An eclectic assortment of stuff: food, archaeology, fun, books, history, geekery, etc.
From Time.com: Vertical Farming.
Dickson Despommier became the guru of vertical farming because his students were bummed out. A professor of environmental health at Columbia University in New York City, Despommier teaches about parasitism, environmental disruption and other assorted happy topics. Eventually his students complained; they wanted to work on something optimistic. So the class began [...]
Posted in gardening on Oct 18th, 2008
I know, I know, I don’t usually blog about gardening. (Well, except for lasagna gardening. And keyhole gardening And perhaps the odd other thing.) But here’s a chance to get great results with almost no effort, and you’ve gotta like that!
This is why you want to plant sweet peas this fall:
Posted in food, gardening, history & archaeology on Sep 23rd, 2008
From the Beeb: Romans ‘brought leeks to Wales’.
The Romans gave us roads, plumbing, wine and irrigation and now it seems they may have also introduced Wales’ unofficial icon — the garden leek.
The National Museum of Wales says the Romans probably planted domesticated varieties to flavour their stews. [continue]
Posted in gardening on Jun 21st, 2008
I thought that the keyhole gardening method was pretty spiffy (and it is!) but this might be even more appealing. Here’s Patricia Lanza’s article from Mother Earth News: Lasagna Gardening.
If someone told me years ago that he or she had found a way to do an end run around the sweat equity of traditional gardening, [...]
Posted in environment, food, gardening on Jun 19th, 2008
From Celesias: Keyhole Gardens Lock Out Starvation in Lesotho.
Sometimes, the best solutions are low-tech. For example, in the tiny African country of Lesotho, a simple organic gardening technique called "keyhole gardening" is allowing people to produce enough vegetables to nourish their families without having to invest in costly technology, fuel, fertilizer or pesticides. As the [...]
Posted in gardening, history & archaeology on Feb 25th, 2007
From The Proceedings of the Athinasius Kircher Society: Linnaeus’s Flower Clock.
Carl Linnaeus, father of taxonomy, divided the flowering plants into three groups: the meteorici, which change their opening and closing times according to the weather conditions; the tropici, which change their opening and closing times according to the length of the day; and the aequinoctales, [...]