Earth Building Classes!

January 27, 2015

Events

...e looking to reprise our popular adobe basics class which will cover brick making, codes and basic adobe wall masonry. We are also looking at having an horno workshop in Los Angeles sometime this summer. Events October 2-4 – EarthUSA 2015, Santa Fe, NM: A reminder that EarthUSA, the premier North American earthbuilding community event is coming up this October. The event brings together expert practitioners, historians and conservation specialists...

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Everything Must Go: Tidying Up at the Root Simple Compound

Mrs. Homegrown

January 9, 2015

Cleaning, Domesticus, Tidying up

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...oint we remembered a book one of our readers mentioned, and which has been making the publicity rounds of late, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by the tidying consultant Marie Kondo (aka KonMari–her method is called the KonMari Method). She’s from Japan, where people have the same hearty consumerist impulses as we do here in the U.S., but considerably less space for storage. When I first read about the book, I understood the gist of it, but...

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Tiny House Dweller as Contemporary Hermit in the Garden

Mr. Homegrown

November 4, 2016

Thoughtstylings

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...bell for the quotes in this post and to Fr. Mark Kowalewski for the Joni Mitchell reference. You can also listen to a Futility Closet Podcast episode about garden hermits. Save...

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Nassim Nicholas Taleb on GMOs and the Precautionary Principle

Mr. Homegrown

September 30, 2016

Podcasts, Thoughtstylings

8 Comments

...presents what I think are some of the best arguments against GMOs. In this podcast Taleb tackles: The statistical errors found in scientific papers The need to apply the precautionary principle The unacknowledged risks of catastrophe The technological salvation fallacy In short, it’s not about the health risks of eating a GMO corn chip. It’s more about the way we discount and misunderstand risk. Consider Taleb’s argument the biological equivalent...

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Atomic Gardening

Mr. Homegrown

February 24, 2017

Fruit Trees, Gardening, Vegetable Gardening

3 Comments

The always entertaining podcast 99% Invisible has a new episode, “Atom in the Garden” about the forgotten 1950s fad of gardening with radiation. Essentially, it was a crude form of genetic engineering. Plants were zapped with radiation in the hopes of creating useful mutations. While it didn’t work well, it did produce several varieties grown to this day including Rio Star Grapefruit. There was also a strong amateur interest in irradiated seeds s...

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