(Video link here.) This inspiring TED Talk by Britta Riley recently introduced us to the world of Windowfarms. These vertical hydroponic gardens allow city-dwellers to grow vegetables, herbs and fruits in the windows of their otherwise cramped apartments, all year long. Think ‘strawberries’!
But what’s most intriguing about Windowfarms is the community behind them, constantly refining the product and experimenting with new possibilities. This isn’t a community of traditional scientists or farmers–it’s just a bunch of folks who are passionate about an idea.
Riley describes the process of what goes on at our.Windowfarms–the Windowfarms open source community platform–as “R&D-I-Y” (research-and-develop-it-yourself). read more…
As much as we love the vertical shipping pallet garden we wrote about in May, it’s flaw is that if you needed to move it off your balcony, you might be in some trouble. Enter the milk crate farm! When the bad economy stalled construction at New York City’s Alexandria Center for Life Science, Chef Sisha Ortuzar and business partner Jeffrey Zurofsky had a brilliant idea: use the stalled site as a farm. There they grow fresh veggies to use at Riverpark, the restaurant next door.
While rooftop gardens are popping up all over the city (see the Brooklyn Grange for example), this one presented a special challenge: it needed to be portable read more…
When we last left our New York City taxi farmers - the car service drivers who plant “crops” in vacant patches of land around the Bronx – they were gamely waiting for their urban garden to grow, even as they waited for calls from the dispatcher.
Well, it’s been a tough harvest in the city, as it has been for farmers everywhere. Last year, as we reported, it was the torrential rains. This year, it’s been the withering heat. Our intrepid drivers lost their first planting, but they didn’t lose heart. read more…
While we were away, a reader left a Comment in response to our post about Constantino Nivola’s Tinkertoy lamps. She described a trellis she had made out of vintage Tinkertoys bought on Ebay. She devised it to display her tillandsia, which are also known as air plants because they grow without soil and can be placed just about anywhere.
We wrote back asking if she had any photos. In a follow-up Comment, she sent us these photos which knocked us out: Tinkertoy as naturally sculptural, Bauhausian trellis! She also wrote:
Obviously, I’m no master of the Tinkertoy (or the photographic, for that matter) medium. And truth be told, I pretty much lack artistic ability, in general. However, one of the great things about Tinkertoys is that, even despite a complete lack of talent, you can at least count on being able to create something with some structural integrity. And with the size and overall shape you’re looking for. So, that’s good.
We were struck by her opinion of herself has lacking artistic ability and talent. read more…
Ellen Silverman is traveling with her family in Venice, sending us the occasional wonderful photo. First came this one of the Grand Canal – like a teeny vacation for us. Then came a few-line story of the clever idea she learned while visiting friends:
We were invited to an impromptu lunch on our first day in Venice by a Venetian friend. He had set the table out on his terrace. Cleverly he stored his chair cushions on hooks from the roof overhang. read more…
We’ve written many times before about the fantastic Canal House Cookbook series, but this summer Christopher Hirsheimer and Melissa Hamilton took their work to a new level by hosting the first annual Smallholding Festival in Ottsville, Pennsylvania. The festival featured a number of skill-shares and do-it-yourself exhibitions including cheese-making, beekeeping, canning, bread-baking, and spit-roasting. Also on-hand was Margo True, the author of The One-Block Feast: An Adventure in Food from Yard to Table, which is worth checking out if you’re an aspiring urban farmer/gardener/d-i-y-er/beekeeper
Even though we’re telling you about this event after it’s happened, you can actually bring a few of the exhibitions directly to your own home. The Smallholding Festival website features four free pdfs with step-by-step instructions for read more…
(Video link here.) With or without the music: lovely, valiant life, which keeps happening ANYWAY, despite all the dark stuff going on. We can’t help thinking that ideas emerge into the world in a similar fashion…given even minimal nurturing, their natural impulse is to grow…
Maria Robledo has a way with flower arranging, or perhaps we should say: off-the-cuff displays of just about any fresh branch, or flower or bunch of leaves. The other evening at her house, we were smitten with the huge green vase into which she’d poured a shallow pool of water; she simply floated a few flowers that she picked one of the bushes growing in her Brooklyn backyard. read more…
We followed up last year, but alas, the growing season was a bust. “Way too much rain,” one of the taxi-farmers told us. Their corn, so beautiful the year before, withered on the stalk, their beans addled on the vine.
But hope springs eternal and this spring our taxi farmers are at it again, plowing the soil on a forgotten hillside in the Bronx near the spot where they wait for calls…planting corn, beans, onions, radishes and more. The onions are already up and so are their hopes. read more…
Pamela Hovland, who always has her eyes WIDE OPEN to what is around her, sent us this photo from a recent trip to Minnesota: an old swing set repurposed into a hanging garden. Charming and great! (And there’s still one swing to swing on, whenever/whoever feels like it…)
A friend called us recently to ask our thoughts on containers for planting her 10′x5′balcony in New York City. She wanted to have her plantings along one side of the terrace only, to leave the rest of the space clear to see the view and do tai chi. Attuned we started spotting some nice looking rectangular and square containers in catalogues. AND we stumbled on Fern Richardson’s charming blog Life on the Balcony, which addresses the many balcony garden related issues, from how to reduce noise, to how to make a screen between you and ugly sightlines. We love her great how-to on turning a shipping pallet into a vertical container. It’s one of the few vertical gardens that’s appealed to us visually; we instantly wondered about painting or staining the wood really dark to chic-it-up a bit*. Anyway, the gist seems easy and doable… read more…
The best thing we found in the recent New York Times’ Design and Living Magazine was Bud Wise, a story and slideshow about making arrangements out of ordinary deli/supermarket flowers. Having found ourselves many times looking blankly at the mishmash of seemingly uninspired offerings at the corner store for a bit of REAL to perk up our table, and spirits, we found the advice given by Sarah Ryhanen and Nicolette Camille each of whom run floral design studios (Saipua and Nicolette Camille Floral Designs, respectively) in Brooklyn. They also operate the Little Flower School, through which they give classes in various locations. They give some really good advice about choosing and handling flowers, what amounts to a set of four loose principles you can apply to fit your own sensibility and budget; it’s worth reading the reasoning and info they give for each one. read more…
On the lookout for flower pots with sleek modern lines, we love this one made from a hacked Ikea lamp. Says creative hackeress Heloisa Fiasco of Raleigh, NC:
“I bought this ceiling lamp at the AS IS section of Ikea. When I saw it I thought it would be the perfect modern flower pot that is so hard to find for an affordable price.
It already has an opening in the bottom where the wire would normally go. Instead the water can make an exit through there now.”
Over the past week, we’ve stumbled on some very cool housewares with all the qualities we value: simple, well-designed, enduring, and good value. Our favorite is a charming geometric textile made of pieced Tyvek by Woodnotes that can be used as curtains, partitions, and table decorations.“Flake consists of snow flake like pieces which are joined together simply by slipping the point of a flake through the hole of another flake. You can create a compact or a net like, loose surface. Three-dimensional forms are also possible.” (Woodnotes also makes a variation on the pattern called Flowers.) We love that we can work with the material ourselves, vary the texture and size, fool around, see where it takes us. We’re thinking room divider…or a pleasingly revealing shower curtain.
In a recent post at Radmegan: In Words and Pictures, crafty blogger Megan described improvising watering globes out of glass Coke bottles. Watering globes, commercially sold as Aqua Globes, are basically inverted bottles that you fill with water and “slam into the moist soil”; they will slowly trickle water into your potted plants, a great solution for watering plants while you’re out of town or just busy. Megan also found that a Martinelli Cider bottle works well too (photos below).
We wondered: why use an ugly bottle with a label when there are so many beautiful glass bottles to be had? Why not figure out some pleasing-to-look at solutions? Our favorites for many years (and many purposes) are wine bottles with the labels soaked off, which allows you see their form: sensual, sculpture, subtly-colored. (We especially like the elongated bottles used for Albariño – a perfect summer wine from Spain. ) read more…
, which is worth checking out if you’re an aspiring urban farmer/gardener/d-i-y-er/beekeeper
, are basically inverted bottles that you fill with water and “slam into the moist soil”; they will slowly trickle water into your potted plants, a great solution for watering plants while you’re out of town or just busy. Megan also found that a Martinelli Cider bottle works well too (photos below).
