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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Irving Gill: the Greatest Architect You’ve Never Heard Of

Mr. Homegrown

July 27, 2018

Design

2 Comments

...the first decade of the 20th century, Gustav Stickley promoted Gill in the pages of the Craftsman Magazine. But many of Gill’s buildings fell prey to the rapacious and indiscriminate mid-twentieth century wrecking ball and he fell into obscurity. He’s often thought of as a kind of proto-modernist but I’m not so sure. His buildings also have a neo-primitive quality, like a mashup of adobe missions, vernacular Greek architecture and a de Chirico pai...

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Saturday Linkages: Raccoon Robber, Facebook Phreaks and T-Bricks

Mr. Homegrown

March 4, 2017

Saturday Linkages

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...Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 4, 2017 T-bricks, the easy way to make an #adobe home https://t.co/2pqQOb93Hp #naturalbuilding — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 4, 2017 Re-purposed Laptop Screen for Raspberry Pi https://t.co/HuqOH6zxGM — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 2, 2017 How to French Polish https://t.co/TttyWoHq9b — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 2, 2017 How to turn an abandoned factory into a thriving mushroom farm: https://t.co/CqU7voZ2o...

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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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