Flowers for your Mama

 
In collaboration with the Woodbine Garden, we are having a “Mother’s Day Plant Sale” all week out here in Bushwick. If anyone is in the area, feel free to stop by. I will be in/around the Secret Garden tomorrow afternoon and/or Thursday during the day.

What of this “fertility”?

Shortages Threaten Farmers’ Key Tool: Fertilizer 
By KEITH BRADSHER and ANDREW MARTIN
Published: April 30, 2008
Population growth, shrinking world grain stocks and a growing appetite for meat, particularly in the developing world, has collided with a shortage of fertilizer.
(Read article…)

…a shortage of fertilizer?! Now the global food markets are telling us there’s not enough shit floating around to [...]

Pick of the Green-wash

One very comprehensive way to think about degrees of ecological self-sufficiency is this “three shades of green” system introduced to me by my friend Adam Brock. The green cred of a car company would be the “lite” shade of green. And I like to think about it as a gradient towards an ultra-balanced forest green [...]

City Composting

During the discussion of how to organize our community garden out here in Bushwick, many of the older community members took issue with food composting because in the past, it has attracted rats. At the time, I felt like it would be a little rude to counter their reluctance with blaming the maintenance of the [...]

Food is Renewable Energy

Growing your own food is beneficial on a variety of levels.
Canada’s York University has up quite a comprehensive blog about their Community Garden, I took a particular interest in their page update about their tomatoes.
If you haven’t started your seeds yet, check out this A-Z Gardening post for “seed starting secrets” – even though they [...]

Earth Day Events in NYC

So it just dawned on me that tomorrow is EARTH DAY!
I am going to be running a vermicompost workshop at the Hope Gardens Community Center in the morning, then heading over to the Woodbine Garden to plant some seeds with student groups.

If you can’t join us out in Bushwick, here’s a list of events you [...]

Skyfarming: Big Budget Development of Urban Agriculture

Just came across this article in New York Magazine, written a few weeks ago by Lisa Chamberlain.

When I took a glimpse of the image above, I saw a valiant attempt at an organic system packaged and marketed to fit the “profitable development” aesthetic. The funny thing is that urban farming can be even simpler than [...]

The Season is Here

Welcome.
At Xposure, we are just starting some of our seeds.

The kids planted their own clusters of carrots (above), cucumbers, tomatoes, lettuce and dahlia flowers. However, my friend Lewis decided to get a head start because he gets such great light in his apartment…

Pictured above: corn, peppers – fantastic city veggie, herbs – these are mint [...]

Zoning Out

So the USDA has divided the continent into 11 “Plant Hardiness Zones” which are supposed to represent the soil tempertaure gradient up the globe that determines the beginning of each region’s growing season, which should also be useful for choosing what types of seeds to plant. The National Gardening Association recommends you use blooming flowers [...]

A Word from the Wise

Above you see a portrait of my grandfather pruning one of the cherry trees in his yard in Plovdiv. Even though he’s lead a busy professional life as an aviation specialist for the government, he’s been growing his own food for 70 years. The cherry he’s pruning in the picture was planted when my little [...]