"Gardening catalogs are the very epitome of dreambooks. Some are quite beautiful, all ripe with the promise of fulfillment in a slightly other universe, but here are the three that make late winter in the heartland a little less bitter..."
*Disclosure: I'm currently the editor of Cool Tools.
Peaceful Valley = "the premier source for organic farming supplies...Here is your source for plastic deer fencing, the world's best walk-behind Italian tillers, superlative hand tools, the best selection of drip irrigation supplies, and -- my favorite -- reusable foam seedling trays."
Hortideas = "It's sort of like a Cook's Illustrated for your garden -- the advice is based on scientific testing, and the tools born out of genuine need."
Lehman's Non-Electric Catalog = "Old-time farming and gardening tools (for old-time skills still viable)-on and on."
In the second part of Boing Boing Video's conversation with Peter Kirn and Matt Ganucheau about generative and experimental audio in games, the debate ends on a high note.
One that involves dance.
(Anyone know where this pic comes from? I suspect it is not official promotional work.)
The Earthbox's own tagline is a bit much: "The World' Most Revolutionary Gardening System!" The black plastic boxes come with generally positive recommendations, but they're not magic—their main trick is keeping a reservoir of water at the bottom, letting plants wick it up as they need it, while keeping the soil at the surface dry and hardy against bacteria and bugs.
While the brand-name Earthboxes aren't terribly expensive—around $60, and that includes some soil and fertilizer—building a similar box yourself isn't a huge undertaking, either. (Here's another variant.) Cut apart one Rubbermaid tub, put its guts inside another, add some drain holes and a fill tube, and you're on your way to big tomatoes and eggplants and cukes with a minimum of effort.
"Just watch out for needles, please..." And with that sensible yet troubling advice, I started re-planting and weeding a 120x100 ft. lot hugging I-280 in San Francisco. The property is owned by Caltrans, but the garden is definitely Annie's. In December, after five years of staring at a mostly-barren lot across from her home, the web designer (at Sega!) set to work guerrilla-style! -- without any permission, public meeting or hesitation*. Adopting an array of Agave, Dianthus, Crassula ovata, Grevillea, Ornithogalum, Anisodontea, Osteospermum and more (a good portion culled for free from Craigslist!), she started transforming the landscape and simultaneously found a way to escape the "sterile and predictable" mindset of toiling in an office. No power tools. No soil moisture sensors. No radio... Right on. So on a sunny Saturday morning, I joined her at the Pennsylvania Garden . Hear more about the artifacts unearthed (needles?), the bum who used to live there (King Cobra fan), and how I hurt my back, after the jump...
*She eventually called the city, then Caltrans, and got their blessing -- and a spigot repaired -- to ensure the plants won't get ripped out. She's invested well over $1,000, let alone the time.
"People are disappointed to find out I don't wear a ski mask," Annie laughed in her British accent (she was born in Wales). It's true. Up until now, my notion of guerrilla gardeners was that they were mostly 12 Monkeys-like rebels toiling in midnight darkness to bolster the natural beauty of dull, cement-laden urban spaces. "Drivers beep at me all the time!" she added.
Pennsylvania Garden is a sloping lot perched on display for neighbors, passersby, drivers, and dozens of dogs who use the upper, un-planted portion as a toilet (two recycled poop-bag-compost stations were installed w/the help of a neighbor). Canine excrement is nothing, though. When she first began, Annie contended with a drunken homeless man who slept under a tree bordering the freeway underpass. After a shelter took the man in (provided he agree to quit drinking), she went in to clean up: a litany of 40-oz bottles, human feces, trash, and hypodermic needles (the man's friends' apparently).
This answered my first bit of skepticism: why not plant food? A lot this size could feed a handful of families outright, much in the same way squatters in cities like Detroit are living off abandoned land. The lot is plant-able, but Caltrans warned Annie (and she warned me): It is toxic, with oil and runoff from the highway, discarded batteries (I found a rusty D-volt), broken fuse boxes (check), and the occasional needle (ugh). Translation: wash your hands thoroughly and don't touch your garden gloves to your mouth. Check.
We started off weeding the back hillside. Lady bugs galore. Then a sharp prick right through my glove. Fuck. Shit. Fuck. I searched. Didn't see a needle. It was a particularly nasty twig or cactus tip. We continued, and finished with a pile of weeds that doubled her compost heap.
Planting in these conditions is tough, but Annie seems more than pleased to keep everything low-tech. A friend has promised to loan her a "Texas toothpick," a heavy shaft of forged steel used to break ground. For now, she tackles patches of debris-caked clay with a shovel. It is hard, back-breakingly so.
Annie already transplanted almost 100 species thus far, becoming a budding amateur plant expert in the process. She regularly travels north of San Francisco to rescue unwanted cactus from people she finds through a cactus-nut she met on Craigslist or through her blog. She's discovered that Starbucks will give her free coffee grounds (a solid top soil supplement since snails hate it and worms LOVE it). She's learned how to manhandle 150-lb. prickly pear cacti (hint: two sets of gloves, tarp, twine, three sets of hands, and lift with the legs).
She's pleasant, not preachy. The self-righteous pretension you'd expect is absent. She says she simply enjoys the work. I believe her. She's one of us: a city-dwellling web designer who spends the 9-5 weekdays tending digital gardens for a paycheck. Any excuse to disconnect, sweat, sunburn, and get dirty hands in the name of something tangible and organic is worth it. Have a great weekend.
Locavore, an iPhone app that helps you figure out what food is in season in your area, is celebrating their newfound popularity on the iTunes App Store by giving us five copies of the app to give away to readers.
Because I don't like to give you away anything for nothing, I've got a request: The first five people to snap an artsy-fartsy image of some local food on their iPhone and add it to the Boing Boing Gadgets pool will get a copy, per my rarified judgement. (Whole foods get preference, but that can include cute animals you've just slaughtered, too!)
DIY Veggiepatch is a fun web site that teaches you how to make your own individual-sized urban garden using fabrics that are lying around the house. Some tips from Jo Szczepanksa, its creator:
1. Print out the templates. 2. Recruit friends. Not everyone knows their way around a sewing machine or a jigsaw/hammer. Plus its a lot cheaper buying the materials in larger quantities. 3. Consider using companion planting, so that you get less pests and bugs munching on your yummy veggies, and you don't have to use pesticides. 4. Find a spot with sunlight, or consider creating a spot with sunlight with some shiny reflectors. 5. Worms! The best thing to gardening ever. Put worms in one of your veggie patch pockets and they will eat up all your veggie leftovers and give you great soil, that will protect your vegetables from diseases and help them grow brilliantly.
My kid sis Rachel Fracassa and her friend Megan Grimwood decided to start their own community garden in Raytown, Missouri, despite having limited gardening experience themselves. Rachel's a go-getter, so I asked her to tell me what hurdles she ran into so far, because I figure she's already found how to get over them.
If the lot is vacant, there's a good reason. Growing some veggies on empty land is not as easy as it sounds. When we first started thinking about organizing a community garden, we became more aware of all the abandoned lots around the city. It seemed like there was so many lots available, it would be no big thing to just grab one and grow tons of food to pass out to the neighborhood.
Perhaps it is indeed that easy if you don't mind trespassing, but trying to get permission to use vacant lots is another story. Just trying to figure out who actually owns the property can be quite a feat. And as it turned out, the majority of vacant land we encountered was owned by the county for back taxes (which must be paid before anyone can step foot on the property).
Make a budget, then double it to cover everything you've forgotten. It all seemed so well planned. We had composed a nice, neat budget and had a huge fundraiser in the works to cover all of our expenses. The time had come to start seeds, and we quickly realized that seed starting equipment costs weren't part of our budget.
After six trips to Home Depot for trays, soil, light fixtures and bulbs, we'd spent another $600 out of pocket. For now, we're pretending that all those out-of-pocket Home Depot expenses are going into a "special" account that we'll get when the fundraising event is über-successful (crosses fingers).
Don't be afraid to rig up a kitty litter and Christmas light contraption. As amateur seed starters, we were convinced our seeds would not sprout without heat mats. We were utterly disappointed to discover that they were so expensive, so we browsed some DIY sites until we found a homemade heating mat method using Christmas lights set in a tray and covered in kitty litter.
We spent the first few days tripping over a mass of tangled electrical cords attached to our home-made heating mats while simultaneously pouring gallons of water into trays and setting them on top. Not surprisingly, they weren't that effective, and we ended up scrapping the whole system.
We had to be open to change. We tried egg cartons, plastic and fiber trays, toilet paper rolls and multiple different lighting methods to find the best possible growing habitat for the seedlings. But we had fun experimenting!
"I'm sure the guys are all over you." ...my manager said sarcastically after I explained the community garden project. Not everyone thinks gardening is cool. We found the people who are passionate about growing veggies, and made them part of our core team. We realized that the most important part of community garden is community. Delegate! It's near impossible to plant 1500 seedlings, plan a fundraising event, and build six raised beds with a team of two.
You don't have to have experience to be a professional. People assume we are experts just because we're organizing the garden. It's become a joke between the two of us as we both have little gardening experience. Plants want to live, right? They want to grow. That's what we just keep telling ourselves
Between our moments of terror, we're determined to live up to the expectation. We'll just have to fake it 'til we make it. And even though this project for community education, we'll be the ones doing most of the learning.
Some interesting moments from the Objectified screening last night.
- Rob Walker, who writes the Consumed column for the NY Times Magazine, was my favorite person in the movie. I particularly liked his idea for a million-dollar marketing campaign for the stuff we already own. Paraphrasing from memory: "You already own all these wonderful things. Enjoy them today."
I love this. I was talking to Anil Dash about a similar idea a few days ago, which let to the idea of stickers for laptops and such that read "Last Year's Model!"
The Bros. Brick brings word that Jumpei Mitsui's six-year project, the minifig-scale Battleship Yamato, is finally complete.
Length: 6.6 meters (22 feet) from bow to stern Width: 1 meter (3 feet) at the widest point midship Scale: 1/40 Time to complete: 6 years, 4 months Parts: 200,000 LEGO elements Weight: 150 kilograms (330 pounds)
I am great with dogs. I have two minpins at home, Ruby and Malcolm. They're both well-fed and happy, and they each poop twice a day. On the other hand, I am terrible with plants. Most don't live more than a few weeks under my care, even though I water them and feed them and love them just as I do the dogs. So when we decided to have a gardening theme day @ BBG, I figured this was as good a chance as ever to have my dogs help me become better with plants. My minpins are 8lbs each and their poop is maybe the size of your pinkie, but the USDA estimates that an average dog poops 274 lbs of poop a year--I figured I should do my part in reducing that number, even if it's just by a millifraction. I decided to make my very own customized minpin poop compost bin. Read on for a step-by-step guide on how I did it, and pictures of dogs pooping:
This is Ruby's butt, a great source for fresh, fertile minpin poop. She eats pretty healthy food--broccoli, carrots, lean ground turkey, some California Naturals kibble, so I'm assuming her poop's made up of a lot of the same stuff too.
My friend Christian, who famously composts his own (bigger) dogs' poop, clued me into the importance of red wiggler worms, so I decided to go to nearby Buena Vista Park to dig for some. People use them to compost human waste, too. If you're not into digging for worms, hardware stores sell things like septic starter or commercial fertilizer that can also do the trick.
I am so glad I was not born a red wiggler worm.
Some poop compost trivia for first timers: * Dog poop can't be used to grow vegetables. Really. It's not good for you. * It has, however, been proven to make shoddy soil healthier. * It also reduces your carbon footprint by reducing the amount of poop that has to be carried out with the garbage. * You might be saving a garbage man's dignity. "Often, poop explodes in the bins and garbage men are covered in crap," Michael Levenston, who runs a Vancouver-based compost hotline via his non-profit, City Farmer, tells me.
Ruby dug for worms for about a half hour but we didn't find any. Just this little guy, which we ended up returning to the soil. We went home slightly dejected, but hopeful that our composter will work regardless of this slight setback.
On the way home from Buena Vista, 11-month old Malcolm dropped a big one. Good boy Malky!
I stopped at the hardware store to get some tools, a bin, and gloves. I drilled holes in the bottom of the bin for aeration, and drew a picture of Ruby on the bin's lid with a Sharpie and wrote Poo over and over so nobody could mistakenly open it thinking it was a tub of chocolate ice cream.
One thing you always have to keep in mind when composting is the carbon-nitrogen ratio. Here are some common carbon-rich materials you can use: * sawdust * shredded newspaper * fallen leaves * straw or hay
And the nitrogens: * poop * grass * veggies * flowers
Malcolm helped me chew up some dried daffodils that I bought at Trader Joe's last week. Good boy Malky!
I took the shit outside and mixed and mashed it. The ratio of nitrogens-to-carbons should be approximately 2:1. Smaller materials compost faster because that induces heat and heat is what encourages microorganisms to start turning the poop into humus, or mature soil. I knew I should have chopped those daffodil stems, but it was too late because they're smeared with poop. Mmmm. Smells awesome.
I closed the lid and placed my minpin poop compost bin next to the palm tree in the backyard. Basically, any safely isolated, moderately sunny corner in the yard wills suffice. If you have good subsoil, you can actually bury the bin in a hole as City Farmer suggests. Microbial activity is measured by temperature, so if you want to be super precise about it, you can stick a thermometer in it and make sure the mixture temperature rises to about 160 degrees farenheit and then gradually drops (see USDA info sheet for more details).
I think it's going to take roughly a month to see results, but I am adding poop to the bin every day and praying to the plant gods for this to be my first successful gardening experience. If you have tips, leave them in the comments--and like my doggies, I will soak up any positive reinforcement you toss my way.
BumpTop, a 3D desktop interface for Windows, is now available for download in a free and $30 "Pro" version.
I just dinked around with it for five minutes. It's amusing, and perhaps even fun, but it feels a little primitive to me for some reason. It might the sheer boxed walls.
Still, it's free, and this sort of thing can't be assessed in five minutes. You have to get around inside and spend some time with it. And if you had a touchscreen machine, I could see it being a lot more fun. Icons + physics is a hoot.
):
Niciun comentariu:
Trimiteți un comentariu