Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom

August 18, 2015

...waters are continually flowing in.” Installing is the hard toil of garden making, placing is its pleasure. I think I’ve spent too much time in the installing and not enough time contemplating the placing. In so doing gardening has become more of a chore than a pleasure. Superior gardens are composed of Glooms and Solitudes and not of plants and trees. I take this to mean that a garden should express moods and ideas and not be just a collection of...

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Don’t Worry About the Boule: Bake Bread in a Loaf Pan

Mr. Homegrown

July 31, 2020

Bread, Fermentation, Food

8 Comments

...ooks more like a pancake than an Instagram worthy boule. But if you’re not making bread for the ‘gram, you don’t have to do a boule or batard unless that really floats your boat. There’s nothing wrong with baking in a loaf pan. Sometimes it’s kinda nice to have a square loaf for sandwiches anyways. The pan I have is a Pullman pan made by USA Pan. It’s square and has a lid. The lid is especially handy in that you can do the first 20 minutes of the...

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Timing Sourdough Feeding

Mr. Homegrown

April 6, 2020

Bread, Food

12 Comments

...ecent sourdough bread: the amount of time between feeding your starter and making your dough. I keep a small amount of starter on hand since I bake, at most, twice a week under normal circumstances (Under quarantine I’m baking a lot more but the reasons for that would be the subject of another blog post). Just before I go to bed, the night before I’m going to make bread, I take a tablespoon of starer and add it to 50 grams of whole wheat flour and...

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I Built a Harvey Ellis Dresser and it Almost Killed Me

Mr. Homegrown

October 26, 2018

Design

14 Comments

...fitting drawers, finishing surfaces). Late 19th and 20th century furniture making involves not just one task all day but a mix of responsibilities as well as aesthetic decisions such as deciding which way to run the grain. The Ikea dresser is made on a post-Henry Ford assembly line where workers either monitor machines and/or do the same repetitive task all day. This makes for a much cheaper product but an unhappy worker. I made many mistakes buil...

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A Not So Close Shave

Mr. Homegrown

April 25, 2019

Domesticus, Shaving

7 Comments

...orming a kind of Golem army. We can thank our Silicon Valley overlords for making an old legend a painful force-multiplied reality. And yet, every time I look at social media it causes me to ask how am I also complicit in the curation of an idealized alternate self via this blog and our books? How many times have I presented some neatly tied up homemaking/gardening tip when the actual results were more ambiguous? Or, to go deeper with this, how of...

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