Spontaneous Construction 2012 Recap

What another great year at Spontaneous Construction (SponCon)- Home ReSource's signature event.  This is a day-long building contest using materials found at Home ReSource. SponCon has been dubbed a "celebration of creative re-invention."  It is a unique and wonderful event and many of us look forward to it every year.


Here is a link to our Facebook album with photos and captions from the day.

Same team- 2011 SponCon Project, a mobile garden cloche

Again this year, our garden coaching business Butterfly Properties had a team and like last year, we built something for the garden.  Team members retained our roles from last year:
me- field marshal, woodworker;
Barry Cummings- metal working specialist, fabrication wizard;
Marilyn Marler- custodial engineer and  field logistical support.

The team and the completed project- re-purposed garden tool garden table and chairs

If you have been following my blog, you will probably recognize the theme- repurposed garden tools.  I love them.  Old tools are special to us. Tools are pieces of art and represent years of embodied work & energy.

This project was part 4 in a 6 part series; it started with the trellis, gate,  arbor, and there are a couple of projects still to come.

Here is what we started with- old tools and recycled cedar 2x4 fence rails.  Reusing these old tools & immortalizing them is a way to add interest to a landscape, and is a tribute to the service the tools have performed.

we are all business

The chairs are made from old grain scoops, manure forks & coal shovels (part of Missoula history since most houses burned coal at some point). Tool handles are welded to the seats, and the back spindles are made from tines of manure forks.

The chair top rails are steam bent white oak tool handles, and the stretchers (horizontal pieces connecting the legs) are tools handles, too. We created tenons on the spindles that we inserted into mortises in the legs for strength.

Checking the handles in the steam box

Bending a handle fresh out of the steam box

The table top is made from reused cedar 2 x 4 fence rails which were destined for the dumpster (they were cutoffs from other projects, & being less than 24” long, their use is limited). All the hardware (screws, carriage bolts, etc) in the project is reused. All of our scraps from this project (like unused tool handles or grain scoops) will be put to use for similar projects.

The potato fork garden table- designed to be inserted into the ground

It is incredible what people can make in 6 hours at SponCon.  There are some fantastic teams filled with skilled work workers  metal workers, an artists.

A bad start to the day- Barry plugs his 110v welder into a 250v outlet

The top 13 or so pieces (there were over 30 contestants), will be auctioned off at the Benefit auction on October 19 at the Double Tree in Missoula.  This auction raises money for the charitable and educational programs Home ReSource provides in the community.  It will be a great event and a chance to bid on these and other works of art (and function).

Another happy family enjoying SponCon!

This was the best SponCon event yet. It is growing and getting more professional and established in the community every year, and like anything of this sort it takes a lot of dedicated people. This year, volunteers like board treasurer Nicole Marshall and Marilyn Marler were co-chairs of the SponCon Planning Committee, and a lot of staff helped organize and implement SponCon. Thanks everyone!

Below is a time-lapse video we took of the event- the whole day in 1:54!.  Pay particular attention to Adapt Design + Build's team in the lower right hand side of the screen as the build a English phone booth inspired greenhouse!

I am already looking forward to SponCon in 2013! 

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The repurposed potting bench in use

My wife spent the afternoon re-potting some of our basil (read: a huge fleet of basil) in our shady area repurposed potting bench.  Although this new addition to our garden performs many tasks (room divider, buffet, potting bench and trellis), today was the first day it got a workout as a potting bench.  

Here are just a few photos showing her (and the potting bench) in action.

We grow a lot of basil.  Everything from Genovese basil (pictured) to Siam queen and holy green.

These plants will go back into our greenhouse where they will fulfill their destiny.  We don't grow basil outside of our greenhouse anymore-  the production in our greenhouse is so much greater.  A few years ago, we compared yield of basil grown outside vs inside the greenhouse.  With the greenhouse basils, we were able to harvest leaves from each plant 3 times before our outside basil was ready to harvest for a first time.

So, after an afternoon using the potting bench, I am happy to report that, according to my wife, the potting bench is "functional".  

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The Little Green Roof: a year later

Things didn’t quite go as planned. Nothing bad happened, per se, but this is not the green roof I was expecting. If you recall- my goal was to try to find some native plants to grow on a green roof. I selected species I thought would do well- those that were easy to grow, were diverse, would tolerate hot and dry conditions, and had a low rooting depth and some that would spread via rhizomes to hold the soil. I wanted this green roof to really fill in and be lush and interesting.

Below is a picture from last summer showing the diverse species.

Here was my list of species with the rationale:

Prairie June grass (Koeleria macrantha), bunchgrass, prolific seeder, deepest root depth of the group
Idaho fescue (Festuca idahoensis), bunchgrass, prolific seeder, low rooting depth
Yarrow (Achillea millefolium), forms a mat and spreads with rhizomes, tallest plant (when in flower)
Rosy pussytoes (Anntenaria rosea) - forms a mat and spreads, their light foliage reflects sun
Cutleaf daisy (Erigeron compositus) - these form a low mat and flower for a long time (starting in April)
Lanceleaf stonecrop (Sedum lanceolatum). I used sedum because it is a requirement on any green roof. It is mandatory. And they enforce this. A nice succulent, though.
Elkhorn clarkia (Clarkia pulchella) this is for color- they are annuals, with very shallow roots, but they readily reseed

Here are the results:
All the lanceleaf stonecrop  survived and only one prairie junegrass survived- everything else died. Furthermore, perhaps to add insult to injury, the stonecrop reseeded like all get-out. The yarrow that was there last year seeded, and now there is a ton of yarrow, but no survivorship.

The few clarkia I planted went to seed and are filling in exceptionally well.

So, why did this happen? I have no idea. The sedum survival was no surprise, but the amount of volunteers was a surprise. They essentially carpeted the whole roof.

It's possible the prairie Junegrass needs more rooting depth- for whatever reason. This one was kind of a stretch- it had the greatest rooting depth of the bunch (a little native grass pun). The Idaho fescue was surprising and so were the pussytoes and cutleaf  daisy-m both have a super low rooting depth. In the wild you find them growing on a rock, and they are happy with it.

Perhaps rooting depth/ rooting media depth was not the issue with some of the failures. For example, with yarrow, maybe there were too many organics in the soil, so it just flowered its head off and died last year.

The roof is actually quite beautiful, and a lot more colorful and interesting than the species composition I had envisioned. There is nothing wrong with the roof- it is just not what I expected and I don’t know why. I need another year of data, so I’ll keep you posted.

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Repurposed Garden Tool Trellis

I’ve been meaning to install a trellis on the side of my house for some time.  This portion of my house always seemed like a blank slate- an expanse of siding. Visually this is a common problem with many houses- between windows house look like monoliths- a monotone expanses of siding.  To me this always represents an opportunity to garden vertically with trellises, add architectural elements, and it helps to add some height- to draw your eye up.  And, for me, it is an opportunity to build something.  

I have been making trellises for some time in our garden to dress up the 6’ privacy fence, adorn (or hide) the garage/ shop, for vegetables to grow, etc…  Most of these trellises I’ve made from recycled cedar fence board and they are all the same or based on the same dimensions.  


Making so many of these adds repetition of form that leads to a cohesive feeling to the landscape. This continuity in design is first a reflection of the divided light windows of our 1940’s home.  

To make a lot of these trellises I made a simple jig years ago, so now I can crank them out in no time- whether to support tomatoes, a vine, to keep cats from digging in our vegetable beds, etc…

However, for this side of our house, I wanted something different, something a little more formal, sort of and something unique. 

So, this is what I came up with- a pretty robust and formal frame, but the vertical dividers made of old garden tools, adding a little whimsy and also to show that a gardener lives here. However, the grid formed by the tool handles and the horizontal supports are the same dimensions as the divided lights of our windows.

Like most of my projects, the materials from this one came from Home ReSource- the tools were, obviously, garden tools, and the wood was cedar deck boards and fence posts I re-milled.  Even though most of my projects are made from recycled or re-purposed materials, typically I try to conceal that fact. However, in the case of this trellis and my new, re-purposed potting bench, I embraced the materials heritage, so to speak!

This definitely breaks up the space and adds interest to an otherwise blank wall and, perhaps more importantly, adds a place for white clematis (Clematis ligusticafolia) to climb.  

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