The Urban Hennery has issued The Dark Days Challenge.

The challenge will run from November 15 to March 15. The Rules:

1. Cook one meal a week featuring at least 90% local ingredients.
2. You define local - the standard definitions range from 100, to 150 to 200 miles.
3. Ingredients can be things you grew and preserved yourself, sourced from local farms and markets, or purchased at the store
4. Write about the meals you cook, your challenges finding ingredients, why you’re eating local or whatever else strikes your fancy for each recap. Photos are optional.
5. Include friends and family in your sourcing and eating as possible.

The Urban Ecoist brought my attention to a site containing a summary of the city codes across the country affecting the raising of chickens:

The City Chicken

Energy Boomer has a great article about what to look for when buying windows.

Here in Arizona, you should pay the most attention to the window’s Solar Heat Gain Coefficient (SHGC) rating. The SHGC is the fraction of incident solar radiation admitted through a window. SHGC is expressed as a number between 0 and 1. The lower a window’s solar heat gain coefficient, the less solar heat it transmits.

Click Here to read the article.

Do you have a great idea about helping the environment by making your home more energy-efficient? Make a video about it and submit it to Home Depot’s Save Money. Save Energy. Win Big contest.

Click Here for more information

Have your Permaculture Design Certificate? Ready to take your Permaculture practice to the next level? This course is for you. You will learn new skills and a new way of looking at Permaculture design, practice, and presentation:

• Practice pattern understanding with new tools- learn to see projects in a new way, and how they nest within diverse community scales and contexts.
• Explore how to use simple, clear presentation methods, as well as efficient ways to partner with design teams on larger projects.
• Study dynamic real world case histories of Permaculture projects, including projects in other cultures.
• Enhance your understanding of the often neglected “Zone 0″ of Permaculture Design
• Learn how to create working teams which enhance and empower communities to find their own sustainable solutions.
• Practice effective communication skills with clients and the public
• Learn more about working with government and non government organizations and non-profits

Dates: One long weekend - November 7th, 8th, and 9th.
Cost: $325 Fee includes all course materials and delicious natural snacks each day made from local foods. Although the course is non-residential, accommodations to stay the weekend may be made with the course host (contact Barbara Rose for lodging and/or camping info) -
brosearth@aol.com
(520) 572-7221
Location: Dancing Rocks Permaculture Community, fifteen miles north of downtown Tucson.
Contact Barbara for more info on the site and directions.
Teaching Team: Joel Glanzberg, Regenesis, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

See the Regenesis website at.http://www.regenesisgroup.com

To register contact Dan Dorsey, 624-8030, dorsey@dakotacom.net
http://www.sonoranpermaculture.org/members/dan-dorsey

You can view our full listing of courses for Fall 2008 and Spring 2009 at
http://www.sonoranpermaculture.org/courses-and-workshops

A short video from the Growing Power Urban Farm in Milwaukee:

HOMEGROWN follows the Dervaes family who run a small organic farm in the heart of urban Pasadena, California. While “living off the grid”, they harvest over 6,000 pounds of produce on less than a quarter of an acre, make their own bio diesel, power their computers with the help of solar panels, and maintain a website that gets 4,000 hits a day. The film is an intimate human portrait of what it’s like to live like “Little House on the Prairie” in the 21st Century.

Click Here to view the trailer.

Click Here to watch for the screening in your city.

The Internet is great, but sometimes there is nothing better than having a fellow urban farmer to commiserate with. Are there other urban farmers in your neighborhood? World Food Garden has published a tool that will help you find out.

Be one of the first to add your garden to the map.

http://www.worldfoodgarden.org/

From Earth Renewable Technologies comes the EarthBottle.

The EarthBottle is made from polylactic acid, which is basically a starch and sugar blend made from, in this instance, corn. It’s then blended with other plant-based materials such as flax or cotton that make the bottle sturdier and less permeable. Add a few anti-microbial properties and you have a container that that’s molded in a variety of sizes and colors, just like plastic.

Learn More…

Blair Stevens has begun writing a column on the Celcias blog that chronicles her effort to make her New England home more energy efficient.Read the first installment here

Let’s face it, we live in a fast paced world and sometimes life gets in the way, so we don’t always have the time to read all the top health books that we’d like to. That’s where Health Book Summaries come in.

Health Book Summaries is a free service that that can summarize today’s cutting edge health books without missing key themes and ideas. Think of them as Cliffs Notes for your health, fitness, and wellness.

Learn More..

EcoRenovator brings us the news that common ordinary rhubard is an effective remover of hard-water stains.

Click Here to read the article.

It looks like the cost of replacing a hybrid car’s batteries isn’t so bad after all.

The Hybrid Cars Blog reports that the cost of replacing the batteries in a first-generation Prius is now $2299. The second generation Prius should still be under warranty but if you did have to buy a replacement battery, it would cost $2588.

Here is an interesting article on the TerraPass blog about recycling waste heat at the University of Notre Dame.

The university has begun housing some of its computers in the nearby “Arizona Desert Dome,” a conservatory for cacti and other desert plants.  The computers get cooled, the cacti stay warm.

Click Here to read the article.

I found this great article about insulation on the Energy Boomer blog.

A broad array of new insulation types are in development. They hold the promise of offering values as high as R-20 or more.

One idea being researched is gas-filled panels. They use pockets of a low-conductivity gas such as argon, krypton or xenon.

Researchers are testing vacuum insulation panels. They rely on a vacuum between two layers of metal to create very high R-values. These work like a thermos bottle.

Aerogels are low-density fibers of silica or other materials. They can offer R-values as high as R-35 per inch.

Click Here to read the entire article.

It’s always a joy to see people making a living from doing what they love. It;’s even better when involves urban farming. One of the newest ways I see this happening is experienced gardeners are becoming Gardening Coaches. In fact, there is a blog dedicated to this new profession. This article contains some great advice for budding gardening coaches.

Your existing shower head may be as good or better that that snazzy low-flow shower head you’ve been eyeing in the building-supply store.

Eco-Renovator tested a low-flow shower heads vs his existing shower head and found the existing one out-performed the low-flow shower head.

Read the article and you can use his simple technique for testing your shower head’s flow rate.

The latest item of interest to thieves? Solar Panels. Thanks right: solar panels.

ECOtality Life brings us this report that police in California are seeing a massive increase in stolen panels from around the more than 33,000 installations in the state..

Engrave your driver’s license number on your panels.

Click Here to read the article.

Thanks to EcoRenovator.org for pointing us to this list from consumer reports:

25 Ways to Save Money at Home

Rhode Island has granted a New Jersey-based renewable energy firm the right to develop a wind farm in Narragansett Bay that would generate 15 percent of the state’s electricity needs in the coming decade, officials said.

Click Here to read the article