Search results for 'taxi farmers'

windowfarms for apartment farmers: opensource brilliance

(Video link here.)  This inspiring TED Talk by Britta Riley recently introduced us to the world of Windowfarms. These vertical hydroponic gardens allow city-dwellers to grow vegetables, herbs and fruits in the windows of their otherwise cramped apartments, all year long. Think ‘strawberries’!

But what’s most intriguing about Windowfarms is the community behind them, constantly refining the product and experimenting with new possibilities. This isn’t a community of traditional scientists or farmers–it’s just a bunch of folks who are passionate about an idea.

Riley describes the process of what goes on at our.Windowfarms–the Windowfarms open source community platform–as “R&D-I-Y” (research-and-develop-it-yourself).  read more…

01.04.12 | comments | in community, d-i-y, eating, garden, how-to, inside, projects + play, reimagine, solutions

portable milk crate farm (d-i-y), for roof, terrace, lot

milk crate farm NYC

As much as we love the vertical shipping pallet garden we wrote about in May, it’s flaw is that if you needed to move it off your balcony, you might be in some trouble. Enter the milk crate farm! When the bad economy stalled construction at New York City’s Alexandria Center for Life Science, Chef Sisha Ortuzar and business partner Jeffrey Zurofsky had a brilliant idea: use the stalled site as a farm. There they grow fresh veggies to use at Riverpark, the restaurant next door.

While rooftop gardens are popping up all over the city (see the Brooklyn Grange for example), this one presented a special challenge: it needed to be portable read more…

10.25.11 | comments (1) | in garden, how-to, materials, nature, outside, reclaim, resources

life shift: tips for frugal living from an urban homesteader

urban homesteading

Eric Michael Johnson for The New York Times

As we were writing about Occupy Wall Street and We Are the 99 Percent, Cara de Silva sent us a compelling and very timely story she spotted in the New York Times. “Back to the Land, Reluctantly” by Susan Gregory Thomas, is about how the 42 year-old Brooklyn mother of three, having found herself divorced, flat-broke, with a dwindling livelihood, figured out how to “live off the land” from her urban garden and kitchen. “Luckily, my late father hammered into me that grit was more important than talent…I figured, if peasants in 11th-century Sicily did all this, how hard could it be?”

It was survival, not any particular love of artisan cheese or the notion of self-sufficiency, that motivated her to learn how to raise chickens, grow vegetables and herbs, make her own granola, bread, perfume and cleaning products,  harvest edible weeds, and stretch a single piece of cheap meat into a week’s worth of dinners, until she discovered she could and her family could live on $100 a week.

IT is a lot of work. You have to be organized and able to improvise on your feet. But, frankly, it’s awesome. read more…

10.11.11 | comments | in cheap + great, copy this!, family + friends, how-to, outside, paths + processes, people, recipes, reimagine, resources, resources blogs + sites, solutions, strategies

nyc taxi farmers: late summer update

taxi farmer with corn plants
photo: david saltman

When we last left our New York City taxi farmers - the car service drivers who plant “crops” in vacant patches of land around the Bronx – they were gamely waiting for their urban garden to grow, even as they waited for calls from the dispatcher.

Well, it’s been a tough harvest in the city, as it has been for farmers everywhere. Last year, as we reported, it was the torrential rains. This year, it’s been the withering heat. Our intrepid drivers lost their first planting, but they didn’t lose heart. read more…

08.29.11 | comments (2) | in community, food, garden, outside, projects + play, sightings, strategies

makeshift street seating (harlem)

 

makeshift seating in Harlem, NY

photo: Sally Schneider

Since we’ve been hanging out with our friend Ana, helping her fix up her place in Harlem (more on that soon), we’ve noticed that people in the neighborhood love to hang out on the street. We see men sitting on folding chairs at card tables playing poker, and families on stoops, and there’s alway a crowd around the bike repair place, where a chess game goes on in the midst of the fixing and conferring.

Recently we spotted these makeshift seats: boards cleverly wedged under the fence along Marcus Garvey Park to create a leverage effect and seats with backs. Someone even thought to bring a pillow. It’s the perfect, impromptu way for two friends to hang out on a summer day.

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08.24.11 | comments | in community, furniture, outside, reclaim, sightings, strategies

bumper crop on the nyc taxi farm

bronx nyc taxi farmers

David Saltman

Two summers ago we profiled an intrepid group of New York City car service drivers who planted three little farms on abandoned pieces of land right in the heart of the Bronx. They harvested abundantly and each of their wives took turns cooking weekly feasts for the assembled breadwinners (and cornwinners and beanwinners).

We followed up last year, but alas, the growing season was a bust. “Way too much rain,” one of the taxi-farmers told us. Their corn, so beautiful the year before, withered on the stalk, their beans addled on the vine.

But hope springs eternal and this spring our taxi farmers are at it again, plowing the soil on a forgotten hillside in the Bronx near the spot where they wait for calls…planting corn, beans, onions, radishes and more.  The onions are already up and so are their hopes. read more…

06.06.11 | comments | in community, garden, outside, sightings

cars as paint brushes and other guerrilla activities

We are big fans of guerrilla activities of all sorts, from the making of art and theater to gardening and marketing. So we loved stumbling on this picture of a striking guerrilla action that took place in Berlin recently: While cars were stopped for green lights, a group of cyclists dumped 13 gallons of colored paint in large puddles onto the street in Berlin’s busy Rosenthaler Platz. As the cars drove through the puddles, their tires inadvertently became brushes to spread the paint, creating a constellation of colored lines. (The artworks’ masterminds posted signs nearby explaining that the paint wasn’t harmful and would wash off with water.) Like the best guerrilla actions, this one shakes up habitual thinking and seeing (and hence maybe living) in positive ways. read more…

05.26.10 | comments (3) | in art, community, projects + play, sightings, strategies, wheels

new york city’s taxi farmers

David Saltman

David Saltman

As today’s guest blogger, David Saltman tells of his discovery of some inadvertent guerilla gardeners. He did some on-the-spot investigative reporting for ‘the improvised life’ and photographed the story with his i-Phone. Thanks, David!

“I was walking down the street in New York City recently when I ran smack into a cornfield. It was no hallucination — big, fat cornstalks were growing out of a tiny sliver of ground at the foot of a stone hillside in the northwest corner of the city. I walked further and saw another abundant patch of corn, then plantings of beans, herbs and a grape arbor, all butting up against the granite bluff on top of which sits my 25-story apartment building. read more…

10.26.09 | comments (6) | in community, food, garden, sightings, strategies