garden.geek.nz

The original solar lights in the sky are so magnificent and wondrous to behold, but the solar lights you can buy are generally uninspired and ugly. How to capture and transmit beauty along with the light? I’m utterly charmed by Wendy Legro’s graduation project for Design Academy Eindhoven, Morning Glory:

The sun is our natural light source. Our homes are filled with artificial light replacing it, undeliberately disrupting our biological clock.

This product works autonomously with a light sensor. During the day, mechanical flowers are closed enabling sunlight to come in. When sun sets, the flowers open and start to emit light. In this way, awareness for a beautiful phenomenon will be brought back.

Want to see something crazy? Check out time-lapsed video of a real morning glory vine and how it lassos on to supports.

Love this Ignite video of Kati London, co-creator of Botanicalls, a device that will let you know when your plant needs watering via Twitter. The Botanicalls system and applications use networked open source hardware and software to allow plants to communicate with people on people’s terms – using the telephone, text messages or twitter.

• If you’re in Wellington this weekend, check out the linux.conf.au 2010 Open Day of talks, hackfest, makers space and little blu kids area at at Town Hall Saturday 23 January 2010 from 11am to 2pm.

I’ve been watching friends get sucked into FarmVille, a social online game that has them planting, plowing and harvesting and earning a little virtual coin. But what if those vegetables you planted in your browser were actually delivered weekly to your home? Le Verdure Del Mio Orto (‘The Vegetables from my Garden’) lets you build an organic garden from your web browser and offers weekly deliveries from ‘your farm’ in Northern Italy, between Milan and Turin. (Found via Springwise.)

Virtual gardeners first select a plot size according to how many people they’d like to feed: 30m2 is sufficient for 1–2 people and costs EUR 850 per year. Then you can select from 39 types of vegetables for your patch, with information on expected yields and harvest times displayed visually. Optional extras include herb, fruit, flower, and flavor (e.g. garlic, basil, chile peppers) beds, a photo album of the garden’s progress, organic compost, personalization, and even a scarecrow with an image of your face.

Now this is the kind of community supported agriculture I’d really love to support!

• If you’re dreaming of growing Italian vegetables in your own garden, Franchi is a line of specialty seeds with gorgeous pomodori, melanzane, carciofi,cime di rapa and other marvelous things available at ItalianSeedsPronto.co.nz online in NZ, seedsofitaly.com in the UK and http://www.growitalian.com in the US.
• If you’re in Wellington and want to order organic veggies grown by Frank van Steensel and Josje Neerincx of Wairarapa Eco Farms online for weekly delivery, sign up at www.simplygoodfood.co.nz.
• If you want to learn to cook creatively with them, make Maria Pia de Razza-Klein your mentor.
• Or if you just want to experience them at their best, eat at her trattoria (Maria Pia’s, 55-57 Mulgrave Street, Wellington, phone 04.499.5590).

It was image of a bungee bird feeder that drew us to The Balcony Gardener, but the solar powered bird box piqued our interest. Why would a bird need a solar panel? During the day, the sunlight charges a small battery, which lights up the perch on the birdhouse attracting bugs to the all-night diner for feathered friends.

Checking out the latest garden gadgets from Love your lawn and Mother Nature

EasyBloom Plant Sensor

• Husqvarna’s Automower solar hybrid and 260 ACX that sends text messages.
• Plant Sense’s EasyBloom Plant Sensor measures sunlight, temperature, water drainage and humidity then offers step-by-step plant care, pruning, fertilization and gardening tips.
• Botanicalls kits (Love this.)
• Cyber-rain’s XCI controller schedule watering times and adjust irrigation levels based on automatic weather updates received via the Internet. Cyber-Rain helps conserve water and keeps track of exactly how much water your sprinkler system is using, allowing you to compare your ‘before’ and ‘after’ water bill to see the difference.
• Solar powered Gardena AquaContour system

Bicycle Window Box- For the transient gardener. – More cool how to projects

Would love to see this!

from Reuters via Scientific American By Farah Master

LONDON (Reuters) – An experimental garden that uses exercise bikes to water plants is about to make the gentle art of gardening much sweatier, its designers said on Monday.

The water-recycling garden, on display at Britain’s Chelsea Flower Show, features two static training bikes that pump water to plants — as long as someone is there to do the pedaling.

“We are going to have people cycling on the bikes throughout the show,” Gerardine Hemingway, who designed the garden with her husband Wayne, told Reuters at the world famous show in west London.

The garden was designed to promote a healthy lifestyle and the sustainable use of water by encouraging those who use it to think about where irrigation water comes from, she said.

At the show, designers sat side by side on bikes and pedaled to pump water along a circuit which irrigates a vegetable and fruit garden. Excess water flowed to a storage tank below the surface, ready to be pumped again.

The garden, which cost between 40- 50,000 pounds ($61,000) to build, features a “living wall” made of vegetables and fruits including pak choi and strawberries.

After the show, it will be transported to a community park in the town of Gateshead, northeast England.

Hemingway said children from the Gateshead community helped design and decorate the garden.

“The idea is to get the community involved in the creation of the garden so when it goes back to its permanent site in Gateshead they get full ownership over it,” Hemingway said.

(Editing by Richard Balmforth)

This inspired business card is part seed paper, part card paper. Tear off seed paper and plant it, then use the remaining part as a flag with plant info on one side and the cardholder’s contact info on the other.

Have previously marveled at the following growing cards: