The Urban Permaculture Farm Magazine
For 
Raw Food, Our own Dana Gordon(Garden Green) sits down with Monica Dewart(MoniDew)
Monica has been an asset on the Urban Sustainable Living website for some time now and I’ve seen some of her articles and where she has been cited in others: Honolulu Weekly’s Raw Meal article and The Raw Vegan Network article Raw Nutrition plus the Natural Health article advocating a no GMO world, to name a few.
The general response to most of my writings is “You’re insane,” and I’ve gotten used to hearing that. But keeping with the natural order and natural design of things has benefits. It’s far more logical than it may at first appear. One of the things that attracted me to Patti Moreno was how she set up her raised beds and her chicken tractor and how she moves things around. Patti realizes that the chickens poop on that area and that it will be good for the plants going into that space in the following season. It is just the natural order of things. She understands how these things work and she is living it! And at first I was humiliated by this because I know this but I don’t live it. So, Patti has been inspirational to me, motivating me to actually do what I know!
The Vegetarian Myth, by Lierre Keith, review by Alex Lewin
In her book, The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, Lierre Keith successfully assails not only vegetarianism, but also industrial civilization and agriculture itself. The effectiveness of her assault may dishearten anyone with abiding fondness for these institutions. She puts the puzzle pieces together excellently and without holes; the resulting picture challenges the foundations of industrial capitalism. She gives no quarter, and, as in James Howard Kunstler's The Long Emergency, her proposed resolution is not an easy one.
She starts by explaining her motivation. She deplores factory animal farming, and seeks above all an end to cruelty and oppression of all kinds. This is why she herself was a vegan for 20 years. In this respect, her goals are still aligned with those of moral and political vegetarians and vegans. According to her, their hearts are in the right place, but they've got the facts wrong. First, she describes her own early, naïve attempts to grow a vegan vegetable garden.
Growing Herbs: Horehound
Many will probably remember the days of a most popular candy. Old fashioned horehound candy and with autumn fast upon us, it is also time to start thinking about the dreaded coughs and colds that inevitably come with the colder time of the year. Sipping on warm herbal infusions does a lot for the symptoms, if not the soul, when one is in the deepest cavity of misery but there is more that can be done by the frugal self sustaining home gardener. Horehound has been used since early Egyptian times for bronchial afflictions and coughs and even today is popular in over-the-counter cough medicines. A single cup of horehound tea can have profound impacts on accumulated mucus in the respiratory passages, reducing phlegm and easing the gloom of illness. Use for bronchitis, flu, colds, and sinus infections. Have a sweetener on hand, horehound has a bitter taste!
The Raw Milk Revolution Book Review
I recently read The Raw Milk Revolution , by David E. Gumpert I recommend it to anyone who is interested in raw milk; in the viability of small-scale farming in the US today; or, more broadly, in the balance between individual rights on the one hand, and the state's role in protecting public health on the other—a civil liberties issue, really.
Gumpert describes a few specific clashes of raw milk producers with regulatory agencies, and tracks a few specific pieces of raw-milk-related legislation.
Green People Video
Growing A Rainbow of Carrots
It may surprise you to know that the carrot did not make it's orange debut until a mutated strain of the yellow carrot came to the Dutch who cross-bred it with red varieties to create an orange specimen in honor of the royal House of Orange. Thus creating the sweet and very orange variety that we know and munch down on today.
Growing carrots can be a snap with a couple of considerations. The first is to realize that they are from a sandy region of the planet and grow easily in sandy, rock free soil rather than regular soil. While carrots can grow in regular soil, sandy soil will yield better and straighter root crops. And the young seedlings are rather weak and will need an easy surface to break through. Traditionally, they are planted with radishes for this reason, but there are other methods to ensure that they are able to get through. My favorite is to trench the sandy soil and then place my seeds. I cover them with peat moss, and the seedlings have no problem sprouting without the aid of radishes.
The Chicken and the Egg it Produces
Though without a doubt, the chicken is the most universally eaten of all meats, I will focus here, upon the egg it produces. A rooster may be dispensed with, with very little deliberation or ceremony and then made a meal of. However, when one considers the little hen, no matter her disposition, one stops and considers weather or not she still produces eggs. Her value, lies mostly, in the number, size and shape of the eggs she produces.
When a female chick hatches, the number of eggs she is capable of laying in her life time, is already known, or at least within her. Samuel Butler once remarked "the hen is only an eggs way of making another egg?", this gives me pause. My point is, that the egg or the chicken/hen, are merely points in a life cycle, an endless loop.
Copyright © 2008-2010 Urban Sustainable living. All rights reserved.
An urban area is characterized by higher population density and vast human features in comparison to areas surrounding it. Urban areas may be cities, towns or conurbations, but the term is not commonly extended to rural settlements such as villages and hamlets.
Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. In ecology, the word describes how biological systems remain diverse and productive over time. For humans it is the potential for long-term maintenance of wellbeing, which in turn depends on the wellbeing of the natural world and the responsible use of natural resources.