“… Here’s a great spring project to get you ready for those up-coming summer barbeques: grow your own lawn furniture with the Terra Grass Armchair kit. All you need to do is assemble a cardboard frame, fill it with soil, seed it with grass, then stand back and watch it bloom. In just a couple weeks, a green and grassy armchair will appear in your lawn …”
–Now all I need is a Barbie with a working ride on lawn mower to keep it trim —
Via Inhabitat
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Lawn Furniture – Literally
Vertical Crop System Piloted
The system can be powered by wind or solar energy, as well as electricity"... A new vertical method for growing crops which claims to use less land and only 5% of the water usually needed is being piloted at a Devon zoo.
The system grows plants in trays of water moving on a conveyor belt.
The company behind it, Valcent, based in Launceston, Cornwall, said it was a sustainable solution to the world’s “rapidly-diminishing resources.” …”
via BBC News
The Lompoc Record
“… Rather than the brawny, sprawling crops of summer that bear fruits, pods, ears and gourds, winter vegetables tend to be small and offer up leaves, flowers and roots. Most take up less space, don’t require as much sunlight and are content to grow in containers.
A number of these cool-season crops can also be easily sown from seed. Indeed, a new industry group, the Home Garden Seed Association, has conveniently begun promoting a list of what it calls the 10 easiest winter vegetables to grow from seed: beets, calendulas, cilantro, kale, lettuce, peas, radishes, salad greens, spinach and Swiss chard. …”
The Hack: Grow these cooler weather crops in containers so you can bring them inside for continued growing (be sure there’s enough room and light available!) Note: With less sun, you’ll find it takes longer for plants to mature.
via The Lompoc Record.
city of johannesburg – Growing food in the inner city
“… Among others, this small garden, a hectare in total(2.5 acres), feeds over 400 inner city children. Of the 11 NGOs it supports, 10 are preprimary schools and one is an orphanage. A visit to one of them, Little Eagles Preprimary, is a joy – the school is filled with beaming faces, with little bodies full of energy running and playing. Their health is partially thanks to Siyakhana Food Gardens handpicked, organically grown vegetables that are delivered once a week. …”
MetaboliCity – Urban Gardening Social Site
Good site to peruse whether you’re in a city or in the country. Find out what people are doing, what their latest innovations are for growing food in a limited space.
This is a design research project by Loop.pH to explore how designers can intervene sensitively within local urban food growing cultures by providing a design thinking and crafting that may help to sustain these initiatives and catalyse larger positive changes in the surrounding environment.
via About – MetaboliCity.
Let’s EAT!
Summer squash (zucchini, patty pan, and others) won’t make it through to november without a lot of tender loving care, or freezing them. Enjoy them now with some delicious recipes, and freeze the rest, since you probably can’t give away the whole bounty!
The hack: freeze all perishable vegetables, or eat them now!
Quick Fall Cleanup Hacks
The nights are getting cooler, I’m sneezing a bit with the onset of the furnace kicking in again.
One concern I’ve heard of from quite a few people is that they’re composting potentially diseased plant materials into their next years garden. I have a couple of hacks for this.
The first Quick Hack while you’re trying to figure out what to do with the refuse from the vegetable garden: If it’s not diseased, make a special compost heap just for the flower garden and put it there. You don’t have to be a composting expert, just pile up the brown, pile on the green (lawn clippings), run over leaves with the lawn mower to get them edible for the worms and mix it all together. Over the winter it will settle and decompose, and be ready for you in the spring. You may have to sift some of the stuff off the top, but it’ll be dark and “tasty” – to the plants at least. Using the veggie garden refuse in the flower garden allows you to use that material without endangering next year’s vegetables.
Same goes for the flower garden: if it’s not diseased, make a separate compost pile for the veggie garden and put all the refuse there. If you do have diseased plants, especially anything in the nightshade family, you’ll want to get rid of the dead plants by either burning them or discarding them in the landfill. I hate the second option – I’d rather have a burn can, burn them, or a better option would be to stuff them into a charcoal can (google “diy charcoal”), and reduce everything into something useful. That being said – I have neither a burn can or a charcoal making apparatus yet, so next year’s flower garden will be lush, and I’ll be trucking in the horse manure again, as well as planting some green manures in the next couple of days (unless I can figure out how to get my compost heap to “light up”).
The second Quick Hack that can stop this from being an issue is to dig a shallow trench, lay the stalks (or vines, or whatever) down right in their own bed, add some layers of lawn clippings and lawn-mowed leaves on top of them, cover lightly with soil and then be sure you rotate your crops!
Tims Tips: Preparing the garden for colder days ahead – NewburyportNews.com, Newburyport, MA
Tims Tips: Preparing the garden for colder days aheadTims TipsTim LampreyAs September rolls to a close, we have to begin thinking about the dreaded “w” word. Yes, it isnt too early to start to think about winter.Eventually, we will get a frost that will kill off all the vegetation, including many of the vegetables in our gardens. When this happens, its time to pull up the dead plants. Any plants that were diseased should be thrown away, not added to the compost pile.
via Tims Tips: Preparing the garden for colder days ahead – NewburyportNews.com, Newburyport, MA.
Is organic food worth extra cost?
“… Organic milk is the number one-selling organic product, and can cost 50 to 70 percent more than regular milk. The main benefit is that organic milk is free from growth hormones, but read the label on conventional milks carefully.
Today, most store-brand milks also are free from added growth hormones and will cost much less. To save even more, check out the price of milk at drug chains like Walgreens and CVS that use milk as a loss leader and typically have the lowest prices on milk. …”
So there’s no growth hormones in the mass-market-milk, but I have to wonder: what else is in there that’s not in the press? Wide range anti-biotics to mention at least one? What else are the mass market meat and milk machines being fed that hasn’t been in the press?
Is organic food worth extra cost? :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Food.
Clever plot – Gardening is Now Fashionable
And if it’s fashionable in Europe this fall, you know that in spring it’ll be the rage in the US… Okay, so it already is here, with urban gardens, people converting their front yards into beautiful plots with decorative peppers and cabbages, etc. “…The Scottish Women’s Rural Institutes (SWRI) has created an easy-to-follow guide to help tackle all gardening issues, from choosing a suitable site and preparing your soil to raising and caring for your plants. …”
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