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  • Green Idea 1 : ' Find your nearest Farmer's Market and go there this weekend with friends...
  • Green Idea 2 : ' Swap your old incandescent bulbs for CFLs when they burn out and start saving $$$
  • Green Idea 3 : ' Try using your bike this weekend instead of your car...
  • Green Idea 4 : ' This Spring why not plant a small kitchen garden of tomatoes and peppers on your balcony or patio?
  • Green Idea 5 : ' What are you waiting for? Make the change today!
  • SUSTAINABLE DESIGN

    The basic objectives of sustainability are to reduce consumption of non-renewable resources, minimize waste, and create healthy, productive environments.

  • URBAN GARDENING

    You can grow your own food whether you live on a rural farm or in a tiny urban apartment. Urban gardening is all about using space wisely to regain a closer connection with your food and beautify your home or neighborhood.

  • RENEWABLE ENERGY

    Explore energy resources, such as wind, solar, hydroelectric, biomass, geothermal, ocean thermal, and wave power, that replenish themselves within a short period.

  • LOCAL FARMERS MARKETS

    Locating the Farmers' Market nearest to you is now only a few clicks away. Localharvest.org is a useful and straight-forward site designed to faciliate your quest.

Sunday

Urban Garden Project: Seeds Strips

Posted by vergelimbo On 4:59 PM 5 comments

Look closely and you can see the spacing of the seeds...
The latest addition to the ever growing list of "my inventions that other people actually brought to market" are the Ferry-Morse "Jiffy Strips" pictured above. The idea is simple: A strip of biodegradable paper with seeds appropriately spaced that you simply "plant" in an open furrow, and then bury. I tried out the "Nantes" carrots, and the Baby Belle radishes. Small seeds which require specific spacing are ideal for this system: Beets, turnips, leeks, onions, parsnips-essentially, any veggie that is row planted.


Isaac Kiwis Begin their Triffid-like Growth

I finally transplanted the Kiwi that my friend John had given me last year. They were on the verge of taking over my fire-escape garden. These Kiwi are Hillarian climbers, and arbor very nicely providing plenty of shade and a countless number of small, fuzz-less Kiwi that pack all the flavor of the store-bought variety, albeit on a lilliputian scale. I need to build my arbor ASAP.



Verge's improvements to the Jiffy Strips:

Rather than a dyed white tissue strip folded into a 5-inch packet, the strips should be made of a recycled paper/peat infused with organic fertilizer and nutrients. Seed Strips should also come in a roll, like scotch tape to minimize packaging...the current offering is un-necessarily over-packaged.

5 comments:

Seed Strips! What next? Spray-on flower beds? I like you improvement ideas for the strips-no dioxin enriched paper for this guy- I want peat with fertilizer. Love the blog and pictures too.

Keep it up Verge

Any suggestions on how to make homemade seed strips, ideally incorporating Verge's improvements? Seems like a good way to go... Great blog - keep posting!

Garden looks amazing. I need to come by and see it. If I ever get a life again. I love the altered seed strip idea. You better market it before someone else does. I finally put a new post on my blog.

Coffee soon sounds good....
D

Dear Vergelimbo:
Greetings from Swaptree.com. Want to commend you on the wonderful job you are doing with your blog – Vergelimbo. You are doing great things in the name of the environment. If only we had a few million more of you.

With that said, I wanted to introduce you to my company, Swaptree.com (www.swaptree.com), and let you know about the environmental initiative, in unison with the Nature Conservancy, that we are doing this coming Earth Day.

Swaptree is a unique website that allows users to trade books, textbooks, CDs, DVDs and video games with other users for free. Members simply list the items that they are trading and the items they want, and Swaptree's two and three-way trade algorithms instantly find all of the items that they can receive for the items that they have. Swaptree is completely free, and users only pay for postage, which means that they can get a book, CD, DVD, or video game for around two dollars. Swaptree even simplifies the mailing process, by providing users the ability to print a perfect postage label right from their printer, so they don't have to weigh items, buy stamps, or even go to the post office.

For Earth Day 2009, Swaptree is working with The Nature Conservancy’s ‘Plant a Billion Trees’ initiative and will be planting a tree for every trade completed on Earth Day. While currently several thousand trades happen every day on Swaptree, our goal on Earth Day is to do 10,000 trades and plant 10,000 trees. While the average Swaptree user, given its emphasis on recycling and sharing, lowers their yearly carbon footprint by 180 pounds, with this initiative we hope to offset several thousand tons of CO2.

Swaptree has garnered positive press coverage from Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Today Show, and many more. However, our Earth Day 2009 initiative is much more of a grass-roots program and we need support from newspapers like Northeastern News if we are to reach our goals. We know college students are always keen to save money and are typically the environments loudest and strongest supporter. Therefore we thought you may want to let the students of Northeastern University know about our site, and this campaign. I think you’ll agree its pretty compelling pitch - get the media you want free, green, and with a tree.

Below is a link to a two-minute YouTube video that shows you what Swaptree is all about:
http://www.swaptree.com/video/demomovie.html

Thank you for your time and consideration, and please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or would like to learn more. Keep up the good work with Vergelimbo.

Best Regards,
Mark Hexamer
Co-founder
Swaptree.com

I will make a "how-to" video of making my ideal seeds strips using recycled paper and organic fertilizer some time soon.