Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom

August 18, 2015

...at a garden should express moods and ideas and not be just a collection of plants or a collection of objects set amidst plants. Finlay’s garden is a poem. While it has a lot of sculpture in it, it’s not what you would call a “sculpture garden” which Finlay speaks despairingly of as little more than an “outdoor art gallery.” A liberal’s compost heap is his castle. Garden centres must become the Jacobin Clubs of the new Revolution. Certain gardens a...

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Seed, nut and fruit energy bars

Mrs. Homegrown

September 8, 2014

Food, Foraging, Recipes

8 Comments

...are should hold you over ’til your next meal. DIY Larabars I first started making these when I wanted a DIY version of a Larabar. If you’ve ever had a Larabar and looked at the ingredients list, you’ve seen that the ingredients are dried fruit and nuts, period. Which is great–I don’t like soy and added sugar and wheat filler material in my snacks–but Larabars are pricey for something so simple and replicable at home. Admittedly, dried fruit and nu...

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A Grand Rapids End Table

Mr. Homegrown

October 26, 2020

Design

12 Comments

...working project I tackle seems to come along with a lesson learned through making a mistake. A previous project taught me that I should take more time deciding what to make. As a woodworker, since you can make whatever you want, you might as well make something interesting and custom sized for a particular spot in your house. With this end table I took my time looking for the perfect piece to reproduce. While the Arts and Crafts thing is way out o...

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Ikea Karlstad Couch Hack

Mr. Homegrown

March 23, 2015

Design

9 Comments

...at in the process. To prevent this we took to putting a stack of our least favorite books underneath one end. While this was going on the cats, like marauding Visigoths, took to using both arms of the couch as a scratching posts. It was time for an intervention, an “Ikea hack” that would save the couch from the hydraulic jaws of the bulky item pickup truck. I set as my goal to make new arms for the couch that would be sturdy and cat-friendly. The...

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Everything Must Go Part 4: How to Fold Your Clothes

Mrs. Homegrown

January 15, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

24 Comments

...may seem a little extreme, but this simple change in behavior seems to be making all the difference in our dresser drawers. Very simply, KonMari politely insists (while flicking her pink glitter cat o’ nine tails) that we shape our all of our foldables into neat rectangular packets and stand them cheek-by-jowl in our drawers, rather like file folders in a standing file. As someone who has always folded clothes into squarish shapes and stacked the...

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