The Vegetable Orchestra in Vienna, Austria performs original music made and inspired by instruments made of vegetables. Cucumberophones, celery bongos and leek violins might seem like something out of a Max Fleischer cartoon, but they are very real. They yield original sounds and music, with an ephemeral quality because of the living – and fleeting…
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Last weekend, instead of the usual fabulous summer flowers – sunflowers, zinnias, roses – we picked up our favorite alt-flowers from our farmer friend Keith Stewart. He sells the flowers from his alliums (members of the onion family) like onion, shallot and chive: long green stems topped by white modernist globes.We also buy Keith’s garlic…
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A few years ago, Manny Howard was enticed by New York Magazine to try growing food in his Brooklyn backyard and sustain himself on it for a month. At the time, Manny wasn’t really committed to exploring the meaning of “locavore” (the magazine’s tack); he loves wild challenges of just about any kind (hunting boar…
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Of late we are smitten with a rather homely blog whose content is so good, and its straightforwardness so compelling, that it overcomes its strangely distracting design and ads for cutting down belly fat. Hunter Angler Gardener Cook is Hank Shaw‘s site about being just that: “I fish. I dig earth, raise plants, live for food and…
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Every winter around this time, hyacinths appear at my corner market: three just-sprouting bulbs nestled in dirt in an ugly plastic pot wrapped in gaudy paper. I treat myself to them because, liberated from their tacky dressing, they offer a glimmer of spring for a few dollars. Once home, I remove the shiny paper, hold…
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Photographer Maria Robledo emailed me this picture of a winter crocus taken with her i-Phone, with the message: “Needs nothing but light to illuminate us.” She was given crocus bulbs bought from the local farmer’s market as a house-warming present. She had only to place one root-side down in a bowl and expose it to…
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Over the years, I’ve collected a disparate assortment of glassware that I use as makeshift vases: tiny odd-shaped beakers (whatever were they originally used for??!!), little bottles, and squat stemware from decades ago. They are perfect displays for inexpensive branchy flowers whose stems I cut way down. Grouped together, they take the place of a…
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As today’s guest blogger, David Saltman tells of his discovery of some inadvertent guerilla gardeners. He did some on-the-spot investigative reporting for ‘the improvised life’ and photographed the story with his i-Phone. Thanks, David! “I was walking down the street in New York City recently when I ran smack into a cornfield. It was no hallucination —…
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The Dutch design firm Demakersvan created this lace chain-link fence in response to a challenge by the Design Center at Philadelphia University: to create a site-specific work inspired by a collection of historic Quaker lace for an exhibition called Lace in Translation. Demakersvan totally transformed ugly industrial fencing by applying what looks to me to…
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Tertin Kartano is a 16th century farm that doubles as a hotel and restaurant (or vice versa) in Mikkeli in Southern Finland’s lake region. Much of what Papita and Matti Pylkkanen and their staff grow and forage – from wild chanterelle to rowan berries – are used in the traditional Finnish manor-house cuisine, and in…
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“I guess you win some and you lose some”, my friend Keith Stewart wrote in an email. “Last year was a winner. This year, I think, will not be.” Like many farmers in the Northeast, Keith’s tomatoes have been hit hard by late blight, the same spore-born disease that caused the Irish Potato famine in the…
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I’ve come across a number of posts about furniture made of pallets, those flat rectangles of rough hammered-together wood platforms commonly used to move bundled goods around by a fork lift. This lounge chair by Studiomama is a particularly good one; it has clean lines and looks like it would be comfortable – perfect at…
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I am a farmer trapped in a city-person’s body, torn between love of urban and yearning to grow vegetables, keep bees, preserve food. I know there are a lot of us around. Why should it be either/or? Although I’ve been figuring out country ways in my small city apartment for years, a new book has…
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The newly-launched website Veggie Trader is like Craigslist for homegrown produce. Sign up to post a listing describing the excess produce you have and what you’d like in return. Or just enter your zip code to see what your neighbors have available for sell or to give away.
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There’s been a lot on the internet lately about guerrilla gardeners, people from all walks dedicated to stealthily transforming blighted, barren or plain ugly urban spots into planted oasis’s. These are often ordinary, middle-class souls fed up with the lack of nature and beauty in their urban landscape, and willing to break the law, shell…
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