Mamis Garden

grasshoppersense: Ben Hewitt, author, farmer, general inspirer...

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:53:46 -0400

Ben Hewitt, author, farmer, general inspirer (that is a word here, I’ve decided).

an excerpt from an excerpt of an essay he wrote for Yankee magazine

‘And I will remember how it happens every year that I improbably recognize a bale or two – maybe a runt from an early pass, when we were fiddling with the baler settings, or maybe one from the field’s edge, with an identifying stick woven in, shed from the old maples that line the northern fringe, overseers of more hay and toil than I can imagine. And I’ll stand in our snow-packed barnyard for a minute, holding the bale, wrenched back to the moment I hauled it off the chute and tossed it to Penny or one of the boys as Martha guided the tractor down the long windrow, the smell of grease and diesel and drying hay riding softly on the summer air.

It’s not a moment frozen in time, but rather just the opposite: A moment so fluid it can travel across weeks and even months to be with me at six o’clock on a January morning, to a point roughly equidistant from the haying season before and the haying season to come.’

finethankyouandyou: Primavera, ca. 1482 (detail) Sandro...

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:51:27 -0400

finethankyouandyou:

Primavera, ca. 1482 (detail)

Sandro Botticelli

Uffizi, Florence

"Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and..."

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:46:00 -0400

“Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.”

- Mary Oliver, Thirst. And the river flows… (via crashinglybeautiful)
im not religious but this poem speaks to me

Fat Chance: The Man Born to Farming

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:45:22 -0400

Fat Chance: The Man Born to Farming:

fatchance:

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes…

grayskymorning: De Alma e Coração

Fri, 24 May 2013 15:40:38 -0400

grayskymorning:

De Alma e Coração

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Fri, 24 May 2013 10:34:18 -0400

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Fri, 24 May 2013 10:34:02 -0400

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Fri, 24 May 2013 10:33:30 -0400

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Fri, 24 May 2013 10:33:16 -0400

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Thu, 23 May 2013 14:54:48 -0400

flowersgardenlove: Arisaema sikokianum Flowers Garden Love

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:48:01 -0400

flowersgardenlove:

Arisaema sikokianum Flowers Garden Love

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Thu, 23 May 2013 14:43:11 -0400

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Thu, 23 May 2013 14:42:40 -0400

breadandolives: |Source|

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:41:11 -0400

breadandolives:

|Source|

homesteaddreams: Cool event, gorgeous design.

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:30:47 -0400

homesteaddreams:

Cool event, gorgeous design.

flowersgardenlove: ✯ Waratah Flowers Garden Love

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:07:42 -0400

flowersgardenlove:

✯ Waratah Flowers Garden Love

huntingtonlibrary: William Sharp, one of the first...

Thu, 23 May 2013 12:05:12 -0400

huntingtonlibrary:

William Sharp, one of the first chromolithographic printers in the U.S., created these extraordinary illustrations for the large folio Victoria Regia (1854) by John Fisk Allen. Allen, a well-known horticulturalist, cultivated a specimen of the rare, huge (up to 8 feet in diameter), fast-growing (up to an inch an hour!) water lily, native to the Amazon. After months of careful tending, the plant—named in honor of the recently-crowned Queen Victoria—blossomed on the evening of July 21, 1853. Sharp’s depictions of this exotic wonder—in various stages of bloom—were masterpieces and elevated the then-nascent art of chromolithography to spectacular new heights.

image captions: All images are from a copy of Victoria Regia in our collections. Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens.

agritecture: Vertical ‘Pinkhouses:’ The Future Of Urban...

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:59:01 -0400

agritecture:

Vertical ‘Pinkhouses:’ The Future Of Urban Farming?

The idea of vertical farming is all the rage right now. Architects and engineers have come up with spectacular concepts for lofty buildings that could function as urban food centers of the future.

In Sweden, for example, they’re planning a 177-foot skyscraper to farm leafy greens at the edge of each floor. But so far, most vertical gardens that are up and running actually look more like large greenhouses than city towers. And many horticulturists don’t think sky-high farms in cities are practical.

“The idea of taking a skyscraper and turning it into a vertical farming complex is absolutely ridiculous from an energy perspective,” says horticulturist Cary Mitchell of Purdue University, who’s been working on ways to grow plants in space for more than 20 years.

The future of vertical farming, Mitchell thinks, lies not in city skyscrapers, but rather in large warehouses located in the suburbs, where real estate and electricity are cheaper.

And oh, yeah, instead of being traditional greenhouses lit by fluorescent lamps, he says these plant factories will probably be “pinkhouses,” glowing magenta from the mix of blue and red LEDs.

Light is a major problem with vertical farming. When you stack plants on top of each other, the ones at the top shade the ones at the bottom. The only way to get around it is to add artificial light — which is expensive both financially and environmentally.

Vertical farmers can lower the energy bill, Mitchell says, by giving plants only the wavelengths of light they need the most: the blue and red.

“Twenty years ago, research showed that you could grow lettuce in just red light,” Mitchell says. “If you add a little bit of blue, it grows better.”

Plant’s photosynthesis machinery is tuned to absorb red and blue light most efficiently. They have a handful of other pigments in their leaves that catch other wavelengths, but the red and blue wavelengths are the big ones, supplying the majority of the light needed to grow.

So why LEDs? They’re super energy efficient in general, but unlike traditional greenhouse lamps, they can be tuned to specific wavelengths. Why use all of ROYGBIV when just RB will do?

And there’s another advantage to using LEDs in greenhouses and vertical farming, Mitchell says: Because these lights are cooler, you can place them close to the plants — even stacked plants — and lose even less energy.

Recently, Mitchell and his graduate student designed a 9-foot-tall tower of lights and grew tomato plants right up against it. “As the plants get taller, we turn on the [light] panels higher up,” he explains. “It takes about two months before all the panels are on.”

The towers cut energy consumption by about 75 percent, Mitchell and his team reported earlier this year.

Right now, experiments are using these specialized LEDs to supplement natural light, not replace it.

But as LEDs get more and more efficient, could growers forgo the natural light altogether and grow crops completely in enclosed rooms, where they’re protected from temperature changes or damaging pests?

That’s exactly what Barry Holtz, at Caliber Biotherapeutics, is already doing.

His farms have never seen the light of day.

He and his company have built a 150,000-square-foot “plant factory” in Texas that is completely closed off from the outside world. They grow 2.2 million plants, stacked up 50 feet high, all underneath the magenta glow of blue and red LEDS.

“A photon is a terrible thing to waste,” Holtz tells The Salt. “So we developed these lights to correctly match the photosynthesis needs of our plants. We get almost 20 percent faster growth rate and save a lot energy.”

Holtz is growing a tobacco-like plant to make new drugs and vaccines. The indoor pinkhouse gives him tight control over the expensive crops, so his team can stop diseases and contamination.

Holtz says this type of indoor gardening isn’t going to replace traditional farms anytime soon. It’s still relatively expensive for growing food. “We couldn’t compete with iceberg lettuce farmers,” he says, “but for certain specialty crops, the economics wouldn’t be so bad.”

And, he says, the pinkhouse is actually quite efficient when it comes to water and electricity. “We’ve done some calculations, and we lose less water in one day than a KFC restaurant uses, because we recycle all of it.”

SOURCE

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Thu, 23 May 2013 02:29:07 -0400

smart-gardener: leahlockedown: #urbanfarm #planting #team...

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:43:19 -0400

smart-gardener:

leahlockedown:

#urbanfarm #planting #team #growHartford #hartfordlove #gardening

Love seeing the kids out in the garden! Such a great learning experience!