Food Storage as Art

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mG9xYVyAnuc Artist Jihyun Ryou’s work uses food storage techniques from the pre-refrigerator era in a way that’s both useful and beautiful. Her goal is to, “Try to bring your food in front of your eyes” to counteract that tendency we all have to make our refrigerators unintentional composters. The techniques she demonstrates include: Evaporation Sand, both to keep vegetables vertical and to d...

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Spark Joy: An Illustrated Master Class on the Art of Organizing and Tidying Up

I figure by now that there are few of you, at least those of you who have de-cluttering on your radar, who don’t know that Marie Kondo, author of Tidying Up, has a new book: Spark Joy. We’ve been shamelessly selling it in our margins here on the blog for a good while, but I’m just now getting around to reviewing it. Of course, we wrote extensively about our journey with Tidying Up here last year. If you’ve read Tiding Up, your first question woul...

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Stencils as Garden Art

...ers alerted me to the far more impressive stencils of San Francisco street artist Jeremy Novy: Photo by Dawn Endico. Green Roof Grower Bruce was inspired by Novy’s work to make his own koi stencils on the sidewalk in front of his house. Now if enough of us adorn these edge spaces (in a neighborly fashion, of course) perhaps we’ll be able to reclaim our streets from the distant bureaucrats who hassle us over our parkway gardens. It’s precisely the...

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Hollywood always gets gardens wrong (I’m talking to you, Maze Runner)

.... They look like thrift store paintings, or the work left forgotten in the art department hallways after the school term has ended. Ghastly. The statues are always hyper-realistic, created perhaps by casting someone’s face, or modeling them in CG. The result is dang creepy, and not at all historically accurate. As far as sketching goes, drawing styles change over time. It’s really interesting, actually, the evolution of line. I can identify the ro...

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Saturday Tweets: Artichokes, Rants and Rare Bee Art

I heart artichokes. Recipe for marinated artichoke hearts here: http://t.co/sBQAkFojun #summer #canning #preserving pic.twitter.com/AtDHB1P5C9 — Kevin West (@savingtheseason) July 23, 2015 Tales From the Droughtside or THE DROUGHTPOCALYPSE!!! | Garden Rant http://t.co/5LGacH9cx4 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) July 24, 2015 The No-Water California Garden | Garden Rant http://t.co/JTCFPiZoFO — Root Simple (@rootsimple) July 24, 2015 What to do with al...

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