If you’ve ever traveled through Asia, chances are you’ve seen beautiful, lush, vibrant green rice paddys, but most likely they were a solid color. Every year, the farmers in Japan take it up a notch with these gigantic living murals made by planting different species of rice in the shapes of iconic figures like the Mona Lisa and Napoleon Bonaparte, ladybugs, and anime characters. They use varieties of rice that grow white, light green, bright green, or black to create the massive images. To have the perfect shape once the rice has grown takes a lot of patience and planning, as you can see in the time lapse video below. [Read more...]
Grow Your Own: A UK Guide to Yearly Planting & Harvest
It’s that time of year again, the time when you pull out your collection of seeds and plan this years magnificent vegetable garden. For some of us, the selection of this tasty cornucopia is a near obsession (we made our own handy California based graphic). This wonderfully designed poster from UK based print shop Bold and Noble could help you plan your year from sewing to harvest. [Read more...]
15,000 Square Foot Urban Farm Goes Portable
Amidst the towering skyscrapers and busting New York City traffic is a mobile, 15,000 square foot urban farm, called Riverpark Farm. Born through ideas of sustainability and more portable approaches to urban farming, Riverpark Farms partnered with Alexandria Center for Life Science and Riverpark restaurant to create one of the largest urban farms in New York City. The unique farm is located on the future site of Alexandria Center’s west tower. With the downed economy, building on the site has been suspended, leaving the lot a perfect place to create an urban farm. [Read more...]
Freight Farms: Grow Fresh Food In Any Environment
At the moment we face a food dilemma in western cultures: a society accustomed to the all-year availability of fresh produce and the rising cost of transport, both environmental and financial. Much of our fresh produce, especially in colder climates like the eastern United States, comes from far off places like southern California and Chile, traveling many freight miles before it reaches the market and finally our tables; but is there a better option for getting fresh cucumbers, peppers and lettuce in the winter? [Read more...]
Open Source: The Global Village Construction Set
People around the world have aspirations to create happily sustainable, affordable communities, but often the lack of construction grade tools and vehicles derail their efforts: enter the Global Village Construction Set. The project was started by Open Source Ecology, a network of farmers, engineers and supporters. Together they are bringing to life a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts. That’s a mouthful, but this big project is making great progress and getting much deserved attention. [Read more...]










