We came across this coupling of essential quotes when we were poking around John Zernings blog about Garden Trellises and Architectural Space Frames.
“Applied to architecture and structure, the former is primarily an aesthetic position; the latter is a principle of economy.” wrote Zerning. We find both immensely useful, and made a sign to remind us…”
You might wonder how we ever came across Zerning’s site in the first place, living in the city as we do, with no garden, or even a terrace. We were following the trail of some images that have been flying around the blogs, of a beautiful architecture of wires… read more…
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 – nature of vegetables…
“The reason why our music is kind of fresh is…because we are forced to make something new on stage to improvise …our musical instruments don’t stay the same…”
Members of the Orchestra forge original instruments using knives, drilling machines, and various other tools. Their work is really about unleashing the possibilities inherent in the most ordinary of things around us.
“You can make music out of nearly everything, each thing contains a very specific acoustic quality and represents an intricate universe of sound…each thing could be a tool to open up that point of view”. read more…
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 scapes, the vivid green shoots that the forming underground garlic bulbs send up, that curl into beautiful tendrils. Two or three scapes in a vase have a sculptural look that will change slightly daily. Garlic scapes are also delicious to eat. When they are young and tender, we slice them on an extreme diagonal and braise them in extra-virgin olive oil or butter with a bit of water and salt, until they are tender. Their texture is like a string bean with a delicate flavor of mellowed garlic.
Because they are the byproduct of an edible crop, allium flowers usually cost little, last quite a long time, and are wonderful to look at. They have the added virtue of being edible. Allium flowers are really clusters of tiny individual flowers; you can pull them apart to sprinkle in salads… on just about any cooked vegetable…eggs…for a little hit of onion flavor.
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 or bear, making a film in Afghanistan…) and New York Magazine knew they had their sucker. In trying to create “the farm”, Manny got SO deep into something he had no clue about that he almost lost his marriage (and a finger). He spent months preparing land that had not grown a thing in decades, nurturing seedlings under make-shift grow lights, rigging coops, building an irrigation system, learning to geld and kill chickens, trying to get rabbits to breed… learning on the job. Everything that could go wrong did, including a hurricane landing in Brooklyn – right on the farm. He lost 29 pounds.
In a recent interview in Elle Magazine, Manny described the biggest challenge:
“Well, I could break it down to most miserable, or most discouraging, or generated the most self-loathing. Those are probably the categories. I was so crazy and myopic. I was dedicated to finishing the project. I really became a lunatic. Fix what’s broken, heal what’s sick, feed what’s hungry-which was the real gift of the whole project: Apply work to a problem and the problem would be gone for, you know, seven hours. Nothing ever actually got fixed or healed.”
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 kill wild animals…But most of all I think daily about new ways to cook and eat anything that walks, flies, swims, crawls, skitters, jumps – or grows…Honest food is what I’m seeking…I am especially interested in those meats and veggies that people don’t eat much any more, like pigeons or shad or cardoons.”
Shaw blogs his “wanderings in the edible world” and explorations of foods that strike his fancy – explorations that invariably lead to improvising and figuring things out himself. The blog is a good place for learning about what’s REALLY in season, and what to do with foods you’ve foraged one way or another, or have just wondered about. We like his step-by-step instructions (with photos) of how to break down a (game) bird, and make bottarga (salt-cured fish roe), and are impressed with his thoughts on Wild Game Fat and Flavor, which we haven’t seen written about elsewhere. And even though we can’t get with his use of garlic powder and Instacure No.2 (sodium nitrite) in what looks like an otherwise fine recipe for Lardo, we love his original voice and take and insights into the process of sussing out a new ingredient; the guy is game to learn and get his hands dirty.
The blog is a fine reminder of what is out there, from acorns and borage, to elderflower and shad: all the fabulous possibilities for eating in the natural world… read more…
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 light to awaken the flower within.
Several kinds of bulbs hold the potential to valiantly bloom in winter; the easiest are those that do not need a period of cold before exposure to sun. These include crocuses, hyacinths, paperwhites and daffodils. Here’s the simple method from Ed Hume Seeds: read more…
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 larger arrangement, in a charming way.
They are mostly the treasure of flea markets, yard sales and junk stores; Ebay always has good offerings if you’re willing to wade through the listings. CB2 often has good selection of handblown beakers and odd vases, for a few dollars apiece, read more…
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 — big, fat cornstalks were growing out of a tiny sliver of ground at the foot of a stone hillside in the northwest corner of the city. I walked further and saw another abundant patch of corn, then plantings of beans, herbs and a grape arbor, all butting up against the granite bluff on top of which sits my 25-story apartment building. read more…
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 creating its very charming ambiance. I loved these canning jars cleverly arranged with vines (others have leafy vegetables and herbs) in place of flowers for the café’s outdoor tables. (I don’t think I’ve ever seen chicken wire used decoratively before…) The vines appear to be hops, grown to make Tertti’s incredibly delicious, crisp, slightly bitter beer. read more…
“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 mid-19th century. The epidemic started with blighted seedlings sold to home gardeners by Walmart, Lowe’s, Kmart and Home Depot. Once the spores were released into the environment, relentlessly wet, windy weather encouraged them to spread and flourish: a perfect storm. A picture in the New York Times food section recently showed Keith hurling blighted tomato plants, that he’d grown from seed, into a deep pit (a grave, really). Keith estimates his losses will be around $40,000, which is not as bad as some.
Keith’s words remind me that to farm is to face uncontrollable forces – both natural and man-made – on a daily basis. Farmers solve problems, think on their feet, improvise constantly. Vulnerability and risk are part of the deal. read more…
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 a beach house or on a patio. It is made out of two pallets and 50 screws, from an inexpensive, down-loadable plan. It would be great painted, or naturally weathered.
The ever-innovative Studiomama has other well-designed examples of pallet furniture read more…
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 opened my eyes to possibilities I never thought of, and gives the wherewithal to do them. read more…
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. read more…
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 out money for seeds, plants and supplies from their own pocket, and put themselves on the line (in effect, doing an end-run around bogged-down, bureaucratic local governments). read more…
