Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Bus garden!!

How sweet is this?!
The design is by Bus Roots in order to take advantage of the forgotten urban space of bus roofs.

Read the article on Urban Gardens

I absolutely LOVE this!!  I think I found a new website!

Sunday, February 26, 2012

Green Beauty Companies

http://teens.readiweb.com/get-educated/greener-alternatives.html

Seattle to build a Food Forest

This reminds me of a video we watched in Sustainable about post Cold-War Cuba. BTW !Cheers Cubanos!
It’s Not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest
Forget meadows. The city’s new park will be filled with edible plants, and everything from pears to herbs will be free for the taking
Claire Leschin-Hoar, Take Part

Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.
“This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project, tells TakePart. Harrison is working on construction and permit drawings now and expects to break ground this summer.

Monday, February 20, 2012

Tenderloin National Forest

This is something I would like to do someday. Slowly, slowly plant the ghetto. How can you be so angry and 'poor' when surrounded by beauty? Also it'd be nice to attach community food gardens.
Article from Treehugger by Bonnie Hulkower
The Tenderloin, one of San Francisco's most crime-ridden neighborhoods, lies in the middle of the city, not far from city hall and the tony neighborhood of Nob Hill. Some travel brochures even caution tourists to stay away from the Tenderloin. The neighborhood earned its name and reputation in the 1920’s, when the police needed to be bribed with choice cuts of meat to provide enforcement in the area where construction and dock workers lived. It remains a neighborhood defined by poverty, homelessness and drug use. But in a narrow alley off Ellis and Leavenworth Streets is an urban sanctuary, known as the Tenderloin National Forest
The Tenderloin National Forest, or Forest, is one of the few open spaces in a dense neighborhood of over 40,000 culturally and ethnically diverse residents. The Forest came to life about twenty five years ago when Darryl Smith, an artist and San Francisco native, was living in a Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC) managed apartment building adjacent to the derelict alley, then known as Cohen Alley. The alley served as a dumping ground for hypodermic needles and garbage. Smith and his partner, Laurie Lazer, along with fellow artists and community activists decided to transform the dingy alley into a safe, relaxing space for people to congregate. It wasn’t easy. In 1989, Smith planted a redwood in the shady asphalt. It was at that time that Smith and his artist collaborators formed the nonprofit Luggage Store Gallery. The space at 509 Ellis, previously a bar, became a garden annex to the Gallery and a site for the Gallery’s Artist in Residency (AIR) Program. Plant by plant, the alley was being transformed into a community garden and temporary performance space.

Sunday, February 19, 2012

Seed Bombs Away!!!


Made from a mixture of clay, compost, and seeds, seedbombs are a great way to combat the many forgotten grey spaces you encounter everyday: from sidewalk cracks, to vacant lots and parking medians. They can be thrown anonymously into these abandoned urban sites to reclaim and transform them into places worth looking at and caring for. They can also be tossed into your home garden. I love the ones used with flexible heart molds!
Here’s the recipe:
5 parts dry red clay*
3 parts dry organic compost
1 part native seed
1 – 2 parts water
*For the clay it is recommended that you use dry potter’s clay. You should be able to obtain this at any farm or gardening store. It comes as a powder, which makes it easier to mix.
-After mixing together all of the dry ingredients, slowly add water to the mixture. You want to add enough water that the mixture sticks together, but you do not want the mixture to be too dry and crumbly or too wet that you cannot role it into balls.
-When you get your mixture together it is time to start rolling it in to quarter sized balls.
-Mixture rolled into balls ready to be thrown
-Once you get the mixture rolled up, the next step is to let them dry out. Generally, the drying process should take somewhere around 48-72 hours. Thats it. You’re now ready to distribute your seed bombs.
http://justlive.us/featured-posts/bombs-away-make-seed-bombs-for-an-environmentally-friendly-form-of-civil-disobedience/

Hugelkultur

I thought this was interesting.  An article from Treehugger about hugelkultur by Sami Grover

Some time ago I posted on hugelkultur raised bed gardening—an initially labor intensive method of growing that involves burying massive amounts of woody biomass underneath your growing bed, providing a long-term release of nutrients and a greatly increased water-storage capacity as the materials slowly rot down. (Advocates say that big-enough hugelkultur beds should never need watering.) At the time I was a little taken aback by images of diggers and large trenches—not what you typically associate with low impact permaculture methods. But I've since heard from many hardcore advocates of hugelkultur, and I've just found a couple of great videos about what it looks like in practice. The first is a neat little time-lapse number from Midwest Permaculture in which they document a step-by-step process of building a small hugelkultur raised bed. No mechanical diggers in sight, although it sure did take a lot of human labor to build one bed!




Sunday, February 12, 2012

Question:
With all these funny websites (DYAC, memebase, postfunz failblog) available and popular these days, are we just getting lazier and stupider by spending hours looking at them, OR are we just showing our sense of humor and enjoying it? (for sometimes hours on end *guilty*)
Discuss.

Green Tea Toner

For my next trial I am going to make some Green Tea Toner, which I found in Ecobeauty by Lauren and Janice Cox.
Recipe
  • 1/2c distilled water
  • 1-2 green tea bags, or 2 tsp leaves
Boil water and put in tea bags/leaves.  Steep 2-3 min then remove bags/leaves. Allow to cool and put in a clean bottle with a tight-fitting lid.  Apply with a cotton ball.
-Green tea is supposedly to calm/refresh your skin and help slow down environmental damage.
-You can also use this as a facial treatment by soaking a washcloth w/mixture and leaving on face for ten minutes.

It's Facebook Official!!

...so then it MUST be true...
Anyway I announced that on Monday I WILL go to the gym that's close by and get a membership.  I've been placid too long and it's been seriously hurting me.
Also
SUNDAY is now Spa-day.  I will relax, and do all that girlie stuff to make myself look and feel better.
I will grocery shop at the Co-op first, then Aldi's, THEN Walmart or Cub.  I want to go more organic, plus I can find some good making beauty stuff.