Homegrown Furniture

How do you make furniture out of solid wood?  Try growing it as a single piece.  Okay, maybe it isn't something that amateurs can do at home, but the results certainly are intriguing.  Gavin Munro has come up with special molds and pruning and grafting techniques to get the trees into the proper shape.  Full Grown Furniture in England sells them, but they cost thousands of dollars and you have to wait many years.

My Cup Runneth Over...

Much fuss is being made about the new NASA study that shows many of the world's aquifers are depleting.  Less is being said about solutions to the problem.  No Tech Magazine reports on a traditional solution in India, the johad.  This does not require lots of money, but it does require community effort.  The description of the way it works bears a strong resemblance to P. A. Yeoman's keyline system for distributing water.

Related articles

• How the "Waterman of India" Revived Five Rivers and Brought Back Water to Over 1,000 Villages
• Where the world's fresh water is disappearing the fastest
• Earth's major aquifers giving water to 2bn people are stressed by human use

Dome Sweet Dome

Michael Matthews is offering plans for what he calls the "Ultimate Survival Fortress".  I haven't bought it (yet), but it seems to be a fairly standard earth-bag type of dome home.  That said, the price he is asking seems quite reasonable for the knowledge he seems to be providing (and I am not an affiliate, so I am not getting any commissions).  While $1 a square foot is literally a dirt-cheap price for living space, I certainly would not want to make a mistake after putting in dozens or maybe hundreds of hours of heavy labor.

Cool! (on the outside) DIY roll-up insulating curtains

A group in Chile has come up with the Kume curtain, a multi-layer curtain you make yourself that keeps moisture and warm air from reaching cold windows.  You can roll them up during the daytime to let light in, or leave them in place the entire winter if daylight is not needed.

Prototype for The City

It turns out my idea for a Domed City in Tales of an Exiled Citizen is not so fanciful after all; one town in northern Vermont seriously tried to get it built.  You can read more about it in Doomed Dome: The Future That Never Was.