Master Tinkerer Ray Narkevicius

...hbor Ramutis “Ray” Narkevicius is building something, tending his poultry, making compost, growing hops on the rooftop of a brewery, scavenging materials, grafting a fruit tree or wiring the inside of a Fed Ex cargo jet. Over the years Ray has turned his yard into a elaborate nutrient loop. Spent grains that he gets from the brewery feed the poultry. Poultry manure nourish fruit trees and the duck water waste hosts crayfish. All the water gets pum...

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A Low-Tech Experiment in Growing Oyster Mushrooms

My furniture making hobby produces a mountain of sawdust and wood chips. Some of it I give to neighbors who have cabins with composting toilets. A lot of it I have to throw out. A few months ago a light bulb went off. I mostly produce oak sawdust which just happens to be one of the ideal substrates for growing mushrooms. While I love looking at mushrooms and attending lectures about mushrooms via the Los Angeles Mycological Society, I don’t know...

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Saturday Linkages: Let Them Eat Cake

...Coronovirus plans: stay home and make a cat cake. Coronovirus – Things You Can Do Our Economic Model Is Making Us More Vulnerable to Coronavirus How to Make a Garden Fountain Out Of, Well, Anything You Want You Already Live in Quarantine The One Defense Against Weaponized Memes ‘The best thing about Wellington’: Mittens the cat has paws all over New Zealand capital Visit the Chocolate Shop...

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I Spent 11 Months Building an Uncomfortable Couch

...rson is probably best known as the architect of one of New York City’s few Arts and Crafts style apartment buildings. Fun fact: Madonna lived there, and if you’ve got a $5,000,000 housing budget and can afford the $4,000 a month maintenance fee so can you. But I digress. Wilkerson’s design has some of Stickley’s austere reaction to fussy Victorianism but softened by gothic arches in the back seat slats and a kind of Greene and Greene-esque shape o...

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