building with dry-laid natural stone

chilton limestone walk-front yard.

I love things made from natural stone.  There's really no substitute for it and no short cuts to take when building with it.  It's a masochist's medium.  Even building something relatively small with with stone leaves you with a backache and bloody hands.  But it's worth it.


To me it feels like dry-laid natural stone is to hardscape what permaculture is to softscape, or the planted world.  It's a human intervention in the landscape, but one that uses a product of nature, with minimal fabrication.  And the material is re-usable if the maker decides to unmake and create another thing with the same material.  Working with natural stone also pretty much guarantees you won't be using machines since cutting it isn't really practical, at least not often, and the uniqueness of each piece makes placing it with machinery difficult.   So you're doing a lot of lifting, then looking, contemplating, and re-lifting.  It's exhausting and also a little bit zen.

urban resilience: what sandy has shown us

from: "The Ruins of Detroit" by Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Hurricane Sandy has been an interesting window into what Americans in a dense urban area will do when deprived of power, water and all of the other things that we take for granted in the early twenty-first North American city.

Fist fights are breaking out in lines at gas stations, as suburbanites wait to fill their cars with hard to find gasoline.  New Yorkers are stranded as the trains stop, crank up generators if they have them, and plan to get them if they don't.

root cellaring for the winter

fall, front yard, tricycles.

I was standing in the kitchen Saturday afternoon, looking out the window, thinking about what I needed to do next.  I had been working on the rental place in the morning, making a bunch of minor repairs, together with my son, who loves being daddy's little helper these days.  We stopped by our community garden plot on the way back, and pulled up all the tomato cages and loaded them into the station wagon.

Then we went for a walk, or a hike- as he called it- through the scrubby patch of forest and weeds and junk next to the railroad tracks that flank the garden.  Then we came home to mom and sis for lunch.

So, I was feeling really accomplished by early afternoon and looking forward to getting into our backyard garden.  Gita saw me looking out the window and read my mind. 

building raised garden beds

raised beds made from repurposed playground lumber- before filling with soil

Apparently people enjoyed the post on building with salvaged things, because that has been one of the most-read posts I have written recently.  I must not be alone in my love of building things from junk- or what others have perceived to be junk- and which I've found to be valuable raw materials for my creations.

A project that I've been working on lately have been some raised garden beds for our rental property in Minneapolis.  If you haven't read earlier posts-  Gita and I bought  a foreclosed building across the river that had been badly neglected by the previous landlord and have been fixing it up for the last two years.  Now, finally, we have it to a point where we can stop doing triage, and can do fun and aesthetically pleasing things with the building and grounds.  So this fall I'm building raised beds for the tenants.

fall in saint paul

the maples of saratoga avenue, near our home

There are some things that pay no attention to the economy, the squandering of resources, the political dysfunction of the nation, even the changing climate.

I pay attention to those things, but nature doesn't so much.  The fall colors this year, in spite of the deepening drought, are gorgeous.  The conventional wisdom was that they were supposed to be dull due to the dry weather, which has set in in during the last half of the summer.

climate change on the ground

winter carnival, february 2011- a real minnesota winter

I don't know that it was on the front page of the New York Times or any other major newspaper, but the fact that arctic ice melted more than it has in recorded history should be a major story, I would think.

politics in the time of peak everything

itasca state park- preachers grove

“If you're not a liberal at twenty you have no heart, if you're not a conservative at forty you have no brain.”

 

-Winston Churchill

My 40th birthday was last week and I still have a brain.

I've been a voter for the donkeys for most of my adult life and will probably be again in a couple of months, though with a great deal less enthusiasm than I've had before. 

But, really, what is a conservative, or a liberal at this point in time?  Are the donkeys really liberals and are the elephants conservative?  What does it mean to be either right now- when resource constraints and global climate change are probably the most pressing, and most ignored issues to be dealt with- or not- as the case seems to be.

end of summer milestones

red calabash tomatoes, provider beans, some type of okra

It's hard to count all the things we've had happen in the last few weeks.  Our first tomatoes of the year, the finishing of the patio (pictures to come soon, but not today) first vacation in a while, a new car (cylinder count is now nine, including lawn mower) and most significantly- the first day of school- ever- for our daughter.

building with salvaged things

the new playhouse- built in an evening from five pallets and wood from the old compost bin

I enjoy building things.  It's satisfying in all the ways that a desk job is not.  And I have a lot of time at a desk these days.  On the weekends, partly as an antidote to the cubicle, I like to build stuff.

And I have two small, very demanding clients who have constant orders for new things.  One of those things was a playhouse.  They had seen a very cute, gingerbread-style playhouse for sale at Costco on one of our pantry-stuffing trips and had been asking (whining, really) for a playhouse, a real playhouse, or better yet, a treehouse in the back yard.

success with apricots/ cherries: failure

one of three chinese apricots from our tree this year.  two seasons ago this tree was a stick.

As if I needed any more proof that the climate is changing- there's this.  A rock-solid, guaranteed hardy, reliable Minnesota staple, the sour cherry, succumbs to a fungal disease, while a fruit native to Turkey and Iran thrives here in the same season.