Inside Urban Green

Kitchen Plants Melange

Apartment Therapy photos

This Apartment Therapy post displays a good cross-section of the topsy-turvy world of top watered houseplants. 

With better education about the benefits of sub-irrigation, we would see plants (and planters) of much higher quality than those shown in this series of kitchen plants photos. 

It is interesting that these were used to present the best of kitchen plants on a blog with high readership. The quality bar is set at a low rung. 

Consider a better way. 

LED Lighting Leads the Way at the Pentagon

Fluorescent lighting

LED lighting

The Pentagon has initiated a project to install LED lighting as part of a 10-year renovation. Over 4200 Cree LR24 recessed LED luminaires will be installed in Wedge 5 of the 5-sided building.  

Government studies conclude that the LED lighting installation will have a payback of <4 years and is estimated to save 140 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year.

It appears to be only a matter of time before we have widespread availability of LED lighting at an affordable price. This has the potential of increasing the use of plants in buildings, both commercial and residential. 

Via: LEDs Magazine 

The Cutting Room Floor

This is a still photo from a video with Chris Raimondi, president of Raimondi Horticultural Group one of the largest interior plantscape companies in the New York metropolitan area. Notice that Martha is holding a soil probe like this one. Raimondi obviously broght it with him to the video taping. I watched the video a few years ago. This part never made the final cut. It was edited out. 

Eek, it's plastic! Unfortunately, Martha Stewart only knows fingers and clay pots and that's what she preaches to her adoring followers. They deserve better. She is obviously creative in areas other than indoor plants...which is not a good thing for houseplants!

Stuck in Time

This is an interesting idea but are Martha and company ever going to move on from the age of clay pots? 

There are better ways to maintain plants indoors. 

Via: Apartment Therapy  

Orange Box Growers

Photos by Maria Finn of the blog City Dirt.

You might not recognize these wooden boxes as remnants of the citrus industry that covered the valleys east of downtown Los Angeles. They used to hold and transport oranges. Thanks to Farmlab, they have returned to use as 'agbins'' to grow vegetables in the city. 

Farmlab has installed some form of sub-irrigation (aka self-watering) in the boxes to enhance their use as vegetable growers. The boxes on legs in the upper photo are for harvesting rainwater, what little there is in Los Angels. How well I know from living there for many years. 

I found this a most interesting repurposed box idea. Surely there are many more yet to be discovered. There are all kinds of boxes and containers used to store and move materials in other industries. All it takes is some creative thinking for us to find them and put them to good use producing food in the city. 

Farmlab is a brainchild of architect Lauren Bon.  

Not a Cornfield artist, Lauren Bon resides in Los Angeles and holds a Masters of Architecture degree from MIT and a BA from Princeton. Ms. Bon is a trustee of the Annenberg Foundation and President of Not Cornfield, LLC. Her recent urban, public and land art projects in the U.S., Hong Kong, Belfast and Northern Ireland, as well as her role as a trustee, make her uniquely poised to build the capacity of the Foundation in the area of site based philanthropy, serving communities through education, civic, health, artistic initiatives and programs. Not a Cornfield art project is being developed through a grant by Annenberg Foundation.

Floor Lamps for Floor Plants

Pablo Cortina lamp from DesignPublic.com

It is unlikely that these lamps would supply enough light for large floor plants but they look like they could. A long time ago, I made a floor lamp from a sonotube standing on end with a 4' fluorescent shop light inside. I cut an opening for the light and muted it with a piece of plastic diffuser. All of this was purchased from Home Depot and it was relatively easy to make. 

The important point is that it works. You can supply enough light to support healthy growth of a Ficus benjamina tree with a vertical lamp like this. It is, in fact, better than overhead light. The light is distributed to the full length of the foliage, not just the top. 

 

Rotate the tree periodically to even out the new growth and maintain its symmetry. Think of the lamp as an artificial window.  Connect it to a timer so that the lamp comes on when the room is unoccupied if you prefer. The plant won't care. 

It would be relatively easy for a lighting manufacturer to produce fluorescent floor lamps like these. Once again, it's a problem of education. Overhead fluorescent plant lighting is very common but using it vertically is out of the box thinking. 

I'm going to contact a lighting manufacturer here in Brooklyn and see if they would build some prototype models for beta testing. Would you be interested in something like this? 

Sub-irrigation by the Knowledgeable

 

The Plantscape Industry Alliance (PIA) and their community service program, PIA Cares, has been awarded a Professional Landcare Network (PLANET) Community Service Award for the PIA Cares installation at the Cathedral City Senior Center in Palm Springs, Calif.

Two thousand outreach clients and 17,000 people pass through the doors of the Cathedral City Senior Center in California each year. Thanks to the efforts of the Plantscape Industry Alliance (PIA) and its PIA Cares Program, and a group of dedicated volunteers, they now enjoy the many benefits of a professional interior plant installation.

Knowledgeable professionals know about sub-irrigation. It happens to be one of the significant aspects of this award winning installation donated to the Cathedral City Senior Center. The seniors who care for these plants now know about its benefits. It would be great if they were here in New York City instead of Palm Springs. 

It’s Our Education Stupid

If we don't understand the difference between capillary action and osmosis, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we don’t understand that plants have no intelligence to start and stop “drinking” water, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we believe a clay pot and saucer is the best way to maintain plants in containers, it's a symptom of an education problem. If we think the term “self-watering” is synonymous with sub-irrigation, it's a symptom of an education problem.

I see these beliefs expressed every day of my blogging research on the web. They lead to an opinion that our level of science education in the field of gardening and horticulture is woefully weak. Is this an anomaly peculiar to the field of horticulture or is it symptomatic of our overall education?

David Brooks wrote an op-ed piece yesterday titled The Biggest Issue and benchmarked our education decline around 1975. I’ve been an eyewitness to much of this in the field of “ornamental” horticulture, which attracted high school students to land grant colleges by the thousands in the ‘70s.

The Clay Pot Martha Rain Barrel

Catching rain water. A good thing! Wasting rain water using clay pots. Not a good thing!

Via: Apartment Therapy