Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Gardening Wisdom

August 18, 2015

...leasure. 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 plants or a collection of objects set amidst plants. Finlay’s garden is a poem. While it has a lot...

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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

...hy we continue to try to get away with it. So I don’t know about this one. Time will tell. For now, I’m praying we’ll get the new plants’ root systems established before the heavy rains hit. The primal landscape? Elephants on the Serengeti (Image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons) The concept of legibility One term used by Rainer and West in Planting in a Post-Wild World that I really glommed onto was “legibility.” Landscapes have to be legible to...

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Josey Baker on Bread: Whole, Wild, Wet, Slow and Bold

Mr. Homegrown

November 23, 2015

Bread, Fermentation, Food

4 Comments

...both Baker and Miller push that wetness to very high hydration levels: sometimes in the neighborhood of 120% hydration if you’re keeping score. (N.B. Hydration level refers to the ratio of water to flour by weight: 100 grams of flour mixed with 100 grams of water = 100% hydration) A big advantage of wet dough is that you don’t need to knead it. The gluten strands align on their own in the wet dough matrix. You still have to do some stretching and...

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Is Facebook Useful?

Mr. Homegrown

November 30, 2015

Thoughtstylings

34 Comments

...stead, focusing on comment threads on Facebook. It may be futile, but it’s time to fight back. What I’ve resolved to do I’m not going to give up on Facebook just yet. I can’t really. As authors we have to use it to promote our work and events. And I like keeping up with friends and family. But I’ve resolved to: Post only post positive things on Facebook. I do this already, but occasionally feel the pull of negativity. My favorite Facebook posts ar...

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Pet Peeve: Texting at the Gym

Mr. Homegrown

March 17, 2016

Fitness, Thoughtstylings

12 Comments

The older I get the more time I seem to have to spend at the gym fixing dumb sports injuries. With that age also comes a crankiness about rude smartphone habits. Lately I’ve found my exercise routine lengthened by having to wait for people just sitting on equipment and texting. I know that this is a “first world problem” and I’ll acknowledge that I’ve probably been guilty of searching for just the right podcast episode between sets. But the gym s...

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