On the Safety of Cleaning Products

May 15, 2019

...the form of fragrances, solvents, disinfectants and softeners. Also, when used improperly at too great a concentration, some cleaning products can cause the degradation of materials resulting in the release of more VOCs. Many products can also trigger asthma. Disinfectants are considered to be the most hazardous category of cleaning products (1). And many cleaning products contribute to the pollution of our watersheds and oceans. Here in Los Ange...

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Why I’m Growing Vegetables in a Straw Bale

Mr. Homegrown

May 29, 2019

10 Comments

...ime around I’m trying an inorganic approach, substituting the blood meal I used last time for urea. I’m curious to see if I notice any difference other than price (urea is a lot cheaper). Should I try it again, I’m thinking of building some simple wooden boxes to hold the bales and keep them moist in our hot and dry summer season. My previous success with straw bale gardening is perhaps a lesson in the simple fact that there is no one-size-fits-al...

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Backyard in Progress

Mr. Homegrown

June 17, 2019

Garden Design, Gardening

3 Comments

...his house in 1998 the spot was occupied by a dead tree. A few years ago we used the area to mine clay for our adobe oven. This left a shallow depression that I filled in with compost and routed the downspout towards via an unsightly pipe. Lacking definition and choked with weeds, the area never looked good. Our landscaper Laramee proposed digging the depression out by about a foot and adding river rock and a little dry stream fed by the downspout....

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I’ve Been Working on This Chair When I Should Be Doing Other Things

Mr. Homegrown

July 17, 2019

Design

14 Comments

...his life and drew up all furnishings down to the desk accessories in the houses he designed for clients. When I spotted some of the quirky chairs he produced in the years before WWI, I knew I wanted to set about replacing the random dining room chairs in our living room with a sextet of Voysey’s “One-Heart” chairs. I liked the strange devil-like horns, the fuddy-duddy heart, and the odd hexagonal, tapered legs. Voysey used the heart motif almost t...

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Sorting Family Photos

Mr. Homegrown

October 28, 2019

Domesticus, Tidying up

16 Comments

...with a friend and in the cloud (Though I feel some guilt about the energy used for cloud storage of photos I might not look at). And they don’t’ suggest throwing out the originals. Lacking a way to project the films and slides, digitizing is the only way that I’ll be able to see them. But there’s a funny way in which grief works. With the photos in the shed I could put off dealing with the loss of my parents by keeping that grief at a distance, i...

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