Make Your Own Furniture

April 9, 2021

Design

...aven’t included in this list. He refers to his collection of books as “The Self Determination Library.” The plan is to keep adding to this post. If you know of books and resources for cheap, easy to make, well designed furniture leave a comment. For every resource that I’ve mentioned there’s probably a dozen more. When possible I’ve linked to free pdfs or books you can borrow at the Internet Archive. Gerritt Rietveld I built a set of Gerritt Rietv...

Read…

Acedia, iPhone Addiction and the Noonday Devil

Mr. Homegrown

May 31, 2024

Thoughtstylings

4 Comments

...he problem to something that’s “in our brains.” Somehow, by the end of the self-help article, we end up in an MRI machine to find out there’s a phone addiction part of the brain and, gee, we just can’t seem to do much about it! We don’t even have a good name for this problem which is why I’ve been thinking again about how the 4th century monastic notion of acedia might just be the framework we need. The root of the word acedia comes from the Greek...

Read…

Mutant Squash

Mr. Homegrown

August 1, 2006

Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

...k meaning “same household”) which is an evolutionary strategy for avoiding self-pollination. Corn is another example of a monoecious plant. Plants can only cross pollinate within their own species so watermelons can’t cross with lettuce, for instance. But there are many different varieties of squash, everything from butternut squash to spaghetti squash to various inedible gourds, so you can get some very freaky mutant cross-breeds. Results of thes...

Read…

Root Simple Visits Simparch’s Utah Compound

Mr. Homegrown

September 2, 2006

Thoughtstylings

...rchitectural thoughtstylist collective known as Simparch has established a self-sufficiency experiment they call Clean Livin’. Located on the remote South Base section of the historic Wendover Airfield on land leased by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Simparch’s project proves that self-reliance is possible in what must be one of the harshest climates in North America. Clean Livin’ features a set of solar panels, batteries, a solar shower,...

Read…

The Three Sisters

Mr. Homegrown

August 31, 2007

Permaculture, Vegetable Gardening

3 Comments

Due to the rigors of finishing our book The Urban Homesteader due out from Process Media next spring we were late getting around to planting our parkway vegetable garden. To review, the parkway is that space between the sidewalk and the street that belongs to the city but is the responsibility of the homeowner to maintain. The city, of course, wants us all to plant a lawn so that fat people can easily plop out of their Escalades unimpeded. We dec...

Read…