Drone Flyover of the Root Simple Compound

February 29, 2016

...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SplvON5R_Nk Many thanks to Steve Rowell for dropping by last week with his drone and shooting our humble compound. I cobbled together a rough cut of some of the shots that show our house and the neighborhood. Look carefully and you’ll see our chicken coop, adobe oven, the small but growing new planting in our front yard and more. Plus those 100 foot Mexican Fan Palms!...

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The #FewerFeatures Movement

Mr. Homegrown

February 3, 2017

Design, Domesticus

15 Comments

...at the hell is “Glass Xpress” or “Adaptive Wash” anyways? Via the power of Adobe Photoshop (itself a mirrored funhouse of features), I’ve redesigned the Whirlpool Quiet Partner III. Et, voila, #FewerFeatures: Here’s our complex and Eurotrashy, combo-washer/dryer: For the #FewerFeatures version, I’ve simplified the wash cycles to cold, warm and hot. I took out a few of the dryer’s options too (the dryer doesn’t work well anyways and we seldom use i...

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Getting Ourselves Back to the Garden

Mr. Homegrown

June 26, 2018

Design, Gardening

...ront and worked its way into the fringes of the small parking lot. A large adobe oven was added and bread and pizza baking events and classes take place on the second Saturday of the month. Recently, part of the front lawn became a community playground. Many church grounds sit idle during the week. Not Holy Nativity. As Rev. Rood put it to me once, “This is a community center that just happens to have a church attached to it.” While the word “comm...

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On the Safety of Cleaning Products

Mr. Homegrown

May 15, 2019

Domesticus, Tidying up

8 Comments

I had the great privilege of working with adobe yesterday while doing maintenance on our outdoor oven. While I’m terrible at plastering it was a great pleasure to work with this elemental and ancient building material that consists of just clay from the ground, sand, straw and water. There’s no need to gear up like an astronaut, with a respirator and gloves, as there is when working with concrete. The same day I showed Kelly Christopher Schwartz’...

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Backyard in Progress

Mr. Homegrown

June 17, 2019

Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...pied by a dead tree. A few years ago we used the area to mine clay for our adobe oven. This left a shallow depression that I filled in with compost and routed the downspout towards via an unsightly pipe. Lacking definition and choked with weeds, the area never looked good. Our landscaper Laramee proposed digging the depression out by about a foot and adding river rock and a little dry stream fed by the downspout. I made a bridge so that when it ra...

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