Black Friday Book Suggestions

November 27, 2015

...strike me as books for a craftsperson ready to take that next step toward making these products as a home business. Malle and Schmickl are scientists–stern Austrian scientists, no less– and they are all about consistency and professional practice. So these books mean to take you from being someone a casual dabbler to a home chemist who could make batches of vinegar or essential oil with consistent, predictable –saleable–results. I’d say the vineg...

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Our new front yard, part 3: design

Mrs. Homegrown

November 17, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...showiest plants, and also the ones that persist no matter what the season, making them the bones of the garden. This includes trees and bushes, as well as large perennials. In a grassland landscape where there are no trees or bushes, this category would include tall grasses as well as plants with dramatic seed heads which persist long after the bloom. Filler plants: These are the transitory, often self-seeding plants which pop up opportunistically...

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Our new front yard, part 2: theory

Mrs. Homegrown

November 13, 2015

Back to the Garden, front yard series, Garden Design, Gardening

12 Comments

...ch makes working on it real fun.) That might be one reason why the idea of making it into an orchard had so much appeal. When garden design books bother to address hillside gardens, they always feature much bigger hills than ours, and these hills feature expensive hardscaping, like artfully arranged imported boulders, fancy staircases which sweep along the contour of the hill, or dazzling water features. Nobody designs in 15 foot wide spaces stuff...

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Does Compost Tea Work?

Mr. Homegrown

November 16, 2015

Composting, Gardening

5 Comments

...epticism. Thankfully, I can now point towards the eXtension.org webinar on making and using compost teas that I’ve embedded above. I’ll oversimplify things a bit with a few of my own bullet points inspired by what Dr. Lynne Carpenter-Boggs, Associate Professor of Sustainable and Organic Agriculture at Washington State University and Catherine Crosby, a Ph.D. candidate in Soil Science at Washington State University had to say in the webinar. Due to...

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Fun With Mortises and Tenons

Mr. Homegrown

January 22, 2018

Design

8 Comments

...els of craftsmanship, I haphazardly fixed the table with screws and nails. Making the mortises and tenons took forever even though I was working with power tools–a plunge router to make the mortises and a table saw to cut the tenons. Of course, a great deal of the time in the workshop was spent in idle chatter. My workshop is right on the public sidewalk and serves as a kind of conversational trap for every passing neighbor and dog walker. Kelly s...

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