The Domestic Revolution is a fascinating tour of the ways relatively minor changes snowball, changing the way people interact with the material world and with one another, but it’s also a tremendous pleasure for its lucid, practical explanations of how these things actually work. Goodman is deeply familiar with her tools and materials in a way that’s quite unusual today. Of course anyone who really makes things will have this familiarity — ask a software engineer about programming languages or his favourite text editor — but in most walks of life actually making things has become increasingly optional. Of the objects I interact with on a daily basis, the only ones I can really be said to have made (my kids don’t count) are the things I cook and the chairs I refinished and upholstered.1 Beyond that there’s the garden I planted with seeds and perennials I bought at a nursery, the furniture I assembled out of pieces some nice Swedish man machined for me, and the various bits of plumbing I’ve swapped out, but none of that is really “making” so much as it is “assembling things other people have made”. It’s mostly the productive equivalent of last mile delivery — nothing to sneeze at, but a far cry from the sort of deep involvement with the material world that was common only a few centuries ago.
This makes perfect sense, of course: I don’t have a deep and intimate knowledge of these things because I don’t need one. Still, though, it’s important to have a certain very basic familiarity with how the things around you work — enough, say, to know what to Google when something breaks and how to put the results into practice, or to turn fifteen feet of arching blackberry cane into an actual bush — because it gives you power over your world. The particular powers don’t really matter (it’s easy enough to pay someone else to fix your plumbing or grow your berries); the key is the patterns of thought they engender. There are, for example, apparently some enormous number of people who don’t change the batteries in their beeping smoke detectors. I have no idea whether it’s drug-induced apathy, ignorance of how things work (in the same way that drilling a hole in your wall to hang something seems scary if you don’t know that your wall is
a liejust painted drywall in front of empty space between the studs), or simply a pathological lack of personal agency, but it’s hard to believe you can change anything dissatisfactory about your life if you can’t change a 9V battery.Making and doing things, even when you don’t have to, is practice in believing that you can change your own world. It’s weightlifting for agency. You can outsource the making of your physical world, but social worlds — the arrangement of your family life, your personal relationships, the organizations and institutions you’re involved in — must be created by the participants themselves. A good society would be one where the default “builder-grade” scripts lead to human flourishing, but unfortunately that isn’t ours, so you have to be able to decide on your own changes. Start practicing now: find one little thing about your physical environment that annoys you and fix it. Put the new toilet paper roll actually on the holder. Replace the burned-out lightbulb. Hang the artwork that’s listing drunkenly against the wall. Pull some weeds. And then, once you’ve warmed up a little bit, go and make something new.
Jane Psmith, “REVIEW: The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-05-22.
1. They’re oak dining chairs, probably (judging by the construction) about a hundred years old, and they looked a lot better on Facebook Marketplace than in real life. When I showed up to buy them, the sellers turned out to be an elderly couple moving to assisted living in six hours; they admired my baby and showed me pictures of their grandchildren and explained they had inherited the chairs from the wife’s mother, who in turn had gotten them from her friend’s mother, and by this point I couldn’t really say “yeah I can tell” and leave, so home they came. When I took apart the seats to recover them I discovered the original horsehair padding and some extremely questionable techniques applied over the years, but anyway now my chairs have eight-way hand-tied springs and I have some new calluses.
August 26, 2023
QotD: The psychological value of “making”
May 29, 2023
How to Plant a Culinary Herb Garden! DIY Kitchen Garden
Food Wishes
Published 1 Jun 2015[Note, description is from the Food Wishes blog. Chef John’s plant selection is Thyme (English, French, and Lemon), Chives, Italian Parsley, Sage, Oregano (Greek and Italian), Tuscan Blue Rosemary, Basil (Genovese or Sweet), and Spearmint.]
I mentioned several times during this “how to plant your own culinary herb garden” video that I’d give a lot more specific information on the blog, but now that I’m here, I realize there’s not much more to tell you.
Herbs are very easy to grow, and besides basil, which doesn’t like to dry out, they only require occasional watering. Any well-drained soil will work, but your best bet is to grab a bag of ready-to-use planting mix. Feel free to double check with the person at the nursery, but it’s basically potting soil with benefits. And, I did say nursery. Drive the extra mile, and talk to people that just sell plants.
I consider these herbs must-haves, but there are many more varieties you can try. I’ve done things like tarragon and cilantro in the past, and while they are a little more temperamental, they can be successfully cultivated.
Nothing beats being able to go out into the garden, and just take a pinch of this and a pinch of that. When you consider the cost of one of these plants is just a little more than for a single bunch at the market, why not have a few pots around, even if they’re on the windowsill? I hope you plant your garden soon. Enjoy!
NOTE: I’m not a gardening expert, so asking me specific question about soil types and weather issues will result in many a guess. My advice would be to use this video as an inspiration, and then check out some local gardening websites.
April 3, 2023
The poison garden of Alnwick
Tom Scott
Published 29 May 2017Inside the beautiful Alnwick Garden, behind a locked gate, there’s the Poison Garden: it contains only poisonous plants. Trevor Jones, head gardener, was kind enough to give a guided tour!
For more information about visiting the Castle, Garden, and poison garden: https://alnwickgarden.com/
(And yes, it’s pronounced “Annick”.)
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February 17, 2023
QotD: Risk mitigation in pre-modern farming communities
Subsistence farmers generally do not do this. Remember, the goal is not to maximize profit, but to avoid family destruction through starvation. If you only farm one crop (the “best” one) and you get too little rain or too much, or the temperature is wrong – that crop fails and the family starves. But if you farm several different crops, that mitigates the risk of any particular crop failing due to climate conditions, or blight (for the Romans, the standard combination seems to have been a mix of wheat, barley and beans, often with grapes or olives besides; there might also be a small garden space. Orchards might double as grazing-space for a small herd of animals, like pigs). By switching up crops like this and farming a bit of everything, the family is less profitable (and less engaged with markets, more on that in a bit), but much safer because the climate conditions that cause one crop to fail may not impact the others. A good example is actually wheat and barley – wheat is more nutritious and more valuable, but barley is more resistant to bad weather and dry-spells; if the rains don’t come, the wheat might be devastated, but the barley should make it and the family survives. On the flip side, if it rains too much, well the barley is likely to be on high-ground (because it likes the drier ground up there anyway) and so survives; that’d make for a hard year for the family, but a survivable one.
Likewise – as that example implies – our small farmers want to spread out their plots. And indeed, when you look at land-use maps of villages of subsistence farmers, what you often find is that each household farms many small plots which are geographically distributed (this is somewhat less true of the Romans, by the by). Farming, especially in the Mediterranean (but more generally as well) is very much a matter of micro-climates, especially when it comes to rainfall and moisture conditions (something that is less true on the vast flat of the American Great Plains, by the by). It is frequently the case that this side of the hill is dry while that side of the hill gets plenty of rain in a year and so on. Consequently, spreading plots out so that each family has say, a little bit of the valley, a little bit of the flat ground, a little bit of the hilly area, and so on shields each family from catastrophe is one of those micro-climates should completely fail (say, the valley floods, or the rain doesn’t fall and the hills are too dry for anything to grow).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
January 17, 2023
Growing an Ancient Roman Garden
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 23 Aug 2022
November 2, 2019
How to make a Planter out of Pallet Wood | Paul Sellers
Paul Sellers
Published 31 Oct 2019Paul takes a break from his day to day of furniture making to show you how to create this very straightforward planter — which is made entirely out of pallet wood!
Paul hopped into a skip (with permission of course) grabbed some pallets and got creating. Using only a few simple hand tools and following alongside Paul with these easy steps, you can create a planter too!
Paul is now ready to start growing some vegetables in his garden when the growing seasons arrive. Why don’t you get ready for Spring this Autumn and create yourself a simple planter for your garden!
——————–Want to learn more about woodworking?
Go to Woodworking Masterclasses for weekly project episodes: http://bit.ly/2JeH3a9
Go to Common Woodworking for step-by-step beginner guides and courses: http://bit.ly/35VQV2o
http://bit.ly/2BXmuei for Paul’s latest ventures on his blog
