The Art and Architecture of C.F.A. Voysey

December 21, 2018

...pent every spare moment of his life obsessively drawing. C.F.A. Voysey: Birds of Many Climes c.1900. Voysey’s work points to an alternate trajectory in which our art and our cities are entwined with a reverence for nature instead being at the service of machines. Instead we have the cynicism, self absorption and nihilism of Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst. And all we have to look forward to are cites soon to be clogged with self driving cars. C.F.A. V...

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Ill advised grafting projects

Mr. Homegrown

January 21, 2016

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

4 Comments

...tobacco-grafted tomato fruits were considered to be safe for consumption. Self-grafted tomato cultivars also had flowering time onsets almost 11 days earlier. However, self-grafting caused 6.0% and 7.6% less total fruit yield per cv. It does remind me of the unsuccessful attempt back in the 1970s to graft hops onto cannabis root stock with the goal of creating a legal looking plant containing THC. The grafts take but the “Hopijuana” plants contai...

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Our Amazon Problem

Mr. Homegrown

August 24, 2015

Thoughtstylings

52 Comments

...e folks at the Idler in the UK. Like us, they teach classes. But they also self-publish beautiful books. What if we were to do the same and sell them through our website rather than through Amazon? Marshall McCluhan noted that when a new technology takes over, what it replaces becomes an art form. I have a sense that, with so much time devoted to staring at screens, people will increasingly want the peace and focus that comes with holding a beauti...

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Our new front yard, part 5: Constructing a meadow community

Mrs. Homegrown

December 2, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

15 Comments

...amic filler layer: These are short lived, opportunistic species which will self seed and pop up whenever there is a temporary space to exploit. Think about wildflowers, for instance, which show up first in the spring, and fade away as the perennials come back to their own. These make up 5 -10% of the community. Now, this sounds pretty straightforward, but once you get into the weeds (so to speak) it gets a little confusing. I wasn’t always able to...

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Gluten Intolerance . . . Is It All In Your Head?

Mr. Homegrown

May 16, 2014

Bread, Food, Thoughtstylings

26 Comments

...t common disorders related to food. But a much larger percentage of people self-diagnose as gluten intolerant who do not have celiac disease. Peter Gibson, a professor of gastroenterology at Monash University and director of the GI Unit at The Alfred Hospital in Melbourne, kicked the gluten intolerance self-diagnosis trend into overdrive with a 2011 study that showed a large percentage of the population (those without celiac disease) as having a p...

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