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Have you tried googling “fire escape garden”?! There are a bajillion articles about container gardening on fire escapes.  Who knew?!

Anyhow, most of them absolutely suck (WHY did TLC, eHow, and Emeril have to jump on the urban farming bandwagon?!), so I’ve saved you some disappointment by picking out a few of the highlights.  Unsurprisingly, Manhattan and Brooklyn are leading the way…

• A packed 2′x3′ fire escape garden in NYC, complete with self-watering containers and upcycled soda bottle planters.
• Interesting conjecture about the legality of fire escape gardening, with an interesting tip to keep pigeons and squirrels out of your veggies.
• Not a post, but it’s notable that there is a EFFING STORE IN SAN FRANCISCO CALLED FIRE ESCAPE FARMS!!!  What?!  They sell lots of unecessarily-expensive-but-very-amusing stuff for the urban gardener.
• For some beautiful photos of fire escape gardening (but relatively little text), check out thefireescapegarden.com’s 2009 archive (apparently, in 2010 they moved the burbs…)

(Photo credit: Flickr user Kristine Paulus.)

It feels like I have a new favorite guerilla-planting every week, and this week, it’s this amazing stenciled utility sink planter on the corner of SE 25th and Ivon in Portland. File under f’n awesome.

This one gets major points for the following reasons:

• Displays polycultural planting in a small space, with tomato, beans, lettuce, basil. (That said, it’s probably planted a little too densely, with one tomato and one bean plant too many.)
• Upcycles an old utiliy sink.
• Water that drains out of the sink flows into another planter below the sink planted with lettuces, which thrive in the shady microclimate underneath.
• Great signage (“Respect Our Local Food” & “Niche Repurposing Public Space”)
• Beautiful stenciling.
• Placement directly on the corner demands attention, but it’s still out of the way enough for pedestrians to navigate around.