Made in the shade- Passive cooling

September 28, 2009

...st the walls of the house serves the same purpose by also blocking the highest angles of the sun. I chose to employ this technology and give myself more growing space by building an arbor on the back of my house. This shades the back of my house and makes it look much nicer at the same time. I have planted hardy kiwi on it. The kiwi will help to provide shade, give me tasty fruit, and because it is deciduous, it will die back in the Winter to allo...

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Are We Keeping Too Many Bees?

Mr. Homegrown

October 25, 2013

Bees

10 Comments

...l beekeeper Michael Bush has many good reasons for not feeding bees except under certain limited circumstances. One of the unintended consequence of feeding bees is that you could easily contribute to an overpopulation problem. It would be better to let populations decline and stabilize, in my opinion. One good thing that might come out of London’s alleged bee overpopulation problem, that the article points out, is that the situation might prompt...

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How to Keep Skunks Out of the Yard

Mr. Homegrown

March 11, 2014

Gardening, Pests

17 Comments

...here’s a concrete slab. But there are a few weak spot where skunks can dig under the fence. I knew of at least two places that were open, critter highways into our backyard. At these two spots I bent some hardware cloth into an L shape, attached the top part to the fence and partially buried the lower part in the ground. I also closed an awkward gap in a fence we share with a neighbor. Finally, I sheathed the chain link gate to the backyard with w...

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Saturday Linkages: Squirrels, Sharks and Nudists

Mr. Homegrown

December 7, 2019

Saturday Linkages

...e between two popular nudist resorts Shark Bites Google Fiber Optic Cables Undersea Ammo can power supply Building a Soil Sifter / Rotary Trommel I just interviewed the untaggable Dave Eggers, who told me he: *Lives without WiFi or a smartphone *Writes on a 14-year-old laptop with no internet connection *Checks his email once, daily, from the library …and now I have new life goals. — Brian EdwardsTiekert (@bedwardstiek) December 3, 2019 The mornin...

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The Monkey Rope

Mr. Homegrown

February 14, 2018

Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...u should. I just finished reading it and, next to the Bible, no other book comes close to Moby Dick’s sprawling, hallucinatory weirdness. It reads like a long prose poem, a philosophical horror novel, a meditation on our relationship with the natural world and, well, who knows what else. I’m haunted by one chapter in particular, “The Money Rope.” In this chapter Melville describes the narrator, Ishmael, tied by a line to Queequeg, who is assigned...

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