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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.)

When I think about overarching topics in systems design for eco-tenants, there are four that immediately come to mind: food, water, “waste” (nutrient and materials cycling), and energy (electricity, fuel, etc.).  While I can spout off a diverse range of renter-appropriate solutions for the first three, my repertoire for energy is usually limited to the conservation side of the equation (CFLs, shrink-wrapping windows during winter, etc.).  These ideas for renter-generated power are pretty neat, and hopefully just the tip of the iceberg of more to come…

Via Apartment Therapy’s Re-Nest, here are two photovoltaic solutions for folks who rent:

SolMeter :: In this California program, you sponsor the installation of solar panels somewhere, and you receive a portion of the profits from the electricity that it generates, which you can apply to your own electricity bill, or whatever else you want.

Veranda Solar :: Again, from California (big surpise!).  This startup makes beautiful little panels that you could mount outside of a window with (or without, I suppose) a landlords permission.  According to the website, they’re orders currently exceed production, but you can sign up to be notified when more are available.

Coming Soon: Photovoltaic Curtains

One technology that I’m excited about, but that apparently doesn’t exist quite yet, are photovoltaic window curtains.  They’re such a simple and wonderful idea: when it’s sunny, just close the drapes and generate electricity!

It looks like several companies have them in the works, but they’re not available at this time.  Here’s a link to a CNN article about the concept.  I’ll definitely be blogging about these whenever they hit the market!
Read the rest of this entry »

Hope this Wednesday finds everyone doing quite well…

City Farmer News served up the first two links in this roundup:

Hungry, Hungry Manhattan

Here’s a great video about what it would take to grow all Manhattan’s food on Manhattan Island. It’s a thought-provoking piece, although there are a number of other questions that it doesn’t address but leaves me curious about. Namely, I think a more useful question would be “What would it take to grow food for all Manhattanites within X miles of Manhattan Island?” Where X is less than, say, 500 miles.

At best, I think this video serves as a reminder that urban ag isn’t a silver bullet for our food system woes. But there’s also a way in which it sounds to like “Urban agriculture doesn’t work because you could never produce all of a city’s food in the city.” No one that I’m aware of, in the Urban Agriculture movement is arguing that any large city could ever be 100% food self-sufficient.  Anywho… Read the rest of this entry »

Goats are the New Chickens

City Farmer News posted this story about the growing urban goat-keeping trend. The article features this great quote:

“In our society, we have pets we love and we have factory farm animals that we treat dismally,” [...] “I want to return to a world where animals are both, like in Africa and Greece where they treat animals very well and then eat them. I think that is a much better model.”

I second that!

And for a little more background on keeping urban goats, check out this page from Seattle’s Goat Justice League.

Does Your Garden Save You Money?

I get really excited when people track how much money is saved by growing their own food, and who better to write about it than a personal finance blogger! J.D. at Get Rich Slowly pens this (somewhat) regular update on the financial benefits of vegetable gardening. Read the rest of this entry »

(For previous talk about container gardening, check this out.)

I keep having a lot of random thoughts and links that I want to get out to y’all, and not the time to develop each into a post of its own.  So here’s another batch or snacks for your brain…

Links

Life on the Balcony, a beginner container gardener’s wet dream, just finished a blog carnival about edible containers. Lots of good reading there. Check the rest of the site for more container gardening information than you could ever assimilate.

I find a lot of stuff on this site (aesthetically) boring, but it has a huge range of ideas. Check it out if you’re needing inspiration around different materials to make containers out of.

The ever-informative about.com has a section devoted to container gardening that I didn’t come across until just recently. Suprisingly extensive.

Books

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Fresh Food from Small Spaces by RJ Rupenthal, and Garden Anywhere by Alys Fowler. Both are superb books for tenant farmers, and while container gardening is a core focus of each, they explore other interesting topics as well.

Places to find great containers for the 2010 season:

For a lot of us in the northern hemisphere, right now is the time to be gearing up for planting, which means get your containers ready!  If you need cheap containers to re-purpose or upcycle, check out these places:

• Yardsales
• Estate sales
• Flea markets
• Thriftstores
• End-of-Season sales at nurseries (varies by region, generally November here in the Pacific NW)

There you go for now.  Happy gardening!

-LB

[image source: ...eeek! can't remember]