Five years ago we began profiling an intrepid group of urban farmers, all of whom have the day job of taxi driver. They’ve “borrowed” pieces of unused open land in various corners of New York City and turned it into bread and butter – or rather into corn, beans, tomatoes, grapes, herbs and whatever else they can…
Read Morenyc taxi farmers: late summer update
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…
Read Morenew york city’s taxi farmers
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 —…
Read Morewindowfarms 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…
Read Morebumper crop on the nyc taxi farm
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…
Read Moreportable milk crate farm (d-i-y), for roof, terrace, lot
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…
Read Morelife shift: tips for frugal living from an urban homesteader
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…
Read Moremakeshift street seating (harlem)
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…
Read Morecars 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…
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