More on our gardening disasters

January 21, 2013

...to put the heart back into our garden. (Our Heart of Flax from way back in 2011) I thought I’d chime in on the subject of this year’s garden failures. Before I do, I’d like to thank you all for your kind advice and commiseration that you left on Erik’s post. First, I will agree that it really, truly has been a terrible year in the garden. Sometimes Erik gets a little melodramatic when it comes to the crop failure (e.g. the Squash Baby adventure)...

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June: National Bathroom Reading Month

Mr. Homegrown

June 26, 2008

Thoughtstylings

2 Comments

...level. Some things look useful, but there’s a lot of dubious stuff such as solar hat fans and electric scooters. And we suspect you can get many of the items in the catalog cheaper elsewhere, though we’re intrigued with the solar attic fans. Backwoods Home Magazine. We love Backwoods Home for its informative articles, unedited and rambling letters to the editor and for the outsider artist who does all the illustrations. Imagine Martha Stewart Livi...

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Water Conservation

Mr. Homegrown

December 30, 2006

Water Conservation

...(not the idiots at Home Depot!) can tell you how. .6% dishwasher Run your energy efficient dishwasher only with full loads. And incidentally, a study conducted by the University of Bonn in Germany concluded that dishwashers use half the energy, one sixth the water, and less soap than hand washing. One last sobering statistic to remember–the average American uses between 80 and 100 gallons per person per day, with the higher consumption coming fro...

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Rain: A Journal of Appropriate Technology

Mr. Homegrown

February 4, 2019

Appropriate Technology, Water and Power

9 Comments

...a lot of articles by E. F. Schumacher, as well as covering such topics as energy efficiency, permaculture and alternative schools. One topic I’d never thought much about, the destructive influence of tourism, seemed to be the special concern of co-editor Tom Bender. Here’s an especially eloquent passage by Bender from the May 1976 issue: Drinking wine one recent evening with Florian Winter, an Austrian visiting us on a global survey of renewable...

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Pedal Like Hell

Mr. Homegrown

January 26, 2008

Bikes

...est admission that our everyday tasks take a lot more energy than we imagine. It’s good to be reminded occasionally of the inescapable laws of thermodynamics, which C.P. Snow summarized as, 1. You cannot win (that is, you cannot get something for nothing, because matter and energy are conserved). 2. You cannot break even (you cannot return to the same energy state, because there is always an increase in disorder; entropy always increases). 3. You...

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