Our new front yard, part 2: theory

...s, fancy staircases which sweep along the contour of the hill, or dazzling water features. Nobody designs in 15 foot wide spaces stuffed between a staircase and a garage. There’s just not a lot of room in our yard for sweeping gestures. I’m afraid our space is inescapably boxy, dorky and pokey. I’ve tried to imagine what could be done with this space if we had unlimited funds and the help of a talented designer. I suspect they’d want to remove our...

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Humanure Dry Toilet Made From a Milk Crate

Modern toilets take two valuable resources, water and nitrogen rich human waste, and combine the two to create a problem: sewage. In a dry or “humanure” toilet, you cover your deposits with a layer of non-toxic sawdust. Once the toilet is full you dump the contents into your outdoor humanure pile and compost the waste at high temperatures for at least a year. You can then use that compost as fertilizer for plants. The ubiquitous five gallon bucke...

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A viewing suggestion from the media arm of Root Simple

...outside world, to the electric light burning beside me. Bless the BBC for making Tudor Monastery Farm (a title which I believe would not fly on American television). This is a quiet series showing three historians/archeologists at play in the Weald & Downland Open Air History Museum, trying out some of the skills they’d need to be tenant farmers to the local monastery. It has some of the structure of a reality show, but it seems that no one reall...

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Branch Weaving & Climbing Structure Workshop

...es and fruits. Come and learn about weaving tuteurs, composting, mulching, water harvesting, and large structure wood weaving, and how to make a climbing structure for kids all from found wood. All workshops are led by artist/activist Jeeyun Ha. This is a four part Workshop, where you can attend one workshop at a time or all four. This is Workshop # 2 of 4 Branch Weaving & Branch Play Structure Workshop taught by Jeeyun Ha. Come join us in buildin...

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

...ecause his philosophy demands that you to focus intent on the garden, thus making the act of gardening a kind of sacred duty. But, this winter, I’ve still got a lot of tasks to complete and don’t have time to develop either a biodynamic compost pile or, gasp, thoughtstyle my way to some new, alternative method of sacramental gardening. So I decided to try straw bale gardening again. My last attempt, that I blogged about and even did a video of, wo...

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