Answering another question with yet another question: How much biotic activity is there in a loam pile, over six feet in height, that has been sitting for more than 24 hours on a site? My understanding is that compost must be stored in windrows of no higher than six feet to avoid creating an anaerobic [...]
Archive for the ‘Gristmill’ Category
Mixing soil 2
Posted in Gristmill, What we're thinking on December 1, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Rusty haiku
Posted in Gristmill on November 6, 2008 | No Comments »
Shot like an arrow
Down a path, the axis tries
To keep us in line.
Patience
Posted in Gristmill on May 31, 2008 | No Comments »
We seem to be on a planting jag right now — not surprising, given the season…
A couple of points about planting a garden with small plant specimens: First, unless we’re talking tiny plants here, which may be overcome with cold, exposure, or rodents looking for a tender snack, small plants have the advantage of being [...]
Inside out
Posted in Gristmill on May 23, 2008 | 2 Comments »
That transition between inside and out is key. When the perceptual barrier is great — that is, when there are lots of high, narrow steps, when a landing lacks depth and width, when a handrail stands too close to the door opening — people will find all sorts of reasons to minimize their ins and [...]
Click
Posted in Gristmill, Plants on May 8, 2008 | No Comments »
I was just looking at some photos from one of my perennial beds, and realized that in a personal garden space, sometimes what snaps the place into focus for me is the emergence of bloom (or in spring, of growth alone). Each phase of the garden has such a distinct look, depending on what’s growing [...]
Flume
Posted in Gristmill on May 8, 2008 | 3 Comments »
OK, I keep thinking I’ll save this bit to put in a really important post, but that seems like a silly idea — why not just write this quick post and be done with it? The topic: The virtues of Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Arts in Cambridge– not the institution, actually, but the building [...]
On center
Posted in Gristmill on May 5, 2008 | No Comments »
Different centers:
T.S. Eliot’s “still point of the turning world” in The Four Quartets
The center of a labryrinth
The ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ spot — I’ve seen it in the middle of the beech spiral at Garden In The Woods, at the hexagonal stone centered in the courtyard in front of the Episcopal Divinity School chapel in [...]
One tree
Posted in Gristmill on May 5, 2008 | No Comments »
There’s a stock set of attributes that we expect a space to have, but not every space posesses all of them, and for me one of the things that makes landscape interesting is that it is NOT about “outdoor rooms,” however useful that idea may be for beginners. A landscape can lack walls, ceiling, or [...]
Random
Posted in Gristmill on May 4, 2008 | 2 Comments »
I’ve just been thinking about the concept of plants making spaces, too. I have yet to come up with a good explanation of how a tree creates a space. It’s easy to use more than one tree to suggest a space; the trick is to figure out what the space of single tree is.
Last fall [...]
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