the urban field guide

Sorry the posting has been slow, I’m winding up my summer term in my acupuncture program. Hope you have a great weekend!

A short list of what I saw on my walk home from school:

*2 more front yards dug up and completely planted with vegetables

*the Malcolm X elementary school garden in full bloom

*the traffic circle’s corn almost ripe

*a miniature chihuahua off  leash chasing his person who was riding a skateboard

A few weeks ago I wrote a post about how street artists in Toronto were turning advertising boxes into planters. Well Toronto is steppin’ up its pace again with the latest round of plant street art by Sean Martindale and Eric Cheung. I read about their installments on The Wooster Collective, which is an amazing blog dedicated to logging ephemeral street art in cities worldwide.

You can check out Sean and Eric’s blog on their project at Poster Pocket Plants. They even offer templates so you can plant the flyer covered telephone polls and thickly covered advertising boards in your city.  Here are some more images of the project. This was posted by the Torontoist.

This one was posted by  Spacing Toronto: Understanding the Urban Landscape:

It’s been a while since I did an Etsy post, but I think this one is worth the wait. Technically there’s one pot and two tools, but that would’ve been a bulky title. Click on the link or the picture to get to the shops!

by coughcoughchoke

This entire shop is amazing, you really should go take a look!

by woodelements

Hand turned paper pot maker that can put recycled newspaper to good use. A great way to cut down on using plastic in the garden, no more plastic seed trays!

by future prim garden

And finally, this beautiful handcrafted dibbler for seeding. Lovely, right?

I have a friend Perci who lives way too far away from me. I was visiting her in the spring when her garden was just waking up from a long Portland winter and was so inspired by the way that she sees her garden. It’s so interactive and intricately beautiful and smart, just like her. Here’s a look for you.

I love this. She lined the shopping cart with burlap so it drains well and then planted layers of potato starts. Here they’re obviously just popping up, I’d love to see them now.

Here’s the tiniest garden in her side yard right outside the door right when the first hint of green was showing. I love this garden.

Beginnings of a vegetable garden… maybe I can get her to take some more pictures and send them so you can see the garden in full bloom. I took these pictures way before I started this blog to inspire me to keep looking at my garden differently. Thanks Perci for letting me share these!

Pie Ranch. The name is enough, right? A good friend invited us to come along with him and his pug to the ranch’s monthly barn dance in Pescadero, CA. He knows the farm apprentices really well so we also wound up camping over and pitching in a hand with the morning vegetable and fruit harvest. We also were lucky enough to have pancakes after the morning work that were made with the wheat they harvested. Wonderful. A really open and warm community, I miss them already.

I would encourage all of you to go over to check out the Pie Ranch website. They’re a non-profit that works to bring urban and rural communities together with an emphasis on showing people the source of their food. They bring teens from neighboring cities out to the farm and teach them how to harvest and then transform the harvest into, well – pie. They even harvested enough wheat this year for over 2500 pie crusts!

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I walk to the acupuncture clinic that I’m interning at daily. It’s about a mile and I get to check out all the gardens as I go along. My favorite block is on Russell Street because of the amazing fragrance of the Michelia trees planted at the Thai Temple.

There are two large trees planted at the entrance and about a dozen more planted in barrels surrounding the temple. The trees are loaded with flowers, although unfortunately my zoom was too weak to capture them! I believe this variety is Michelia champaca. The flowers are a light yellow and you can smell them all the way up and down the street. They transform that little corner of the city into pure magic.

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I’ve talked before about my love for sites like Smitten Kitchen, but today I want to share a link with you that I saw on another one of my favorite sites -Design* Sponge.  Often times Grace posts diy projects and this one was featured yesterday -

This tutorial originally posted by Design Gal shows step by step instructions on how to make these ornamental pieces using quick concrete, non-stick cook spray and old lamp globes. It looks really simple and a great base for many more possibilities. Check out the details here or here!

While having an aimless moment of skipping from garden blogs to ecology sites I came across this great site from Portland, Oregon. I guess I’m pretty much stuck on the NW right now, so why not embrace it?

The photo above is from that site and is a mobile garden with a gravity fed irrigation system. Permaculture for Renters has articles ranging from container gardening, composting, and front yard farming to negotiating with landlords and farming a neighbors yard. Leonard Barrett is the author of the site and is traveling around doing workshops, so stop by the site and check it out – he’s doing great work!

Before I get back to our regularly scheduled programming I thought I’d share some more pictures from the NW. Hope you enjoy.

Visitors arrive by the busload to visit these lavender farms in Sequim. The town books solid and there are gallons of lavender flavored ice cream, iced tea and even coffee drinks set out on counters everywhere. This small town had a really, really good idea in nurturing their local farms to improve the local economy. On a side note, I could spend all day in this purple field!

There are a few more posts I want to share about my time on the Olympic Peninsula. This post was brought to my attention by my mom, Penny – so thanks!

Image by Sunprint, etsy seller

I love the idea of this company and can’t get it off of my mind. Sail Transport Co. is providing CSA produce boxes to subscribers in Seattle completely free of fossil fuels. They bring fresh organic produce from fantastic sources like Nash’s Organic Farm in Sequim to Seattle by a series of alternative modes of transportation. First they use a 15 year old electric truck to bring over 1000 lbs of produce down to the dock where they then load it onto their sailboat named Whisper. From there they travel by sailboat for anywhere between 12 to 24 hours into Seattle. Upon reaching Seattle they load the produce onto electric trikes with bike trailers attached to reach the produce markets and CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)  pick up locations. Zero % emissions, just muscle and creative thought. They also deliver honey from another peninsula location. Beautiful, right?