perpetual gardening calendar by krank press

Hello! All the best wishes and hopes to you for 2010! I’m easing back into being home after a whirlwind tour of the Pacific Northwest. So many beautiful sights – snow on the firs/pines/cedars, fog winding through mountain passes, chickens running around the front yards of portland and lots of good strong coffee, even some coffee stout. I’ll post some pictures later, but for now wanted to let you know about the good work being put out by Krank Press in LA.  In their etsy shop they are selling ‘Perpetual Gardening Calenders’, which are beautiful spiral bound collections that are not just for 2010 but are, well, perpetually useful. They have some specific calendars like one for the Pacific Northwest and SF that are amazing. Each month has a linoleum cut illustration and includes 2 lists. One list is planting recommendations and the other is a produce list of what’s available in the markets for that month. In addition there is also a space for note keeping on the side. Love it!

They also have  a calendar of the odd birds of LA featuring amongst others, a burrowing owl page. Less then a mile from my house there’s a burrowing owl habitat and every time I see them I feel incredibly lucky.

 

new botanical prints from visualingual

I’m a big fan of the shop and the artists behind visualingual. I love these prints of plants that they’ve found growing wild in their midwest neighborhoods. You can visit their etsy shop here.

 

new kind of specimen jar

I saw these on for me- for you blog this morning and love them. They’re from the Brooklyn based company Land-Rich. I think I’m going to try and make some of these myself, maybe even a tiny little terrarium would work….hmmm…..

 

pineapple sage, you’re beautiful.

Thanks to this plant, well and to the incredibly temperate weather we’re having that allows me to sleep with the windows open in November, I woke up this morning to the sound of a hummingbird’s wings as it feasted on the crazy number of scarlet flowers on my pineapple sage (salvia elegans). I love this plant. The crushed leaves truly do smell very pineapple-y, and they even have a slight pineapple taste. This particular bush is taller then me and wider then it is tall. And the hummingbirds are plump and making good use of the clothesline right above it, a perfect perch. The sage hardly needs any water all summer and will even sporadically bloom during the summer, but fall is it’s glory. Hundreds upon hundreds of red flowers. And it transplants without a hitch. Dig up a chunk and now the hummingbirds love the front yard too. Highly recommended, a great plant for the beginning gardener to boost your confidence!

 

west virginia wins

Really? This is amazing and I want to go. Now. Tonight.  There are over 3000 pumpkins lit at 748 Beech St in Kenova, WV. Hands down best halloween decorations. And in the second photo doesn’t it seem like there’s a decorated chicken coop?

Hope you all had a good and perhaps even meaningful Halloween! xoxo

 

seed bombs

Every day I walk past lots that are full of broken glass, scraggly foxtailed grass and cracked cement. Typical city adornment. A lot of people have been taken with the idea of seed bombs and are lobbing tiny balls of hope over many fences within busy city borders. I looked around on Etsy because I am obviously fascinated about the breadth of homemade crafted goods people offer on there. Sure enough there were some seed bomb offerings, and I’m loving these by the shop Visual Lingual.

Now for those of us not living in the Midwest here is a recipe to make your own.

Seed Bomb Recipe:

5pts dry red clay (to hold them together until the rain)

3 pts dry organic compost (for seedlings nourishment)

1 pt seed

1-2 parts water

*Combine dry materials, add water until a paste is thick enough to form penny sized balls. Allow the seed bombs to dry for 3-4 days in the sun. For those of you in California the seeds from lupine and california poppies are great plants to use.

Now while I LOVE this idea, and would encourage folks to try it out, I have a few caveats.

*Make sure that the seeds are for local native plants only. I know cities aren’t exactly natural, but we can still hope to encourage the wildlife that need native plants to take up residence. It would be totally irresponsible to throw seed around from non-native invasive species.

*Please stick to lots and city cracks only. Do not bomb any area set aside for wildlife. The ecosystem is fragile and I’d hate for your enthusiasm to have catastrophic interspecies  effects!

 

collecting nigella seeds/love-in-the-mist

I’ve been tying up the loose ends of summer this week. Making tinctures, getting ready to press some that I made earlier in the summer, and now I’m starting to collect some seeds. Nigella damascena, affectionately known as love-in-the-mist, is really easy to grow, keep alive and then reseed. Perfect for beginners in the garden. It jumps around the garden, sure, but it doesn’t take over or even seem to travel that far away from the garden’s edges. Don’t confuse it with Nigella sativa, it’s medicinal counterpart, this garden relative is not going to help your asthma or digestive complaints!

I’ve seen this plant grow in the shade or the sun, but it prefers sun. I’ve also seen nigella grow quite large with water and grow to about 3 inches high if growing in a dry crack in the sidewalk. Either way, it still blooms – such a tough guy! My front garden was full of self seeders this year, nigella, california poppy, violets and the persistent pink valerian were all tangled together. I cut the seed pods off for harvesting after I cut them down for the year.

The whole plant in bloom is an architectural phenomenon and the seed pods definitely hold to that perfection as well. Here’s an individual one that’s easier to see.

At the top of the seed pod there are tiny openings that form as the seed pod dries out. They make a rattling sound and are really fun to play with, send your kids out to sow the next crop!

 

moss graffiti

All of the above work is by Edina Tokodi a Hungarian born artist working in Brooklyn, NY. I absolutely love it.

 

planting the city/street art

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:

 

garden inspiration

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!