  what  to  do and  how  to  do it   when a  disaster strikes and  your life  will depend on  your  ability to  conserve.
It  is important to make  sure that the  detergent  you  use  is  phosphate free and  biodegradable.  So that it is  safe for your  plants and the   environment.
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Low-Cost Greywater Irrigation

Use greywater from your kitchen sink to water your vegetable garden with this simple irrigation system.

By Dana Cohen
August/September 2009

Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/Graywater-Irrigation-Low-Cost.aspx#ixzz1hu7XKqtN

A simple, portable watering system for a small garden.

DANA COHEN

I’ve always wanted to do more with greywater (also spelled graywater, gray water and grey water) — waste water from dishwashing, laundry and bathing — but as a renter, I wanted to invest my money and energy in a way that was more portable than traditional systems. I started by looking into rain barrels as a way to cache water and was amazed at how expensive they were. Then I found a few 5-gallon buckets at a construction site, and came up with this simple greywater setup that has worked well for me for the past two summers.

The setup is a 5-gallon bucket with a tap inserted, hooked up to a commercial drip irrigation system in my raised garden beds. I use one bucket per 2-foot-square bed.I clean the buckets, drill a hole, and insert a garden-hose-sized tap. To keep the tap from leaking, I cover the thread with Teflon tape, put a washer on the inside of the bucket and use a plastic hose coupler to secure the tap. I hook this up to the drip irrigation system.The drip irrigation kit was the most expensive part of this system at about $25. The tap and accessories totaled a little less than $6. I live in northern Arizona, and during the heat of high summer I use a full bucket a day in my sunniest bed.The source of the greywater is the leftover water from washing dishes, which I collect in another 5-gallon bucket I keep by the sink.

Dana Cohen
Fredonia, Arizona

Read more: http://www.motherearthnews.com/Do-It-Yourself/Graywater-Irrigation-Low-Cost.aspx#ixzz1huCkk0K2

Another  route that  some people  are taking  is  the  grey  water  diversion method.  This entails rerouting  the flow  of  grey water  from  main  sewer piping  established  by the cities and  counties to ensure that  the  grey water  can  be  utilized in a  more  efficient  manner.  Although  in some  States this is  illegal  many  are opting to the  clandestine  retrofitting to fill a need  for  conservation  and the  logical  and  ethical stewardship of  natural  resources and   our planet.