Pale green?

Here's an interesting feature on the slightly controversial green credentials of Corian, a material we've used in our kitchen here both as a surface and a splashback.

Bedroom green roof install

Our bedroom - the smallest and least visible of the two green roofs on the site - is about 3.5 x 4.5 metres in size, and for this green roof we used 9 x 100litre bags of lightweight vermiculite mixed in situ (see pic!) with 8 x 35litre bags of sterilised loam topsoil. This gave us a soil depth of about 15cm.
This mix went on top of a large piece of woven membrane, in turn on top of a kind of black plastic eggbox in sheets which very simply lie on top of our butyl rubber flat roof.
I'm fascinated to see what the birds and wind bring in to this roof so I'll be not seeding it at all and monitoring what comes up - watch this space!

Cue Mother Nature

Amazing weather this Easter means we've got on with the green roofs here. For urban folks these are a tiny oasis in the overheated city, a little postage stamp of biodiversity in the concrete. Here its more about having a nice feeling of nature growing on all sides of your house, any maybe even breaking up the ruthless lines of modernist architecture ....
If I was going to live here full time I'd be building a vegetable plot or a chicken run. Ok, or maybe a freerange guinea pig run. But at the mo we're installing two extensive green roofs on both storeys of the house, each about 15cm deep.
I decided -as I'm a big gardener - to leave the smaller roof (on the bedroom) to colonise naturally over time with windblown / animal-carried seed. The large one -visible from the bedroom - will need more 'real cultivation'.

Fellow Love Shackers

Of course this is the REAL Love Shack but one of our summer guests just sent me this story of a couple who - like us - struggled to get their local Council to allow the naming of their house:

LONDON, April 5 (UPI) -- Artist Simon Cassini says he and his wife Sheba were allowed to officially name their London home Love Shack thanks to a backyard barbecue.
Cassini, 51, said while the Richmond Council had concerns the name Love Shack would mislead emergency workers, firefighters easily located their home while responding to a call of a possible backyard fire, The Sunday Telegraph reported.

"Richmond Council would not let us change the name of our house because in the event of an incident involving the emergency services, they would not know which house to go to," Cassini said.

Read the whole story here.