Read Online Made by Hand by Mark Frauenfelder - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mark Frauenfelder
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Mister Jalopy explained that if I was interested in DIY living, I owed it to myself to get to know them. From their 1926 house (likely built as a cabin for hunters when grizzly bears roamed the hills between Los Angeles and Pasadena), Eric and Julia and their two small kids have been experimenting with gardening, composting, crafting, sewing, growing native plants, cooking and baking and slow food, amateur entomology, beekeeping, and foraging—a life they sum up as “ramshackle solid.” Julia works part time as a reporter for a public radio station in Pasadena. Eric is an artist and a designer for Yahoo.
Eric and Julia invited me to their house, on a hill behind a gate guarded by two big pit bull mixes, which turned out to be a couple of marshmallows. Eric—tall, thin, with a couple of days’ growth of beard—shushed the dogs and let me through the gate. I ran my eyes over the property and decided that ramshackle was an apt word to describe it. An ancient flatbed pickup truck that obviously didn’t run sat in the yard between two outbuildings, one of which was starting to sink because the asphalt driveway was slowly caving in. “The shack is made out of old doors,” said Eric. “It’s what they call farmhouse construction, where there are no two-by-fours. The whole wall is just one-by-twelves. I don’t even know how they built it. I think they framed it on the ground and then tipped it up and nailed it together, like at a barn raising. There are no vertical beams and no roof beam. Whenever somebody who knows something about construction comes in and looks at it, they say, ‘How’s this thing even standing?’ ” He pointed up to the main residence. “The whole house is built that way, too.”
I noticed small mounds of fresh dirt around the property. Like Julian and Celine, the Ramshackle Solid homestead had a gopher. It had been wreaking havoc on the root vegetables for the past three months, Eric told me.
Picking up an acorn and gesturing to the tree above us, he said, “That oak is huge, and it’s got a ton of acorns in it.”
“Can you eat them?” I asked.
“We did last year. It’s really cool. You can get a really nutty, coarse flour, and you can mix it into pancakes. The buckwheat is also really good,” he said, pointing to a patch of pinkish flowers. “What you do is get the whole flowers and save them in a bag. You can mix them with a little bit of Bisquick and make buckwheat biscuits. They’re almost black, and they’re really perfumey. They’re good with honey.”
The property is covered with native California holly, from which Hollywood got its name. Also known as toyon, the shrubs are about eight feet tall and have reddish berries. “It makes such killer compost,” Eric said. “If I trim the leaves and mulch them, they’ll compost in three months easily. I go around and look for things that need a bit of pruning. I get the stuff together, run it through the mulcher, and end up with an almost perfect mix of dry and green that’ll cook up really, really hot.”
He led me over to the compost pile. I picked up a handful of compost—it looked like crumbly chocolate cake and had a clean earth smell. “It’s even got a red wiggler in it,” said Eric, pointing out a worm. “And there’s a worm egg.” The egg was surprisingly large.
“I planted that little orange tree over there,” Eric said. “It was diseased and curled up and had bugs on it. I was reading about organic gardening and read that the plants will get diseased if you don’t have good soil—so I just took some of this stuff and dumped it around the base of the tree, in the old wagon-wheel rim that I put around it. I filled it with compost and put mulch on top of it and watered it. Immediately it just grew like crazy. Two days later it had like four inches of growth on every branch.”
“You didn’t have to dig down to the roots to get the compost into the tree?” I asked.
“The water sent down the
Eric and Julia invited me to their house, on a hill behind a gate guarded by two big pit bull mixes, which turned out to be a couple of marshmallows. Eric—tall, thin, with a couple of days’ growth of beard—shushed the dogs and let me through the gate. I ran my eyes over the property and decided that ramshackle was an apt word to describe it. An ancient flatbed pickup truck that obviously didn’t run sat in the yard between two outbuildings, one of which was starting to sink because the asphalt driveway was slowly caving in. “The shack is made out of old doors,” said Eric. “It’s what they call farmhouse construction, where there are no two-by-fours. The whole wall is just one-by-twelves. I don’t even know how they built it. I think they framed it on the ground and then tipped it up and nailed it together, like at a barn raising. There are no vertical beams and no roof beam. Whenever somebody who knows something about construction comes in and looks at it, they say, ‘How’s this thing even standing?’ ” He pointed up to the main residence. “The whole house is built that way, too.”
I noticed small mounds of fresh dirt around the property. Like Julian and Celine, the Ramshackle Solid homestead had a gopher. It had been wreaking havoc on the root vegetables for the past three months, Eric told me.
Picking up an acorn and gesturing to the tree above us, he said, “That oak is huge, and it’s got a ton of acorns in it.”
“Can you eat them?” I asked.
“We did last year. It’s really cool. You can get a really nutty, coarse flour, and you can mix it into pancakes. The buckwheat is also really good,” he said, pointing to a patch of pinkish flowers. “What you do is get the whole flowers and save them in a bag. You can mix them with a little bit of Bisquick and make buckwheat biscuits. They’re almost black, and they’re really perfumey. They’re good with honey.”
The property is covered with native California holly, from which Hollywood got its name. Also known as toyon, the shrubs are about eight feet tall and have reddish berries. “It makes such killer compost,” Eric said. “If I trim the leaves and mulch them, they’ll compost in three months easily. I go around and look for things that need a bit of pruning. I get the stuff together, run it through the mulcher, and end up with an almost perfect mix of dry and green that’ll cook up really, really hot.”
He led me over to the compost pile. I picked up a handful of compost—it looked like crumbly chocolate cake and had a clean earth smell. “It’s even got a red wiggler in it,” said Eric, pointing out a worm. “And there’s a worm egg.” The egg was surprisingly large.
“I planted that little orange tree over there,” Eric said. “It was diseased and curled up and had bugs on it. I was reading about organic gardening and read that the plants will get diseased if you don’t have good soil—so I just took some of this stuff and dumped it around the base of the tree, in the old wagon-wheel rim that I put around it. I filled it with compost and put mulch on top of it and watered it. Immediately it just grew like crazy. Two days later it had like four inches of growth on every branch.”
“You didn’t have to dig down to the roots to get the compost into the tree?” I asked.
“The water sent down the
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