Sweet Paul’s Hanging Bench
I need this beautiful hanging benche in my yard very, very badly. Sweet Paul made it and posted up simple directions for making your own. [via Apartment Therapy]
Gardening
The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for hacking nature from plant grafting to building gardening tools and sprinklers.
How-To: Ball-In-Cage Switch
Sean Ragan just put up a tutorial for this simple analog tamper-detecting switch for guarding his garden over on Make: Projects: This clever mechanical switch remains open so long as it is balanced in an upright position. But disturb it in any way, and the ball falls against the bars of the cage and closes […]
Moss-Covered Living Walls in London
I wish I had seen these moss walls by Norwegian design studio PUSHAK while I was in London last week! From Inhabitat: Dubbed Moss Your City, the project was installed during the London Festival of Architecture as a part of the foundation’s international exchange program, which promotes emerging architects in both Norway and the UK. […]
How-To: Make a Fountain
Sunset has more than 30 DIY fountain projects up on their site. I love fountains, and with some clever material sourcing, they can be quite easy to put together. When I lived in a bustling town with tons of traffic, my fountain was kept outside under my bedroom window so I could fall asleep to […]
How-To: Bike Tubes for Trees
Avid gardener Lenore Edman at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories writes: Even after one too many flats, a used bike inner tube has plenty of uses. One more to add to the list: it can be used as a cushion between a tree trunk and a staking wire. More: How-To: Bike Tube Headband (CRAFT Video)
Visual structure of a zen rock garden
Just ran across this fascinating little paper published in Nature back in 2002 by Gert J. Van Tonder, Michael J. Lyons, and Yoshimichi Ejima. In it, the authors apply a simple shape analysis to the layout of the 15 boulders in Japan’s most famous karesansui (or “Zen garden,” as they are often called in the West) at the RyÅan-ji temple in Kyoto. The technique they use is called “medial axis transformation,” which, by my understanding, basically means that they took the Voronoi diagram of the boulders in the garden as viewed from above. The paper’s authors explain their method with an elegant analogy:
Portable automated greenhouse
My project is a portable greenhouse / seed starter that has high tech features and collapses for easy storage. Since a standard greenhouse can overheat if it is closed up or get too cold if it is opened up, mine includes an automatic vent that controls to a user selectable temperature. The user first selects a temperature between 60 and 95 degrees Fahrenheit, by 5 degree increments. Then the greenhouse’s built in sensors and microcontroller automatically adjust how much the vent is opened or closed to help maintain that temperature. And because of its ultra low power design the whole thing can run 24/7 for about a month on just four penlight (AA) batteries!
