The latest DIY ideas, techniques and tools for hacking nature from plant grafting to building gardening tools and sprinklers.
This is one plant with 991 flowers, making it the largest Chrysanthemum in North America. The rigorous, 18-month growing technique involves meticulous watering, pinching and tying of the chrysanthemum to a customized wire frame to train the plant to grow into the desired form. The blooms are painstakingly arranged in a dome shape, with the […]
Weigh your hive! Trerick writes: There is currently a NASA-sponsored nation-wide research project that asks volunteer beekeepers to take daily weight measurements of their bee hives. The data is used to estimate when nectar flows begin in order to answer how changing climate effects honey bees. The goal is to build an accurate, electronic bee […]
Nick Normal @ Make: Online recently went on a bicycle tour of some different compost sites in Queens, NY. He writes: This past weekend I went on a group bike tour of five compost sites in Western Queens, NY, in the neighborhoods of Astoria, Long Island City and Sunnyside. The sites were as diverse as […]
I’m finally accepting that it’s truly autumn, so I gasped with delight when I saw these amazing leaf creatures by Mortéza Esmaîli Sohi. They’re called “des feuilles tres, tres chouettes” which translates roughly as very, very cute leaves, which indeed they are. I’ve of course seen artwork made out of leaves and flowers before, but […]
When I moved into my new house, I bought a few Woolly Pockets for a northern wall in the garden that probably gets a total of 10 minutes of sun each year. Nothing would grow there except ferns, and this is the perfect way to get some greenery onto the concrete. A friend came over […]
Instructables user whamodyne made a self-watering planter from a rag and a 2-liter plastic bottle: I have a black thumb due to my forgetfulness on the watering of plants. By the time I remember and rush over with the wattle bottle, the plants have croaked and moved onto the next plane of existence. I was […]
A trowel is such an inexpensive tool, it’s hard for me to imagine making my own for anything besides the experience of making and having made it myself. Still, I can see why someone might want to make this one described by Instructables “PVC whisperer” Thinkenstein: It starts from ubiquitous scrap material, looks good, and is made using an unusual process that involves softening PVC pipe under heat (a delicate trick, safety wise) and forming it by hand.
