Other blogs,websites – Page 3

Vegetable varieties website featured on Ken Druse Real Dirt radio

Today’s Real Dirt radio show, hosted by garden writers Ken Druse (Planthropology, etc.) and Vicki Johnson featured an interview with a Cornell co-worker of mine, Lori Bushway. (mp3 podcast).

Lori filled Ken and Vicki in on our Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners website. If you’re starting to mull over your seed catalogs this winter, you might want to stop by the site for a visit.

I like to say the site is like an amazon.com for vegetable varieties, only we don’t sell the seeds. You’ll find descriptions of more than 5,000 varieties along with seed sources. And more than 3,000 registered users at the site have been rating and reviewing their favorites — as well as those that haven’t worked so well for them.

So come see which varieties your fellow gardeners recommend, and register and share your favorites.

And thanks Ken and Vicki for your kind words and for all the work you put in hosting my favorite gardening podcast.

Japanese rice field art

Hat tip to Matt Mattus for his post about rice field art near the village of Inakadate. Designs are ‘painted’ into fields using rice varieties with different leaf colors. (Here’s what the plants look like up close.)

I was pleased to see one inspired by one of my favorite woodblock prints of Mt. Fuji by Katsushika Hokusai.

More rice field art images here. Or google image search.

Brothers in craft

I’m a sucker for old images. One of my favorite blogs for getting my old-image fix is BibliOdyssey, which is like a browse through the stacks at a rare book library. The image at right comes from a post Brothers in Craft, from 15th or 16th century Germany.

Paul, BibliOdyssey’s curator, tells the story behind the nearly 30 pictures of elder craftsman he reproduces in that post. They are from the Twelve Brothers House Foundation in Nuremberg, where a “dozen elderly and unwell (but capable) citizens were (I assume) given a place to live in exchange for their performing work duties.”

The house served as a model for the commencement of similar charity foundations in other German cities.

… The practice [began] in the 15th century of having sketches made of each of the brothers engaged in their chosen employment together with detailed notes about the tools and practices relating to their work. The manuscripts were updated until (I think) the beginning of the 19th century, although portraits of craftsmen engaged in their work were only produced in the 15th and 16th centuries.

I sure wouldn’t mind being that gardener, weaving wattle fences and breaking up clods in my gray years.

More recent eye candy from other sites:

World’s Strangest Fences

Great post from Dark Roasted Blend, one of my favorite image blogs:

Some of the World’s Strangest Fences.

Sunday music: Sweden’s finest

absolut spring This week, Ellis Hollow celebrates and salutes Ken and Carina at TrÃ¤dgÃ¥rdsdrÃ¶mmar, who this week were chosen most beautiful garden in Sweden 2008, by the magazine DrÃ¶mhem & TrÃ¤dgÃ¥rd. How to celebrate? With some of the other fine things Sweden has bestowed on those who appreciate the finer things, Absolut, Nils von Dardel and The Hives — perhaps the finest garage-punk band in recent years.