What You Can Do to Make Our Streets Safer

April 13, 2018

...can think of at least two simple things you can do to begin the process of making our cities more livable and safe, especially for our children and elders. Burn Your AAA Card The Automobile Club likes to hide behind the cheery road trip facade epitomized by their magazines and free travel advice. But behind the scenes they are a lobbying group as powerful and nefarious as the tobacco industry. They’ve never seen a road they don’t like and have spe...

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The Year We Gave Up Our Smart Phones

Mr. Homegrown

September 3, 2018

Thoughtstylings

19 Comments

...ve to eat is freeze dried Beef Stroganoff in a Martian prison of their own making. We used their stranding as an opportune moment to rid our culture of the things that were holding us back. My own personal smart phone addiction recovery path began back in 2018. I was building the most complex project I’ve ever attempted, a chest of drawers. It required intense concentration and I kept getting interrupted by the ping of text messages, junk phone ca...

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Bread Camp at the Greystone Mansion

Mr. Homegrown

March 6, 2015

Events

1 Comment

...h-baked loaves, whole grain breads, pretzels, parchment crackers, tortilla-making and pizza dough 101. What’s more, many of our recipes will be baked in MOMO a wood-fired mobile bread oven! Don’t worry, home oven baking instructions will be included in your class handouts along with places to source the best flour, grain, equipment and tips. Highlights include: Assembling your own take-home wild yeast starter Grinding fresh flour on the spot from...

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Our Rocket Stove

Mr. Homegrown

November 21, 2007

Preparedness, Rocket Stove

92 Comments

...ew small branches or twigs. Before we built the rocket stove we considered making a cob oven, a mud domed wood fired oven in which you can cook bread and pizza. There’s a trend in the eco-world to build cob ovens and we felt a certain pressure to keep up with the eco-Joneses. We started to build the base for one and then began to think about how often we would actually build a fire, especially considering that it has to burn for several hours befo...

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The #700 Bookshelf

Mr. Homegrown

December 3, 2018

Design

17 Comments

...art. The #700 bookcase as seen in the 1909 catalog. My latest project was making a copy of Gustav Stickley’s #700 bookshelf, originally manufactured in 1904. The $30 price in the 1909 catalog would be around $900 today, not cheap considering that a good salary at that time was between $2,000 and $5,000 a year. In my cranky opinion the pre-WWI Arts and Crafts era marks the pinnacle of American design. It’s all downhill from this point. The #700 bo...

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