Last Easter, we posted Ambatalia’s extensive how-to on dying Easter eggs with natural dyes. We have that essential Easter item covered. What to do THIS year? There’s egg-shaped stones painted a la Max Ernst… Then an image we saw in a Remodelista post about cold frames got us thinking about another kind of ALT Easter…
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(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…
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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…
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photo: david saltman 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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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(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… Filmed by Neil Bromhall. via Imaginary Foundation Related posts: video…
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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…
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Two summers ago we profiled an intrepid group of New York City car service drivers who planted three little farms on abandoned pieces of land right in the heart of the Bronx. They harvested abundantly and each of their wives took turns cooking weekly feasts for the assembled breadwinners (and cornwinners and beanwinners). We followed…
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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…) Thanks Pamela! Related posts: think-make-think itzhak perlman:…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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The last “turning” hydrangeas from Maria Robledo‘s garden made the perfect instant flower arrangement for the table… …here’s another of Maria’s arrangements made with branches of leaves and some yellow flower that looks like an undersea creature…(dig the fabulous nude by Sofia Rower in the background)…
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I keep a stack of books by my bed for “daily” wind-down reading. They are meant to do various things: cool me out, give me hope and/or inspiration, help me think about pressing matters, entertain. One of them is Keith Stewart’s It’s a Long Road to a Tomato: Tales of an Organic Farmer Who Quit the…
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Friends of ours recently finished the long renovation of their brownstone in Brooklyn; designed by artists, the house is full of interesting ideas. One of the most dramatic is the floor-to-ceiling sliding doors that collapse sideways to open to the lush garden in the back…on two floors no less. (Our photographs were taken while the punch-list…
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We came across this coupling of essential quotes when we were poking around John Zernings blog about Garden Trellises and Architectural Space Frames. “Applied to architecture and structure, the former is primarily an aesthetic position; the latter is a principle of economy.” wrote Zerning. We find both immensely useful, and made a sign to remind…
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