Food Storage as Art

January 7, 2013

....com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mG9xYVyAnuc Artist Jihyun Ryou’s work uses food storage techniques from the pre-refrigerator era in a way that’s both useful and beautiful. Her goal is to, “Try to bring your food in front of your eyes” to counteract that tendency we all have to make our refrigerators unintentional composters. The techniques she demonstrates include: Evaporation Sand, both to keep vegetables vertical and to decrease humidity Us...

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Who Needs Windows?

Mr. Homegrown

November 23, 2021

Design

5 Comments

...brutalist AT&T switching center in New York above), all those Amazon warehouses, or Los Angeles’ hidden and still functioning urban oil wells. Our window free tour will visit some misguided office buildings, a Masonic temple and a trade school. So turn on that glaring bank of florescent lights, sit down in a dark cubicle and let’s take a windowless journey beginning with the headquarters of America’s most mediocre chocolate factory. Hershey’s Choc...

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Garden Design Trends: Interplanting and Plant Communities

Mr. Homegrown

January 23, 2013

Garden Design, Gardening

4 Comments

...nature’s diversity, but in a somewhat more compressed form. The example he uses is the striking garden at Arthritis Research UK. You can see a video of that garden here. Rosalind Creasy has demonstrated, this same interplanting strategy can be used with edible and medicinal plants. Another related design strategy are gardens inspired by wild plant communities. The example Rainer cites is the Daily Telegraph garden seen in the picture above. You ca...

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Kelly’s New Desk

Mr. Homegrown

September 14, 2020

Design

14 Comments

...ry and older designs that, paradoxically, seem clean and modern. This desk uses a common staked leg design that you’ll see on a lot of tables and chairs in the past and to this day in many places in the world. As this was the first time I’ve ever built this type of table, mistakes were made but I’m pleased with the end result. Schwartz emphasizes hand tools which means that this desk could be made with just a few tools in a small workshop (though...

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Growing Strawberries in a Self Irrigating Gutter (SIG).

Mr. Homegrown

March 19, 2013

Gardening, Self Watering Containers

15 Comments

I got this idea from Larry Hall, who made a video showing how he uses gutters as self watering containers. In the first part of the video Larry shows how to use a gutter to supply water to a row of pots. In the second part he shows a two gutter strawberry growing system. I decided to build Hall’s self-irrigating gutter (let’s call it a SIG) to grow strawberries. Here’s how I did it: With some scrap wood I made a support system for the two gutters...

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