I Spent a Year Making a Bed

April 18, 2024

Design

How’s that for a click bait title? But I really did spend almost a year on this with most of that time eaten up teaching myself how to do marquetry and inlay work. As I mentioned before, my first attempts didn’t go well and I spent a lot of time searching for advice on how to do this particular style of Art Nouveau work that almost nobody does anymore. Sanding and finishing metal and wood right next to each other also proved difficult and I’m not...

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Make a Rain Barrel

Mr. Homegrown

October 8, 2008

Design, rainwater harvesting, Water and Power, Water Conservation

11 Comments

...nnection is another reason I like Chenkin’s design. It’s important to keep rainwater away from your foundation especially when, like us, you live on a hill. The picture at top shows our barrel installed with the overflow pipe connected to a pipe that runs down to the street. Los Angeles’ building code required us to run our rainwater out to the street, where it helps wash pollution into the LA River and the ocean (see creekfreak for more on LA’s p...

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What does the loving landscape look like?

Mrs. Homegrown

April 16, 2015

Back to the Garden, Gardening

18 Comments

...shamelessly screen grabbed a still from a nice short video about Brad and rainwater harvesting, called Free Water, by Andrew Brown. I will share this video again later in this series, and we’ll talk more about Brad, too. In the meanwhile, though the images are not of best quality, look at the lushness of this landscape. This was all done at low cost with basic materials, working smart instead of working hard. This all grew out of nothing. Believe...

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The Root Simple Workshop

Mr. Homegrown

June 22, 2016

Design

5 Comments

...bright orange/white/black color scheme. Our friend Lee Conger noticed the labeling on these cabinets that point to our overly eclectic interests: It’s like our heads need to be KonMaried! And fencing purists will note that the label should be “epee parts” not “swords.” Our three bikes and cycling accoutrements are kept locked to a pole. Always lock your bikes, kids, even when they are in the garage! The one last touch I want to add to the worksho...

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Polyculture

Mr. Homegrown

December 7, 2006

Permaculture

14 Comments

...w in the fall. So you see, the secret is in choosing plants with staggered harvesting times, so they don’t come in all at once, overwhelming you and competing with each other for space, and also in choosing plants that are not all from the same families, so they don’t compete for the same nutrients. The beans in the polyculture above help replenish the nitrogen in the soil that the other plants drain out. Very clever. With little effort compared t...

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