Images from a post titled small measures with Ashley: starting seeds indoors found at Design Sponge March 12th, 2010. From the northern hemisphere comes a simple idea thats been doing the rounds for quite some time - using recycled newspaper to create a seedling pot that gets planted straight in the ground when the seed has been raised. Listening with interest to a discussion on what can be employed for this very purpose the other day here is one very simple affordable answer and the how-to instructions - click above on highlighted name 'design sponge'.
4 comments:
I like this clever way of making a pot for seedlings; thanks for posting it, Sophie. I reuse my plastic pots year after year and recycle them when they crack, so I don't feel too guilty using plastic.
Hello Altoon,
I'm pleased you liked this. Its perhaps an odd thing to post on a residency blog where there may be expectations of highbrow content and a certain tone.
I cant help feeling that that can be such a trap however - in the effort to 'appear' clever one fails to be remotely sensible (as in to engage the sensory faculties) or effectively communicate or highlight the most obvious and sometimes critical matters.
I would love to interview you actually about the way your art practice and interest in garden, growing things, farming and such intersects.
I recall Margaret Kingsolver in 'Animal, Vegetable, Miracle' discussing at length how the cultivators and sustainers of our food supplies in the 20th century (in western nations certainly) came to be seen as a great focus for mockery - 'the country hick' label stuck on anyone on the land regardless of their farming practices and business set-up. Interesting that it is the 'city slickers' in their suits who helped industrialise farming, modernise the 'hicks', shame them into new ways and create the fool's paradise we have today - with far too much of our food masquerading as food that really isn't food as we once knew it.
On a somewhat connected line of thinking Patience Gray's 'Honey from a Weed: Feasting and Fasting in Tuscany, Catalonia, the Cyclades and Apulia', written almost 3 decades ago, before the "Tuscany rush", is a seminal text on the food heritage of the people of these region. A heritage passed on, she passionately writes, from generation to generation by the oral traditions of the peasants - the 'uneducated'. She describes these marble regions of the Med where she lived with her sculptor partner, deeply immersed in the traditions of each region as 'living in the wild - living on the margins of literacy' and yet she champions them and the learning that she took from them.
This small handmade seedling pot is actually a potent reminder that the growing of food and plants in general matters - that it needs be accessible and affordable to all. Is it any wonder the ancestors said prayers to their god/s for the safety of their harvest.
S
thanks for planting a small seed on my blog, i followed the fallen petals back here and have found much to delight me
Thank you indeed India!
As a botanical alchemist and poet in many genre's (I've admired your work through your blog this past year) I'm delighted those petals led you here.
I would love to discover if there are any seeds in particular you work with and actually post something of your work (with story) on this blog.
I'm making a point of gathering seed stories and related material of all kinds... in homage to the seed!
best wishes,
Sophie
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