Our new front yard, part 2: theory

...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

...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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Root Simple: 2015 in Review

...that I could do more how-to posts, but the fact is that they are the most time consuming. We did manage to do a few good ones: Stuff you Learn When the Power Goes Out (with El Niño storms approaching, it’s time to review this one), Restoring a Built-In Ironing Board, Three Things I’ve Learned from Baking Bread with Whole Grain and How to Make Hot Sauce. Podcast Comments Due to the nature of the medium it’s difficult for me to gauge the reaction o...

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Are Miniature Books the New Smartphone?

...man historian whose extant books chronicle the tumultuous years around the time of Constantine. So far it’s even more lurid than the updates on our current presidential election I get when I glace at the iPhone. Yes, you can read books on a smartphone, but I still think that the medium of a paper book lends itself to developing a greater ability to focus. And as Cal Newport suggests, anyone who can focus on a problem in depth for a long period of...

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How to Design and Fabricate Homestead Projects

...nce lots of high and low culture. I drew on those experiences when it came time to come up with a cage for the veggies. Due to my fascination with out-of-favor 80’s postmodernism, I remembered Robert Venturi’s Franklin Court from an architectural history class I took as an undergrad: Impressed that I remembered a small detail from a slide show in a class I took 30 years ago, I Googled Franklin Court and showed it to Kelly. She countered with Wonde...

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