Maintaining a Worm Bin

...tter how long you rest one side of the bin, there will always be a few confused worms living in the finished castings. If you bag them up with the castings, they’ll die. So you have to sort out your feelings and responsibilities vis-a-vis the worms. I won’t blame anyone for letting the strays perish (they had warning, after all) but I have guilt, so I do my best to sort them out. However, hypocrite that I am, as I do so, I entertain myself by tryi...

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Fun With Mortises and Tenons

...s test of eighteen of the most common joints (article is behind a paywall) used in furniture and found some surprising results. The strongest joint was actually a half lap. It’s not an attractive joint nor would it have worked for my table base. While the half lap is stronger, Fine Woodworking’s tests vindicated the traditional mortise and tenon over pocket screw joinery (similar to what is used in Ikea furniture). Pocket screws failed under 698 p...

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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Open Floor Plan

...ining room. And the two closets that share a wall between the two bedrooms used to be one big closet with a window. The window is visible from the outside but plugged up on the inside. I’m pretty sure that the house we live in was a kit offered by the Pacific Ready Cut company. Style #48 in the 1925 Pacific Ready-Cut catalog closely resembles our floor plan with the dining room and living room flipped and the closet in a different orientation. We...

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Grow the Soil

...Farm and Garden Supply has a nice selection of annual cover crops here. We used their dryland mix to deal with the bad soil in our front yard and we’ll re-sow it again this fall. Cover crops send down roots that break up soil, with the legumes used to fix nitrogen–it’s a great way to amend a large area with almost no work involved. Here at Homegrown Evolution we don’t believe in tilling soil. Tilling soil disrupts the natural balance of soil micro...

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How to Size a Breakfast Nook Table

...side. Having set up a new wood shop I set out to make a new table top and used a base that I found in an alley. Rather than that strange hinged mechanism I just used plastic sliders on the bottom of the table to make it easy to move the table back and forth. I chose hard maple and included breadboard ends for a traditional look. Flattening the table top was an excuse to learn how to use hand planes, the bicycle of tools in that they are simple, e...

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