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Steve Wheen, a guerrilla gardener, uses plants and miniatures to create sanctuaries of tranquility in broken urban places. Specifically, he alters potholes in east London. His website has many photos of his work. The best are his pictures of people reacting to seeing these tiny green spaces.
Link -via My Modern Met | Previously: When Potholes Become Art
In 1995, while baking in her kitchen, Lena Påhlsson of Mora, Sweden took off her custom-made wedding ring. She didn’t see it again until it turned up sixteen years later around a carrot that grew in her garden:
But as Lena was about to gather the last of the carrots from the family vegetable patch last October, she pulled out a carrot that had something attached to it.
As the carrot was so small, she was about to throw it away when she realized what it was that appeared to be “growing” around the finger-sized vegetable.
“Our daughter Anna was at home at the time and she heard an almighty scream from the garden,” Ola Påhlsson told The Local, recalling the day of the miraculous find.
Link -via Dave Barry | Photo: The Local
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It looks like a ‘shopped-up version of your average garden rose, but it’s not: that’s the Rainbow Rose, and you can make them yourself using cut flowers and some heavily tinted water. And if you aren’t a rose fan, you can use the same technique for cut Chrysanthemum and Hydrangea as well. Link | via Mental_floss
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I love gardening, but I’m not very good at it, which is why I absolutely adore these cute graveyard plant markers. After all, this way you can leave them up after you manage to kill off your poor plants with your not-so-green thumb.
How did the sport of competitive giant pumpkin-growing get so big? I mean, it’s really big!
1. Chris Stevens of New Richmond, Wisconsin grew a pumpkin this year that weighed in at 1,810.5 pounds -considerably bigger than the previous world-record pumpkin that weighed 1,725 pounds. The big pumpkin was weighed at the Stillwater Harvest Fest in Stillwater, Wisconsin Minnesota last weekend. How did he grow a pumpkin that big? Stevens has a 10,000-square-foot pumpkin patch, in which he grows only one pumpkin per vine. He shades the fruit from the sun, and feeds the vines cow manure, fish emulsion and seaweed.
2. Competitive pumpkin growing really began with William Warnock of Ontario. He grew the Rennie’s Mammoth variety of pumpkins, which were billed as capable of growing to over a hundred pounds. However, Warnock’s pumpkins were much bigger. In 1900 and 1904 he produced fruits that weighed over 400 pounds! His 403 pound world record set in 1904 stood for 76 years. See Warnock’s pumpkins here.
3. The most common variety of pumpkin grown for world-record competitions is the Atlantic Giant, which produces the largest fruit of any plant in the world. The variety was first cultivated by Nova Scotia farmer Howard Dill in 1976. It was Dill who finally broke Warnock’s big pumpkin record in 1979, and grew record-setting pumpkins for several consecutive years afterward. The Dill family still sells the record-breaking seeds.
4. During the last few years of the 20th century, the competitive pumpkin community was rocked by cheating, scandals, and infighting -enough to power a soap opera. The main governing body of the competitions was the World Pumpkin Confederation. A split in the membership led to the creation of the Great Pumpkin Commonwealth, which now oversees official weigh-ins.
5. The first pumpkin that weighed over a thousand pounds was grown in 1996 by Paula and Nathan Zehr of Lowville, New York. Their record-breaking pumpkin weighed an astounding 1,061 pounds, which won the couple a $50,000 prize for reaching the 1,000-pound milestone. Since then, half-ton pumpkins have become “common”. The world record for large pumpkins has been broken every year this decade, except for 2008.
Pictured above is an artist’s conception of what the Bus Roots project will look like upon completion. The team behind this venture hopes to plant gardens on the roofs of buses in New York City:
A public transit bus has a surface of 340 ft2. The MTA fleet has around 4,500 buses.
If we grew a garden on the roof of every one of the 4,500 buses in the MTA bus fleet, we would have 35 acres of new rolling green space in the city.
Link via The Presurfer | Flickr Photostream | Photo: Shane Rankinsoon Photography
Australian inventors Brendan Corry and Peter Sargent designed the Wunda Weeder. This fanciful garden gadget is self-propelled, thanks to the solar cells on the roof. A gardener can lay on the cot and weed rows of plants in his/her garden while staying cool in the shade.
Link via OhGizmo! | Photo: Wunda Products
Want an earth friendly way to upcycle old manga or maybe even telephone books! How about using them to grow radish or other sprouts, like this project by Japanese artist Koshi Kawachi. It would make in interesting conversation piece. My only concern would be that the book might get moldy after a few days, but perhaps you could transplant them into a pot or garden.
Link – via mademoisellechaos
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by 
Plants grow too slow to see most of the time – making these videos seem like secret access points to a hidden world that operates at a radically different speed.
For those of you unfamiliar with plants (they’re a lot like pets, only lower maintenance) these 12 (!) time-lapse videos of plants and flowers growing and blooming should adequately acquaint you with their natural majesty. The only downside to plants is that they take a while to grow, but as you’ll see in these videos, it’s a beautiful process, which can be made all the more heart rending when paired with the right music.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Urbanist.
These cucumber growing molds from Japan are so fun! They would be great for bento boxes or in salads and sushi. I bet you could also use them for zucchini. I want one!
