http://www.verticalveg.org.uk/
TD Centre’s ‘living roof’ like a farm in the city This week I stood on the freshly greened roof of the Toronto-Dominion Centre banking pavilion, surrounded by a field of creek sedge grass. Bounded on all sides by steel and concrete skyscrapers, the oasis was surreal and thrilling. It felt strangely illicit – as if a tract of farmland had been floated down on the city’s financial district. The transformation of heat-absorbing asphalt roof-scapes into energy-saving canvases of greenery is being embraced not only by businesses, but university and condominium developers. Living roofs are also increasingly being promoted as therapeutic tools for health-care facilities. There are courtyards at CAMH on Queen Street West, an extensive fragrant garden at the CNIB, and the Royal Victoria Health Centre in Barrie has just installed nine green roofs.
DIY Hydroponics To make all of these Instructables, download this collection of How To’s as an ebook. Download » DIY Hydroponics gives you full step-by-step instructions for 18 projects to get your indoor harvest growing. DIY vertical garden Vertical spaces in small yards or patios need no longer go to waste with the latest repurposing/DIY trend of building a vertical garden. It’s a great way to further green your living spaces and putting to good use all those pallets past their prime. While there are a number of tutorials out there for building your own, these particular directions courtesy of Steph Lawrence at The Local Spoon are some of the easier we’ve seen and make for a great fall project to ready for spring planting in less temperate climates. Full story at The Local Spoon via Neatorama. Anywhere gardening.
The Produce Worker's Guide to Storing 25 Common Fruits and Veggies Popular in Food & Drink Unless you belong to a CSA or grow your own garden, produce can take up a huge chunk of your grocery budget, and throwing away food can also feel like throwing away money. As a former professional cook and produce worker, however, I know that getting the most out of your produce can be tricky if you don't know the best way to store or prep it. (See also: Waste Not, Want Not: Stop Throwing Away Your Food!) A note about freezing in general — there's less chance of freezer burn when you use a sealable freezer-weight bag; you can also suck out the air with a drinking straw to ensure that there's no air in the bag before you close it. I have also found that freezer bags are ideal when you are really hungry and impatient, because you can rip them open and toss them into whatever you are cooking to shorten the defrost time.
Build a vertical aquaponic veggie & fish farm for small yards & houses This low-cost vertical aquaponic system can grow leafy greens, herbs and raise fish for a small family year round, and it fits in a 5' by 3' space. Sean Brady, the aquaponics projects coordinator at the Center for Sustainable Aquaponics and Nourish the Planet in Loveland, Colo., showed us how to build a system from scrap he found around the greenhouse. We published a version of this how-to guide at engineeringforchange.org, and it's one of the good ones, so we'd like to share it with Instructables, too. What it is A vertical aquaponic system grows vegetables without soil in columns above a fish tank.
How to Turn a Pallet into a Garden Good news and bad news. I had planned to film a short video showing you how to make a pallet garden, but the weather didn’t cooperate. I was stapling the landscape fabric onto the pallet when it started drizzling and got really windy. That’s the bad news. But I know I promised a tutorial today, so I took photos and have kept my word to share how to make the pallet garden. How The Taste Of Tomatoes Went Bad (And Kept On Going) : The Salt hide captionNotice how some of these tomatoes have unripe-looking tops? Those "green shoulders" are actually the keys to flavor. pocius/Flickr.com
MoSan- Mobile Sanitation Donkey vs. push cart Today we modified the collection service of feces containers. Donkeys need time to get used to a new area. Since we currently don’t have the time, we decided not to go with the donkey again. After interviewing our cart driver we learnt, that this donkey usually transports water on the same cart. Live Green Toronto The Eco-Roof Incentive Program promotes the installation of green and cool roofs on Toronto’s existing buildings and new buildings not subject to the Green Roof By-law. Applications are currently being accepted for green and cool roof projects and will be reviewed on a monthly basis, subject to funding availability. The City of Toronto launched the Eco-Roof Incentive Program in 2009 to support the uptake of eco-roofs by building owners, make buildings more sustainable and promote the creation of green jobs. Performance criteria for the Eco-Roof Incentive Program are consistent with the Green Roof Bylaw and the Toronto Green Standard. Learn more: Read the Eco-Roof Case Studies Map: All projects supported by Eco-Roof Incentive Program to May 2013
Adding the center yogurt cup. With the inner and outer buckets assembled, insert the yogurt cup into the center hole and determine how much, if any, needs to be removed from the bottom of the cup. Using a knife, carefully cut the excess from the bottom of the cup. The bottom of the cup must be cut off in any case. Can Urban Farming Go Corporate? Farms have sprouted in cities across the country over the past several years as activists and idealists pour their sweat into gritty soil. Now Paul Lightfoot wants to take urban agriculture beyond the dirt-under-your-nails labor of love. He wants to take it corporate. In June, Lightfoot's company, BrightFarms, announced a deal with The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Co., or A&P, to provide New York City-grown vegetables to the local chain's supermarkets year-round. The goods will grow in what the company says will be the country's largest rooftop greenhouse farm, a high-tech hydroponic operation that will boost yields, allowing the company to face-off with organic vegetables trucked from California, cutting thousands of miles from the supply chain while aiming to provide a fresher product at a competitive price. With similar deals announced for St.
Aquaponics greenhouse for - DIY We’re here to tell you it is possible – but don’t take our word for it: ask Aquaponics Steve. Aquaponics is defined as “sustainable food production system that combines plant-growing with a traditional aquaculture (raising aquatic animals such as snails, fish). It was Steve’s years working in a pet shop that gave him the know-how. The secret is in breeding the bacteria from fish waste – sounds yucky but it works – with no need to use creepy chemicals. He shows you how to make a tiny greenhouse and stock it full of plants for just $50. However if you want to spring for a solar panel, car battery and pump then you can go the whole way to a full aquaponics set up. A Vertical Garden Feeds 10,000+ Visitors to Chicago O'Hare Airport Growing Your Greens/Video screen capture John of Growing Your Greens has been busy in Chicago. No sooner does he post a video of an old meat packing plant morphing into a gigantic vertical farm and food processing facility, than we also get a visit to an urban garden that is bang in the middle of Chicago O'Hare airport. Using an aeroponic Tower Garden growing system, the garden is growing lettuce, greens and herbs for airport restaurants with an almost zero transportation footprint.
How To Own It: The Queer Grrl’s Guide to the Galaxy Hello beautiful, and welcome to How To Own It, where store-bought fashion meets DIY crafts. Each week I’ll be exploring an aesthetic theme, showing you some of the best ways to wear it and how to make it for yourself. Want to know how to own a look?Email gabrielle@autostraddle.com or tweet to @Gabrielle_Korn. Header by Rory Midhani Sometimes, it can be tricky to be a human with disparate passions.