Other blogs,websites – Page 4

Ellis Hollow from the air

I love aerial photos. (See previous posts of old aerial photos and online views from local.live.com.)

I was googling around the other day and found this image from May 2005 from fellow local blogger Simon St. Laurent’s Living in Dryden website.

Larger image.

That’s our house in the middle of the picture on the far side of the road from the white church, which has been renovated into an as-yet-unsold house. Our 7 acres extends more-or-less in a skinny strip through the woods parallel to the wetland to the field.

Simon has a gallery of area aerials on his blog. (Thanks Simon.)

Living sculpture activities

Here’s a preview of a Living Sculpture activity website that’s part of our Cornell Garden-Based learning program. It’s basically activities for educators working with children, youth and community groups, and pre-release, as we’re still putting some finishing touches on it.

I invite you to explore the site and help us test it out. We’re new with video, and don’t quite have the embeds worked out 100 percent. A small percent of users won’t be able to view the embedded videos and will have to rely on the links to other file types which will open up in an external player. Â (I don’t have the embedded videos set to autoplay, so you’ll need to click on the play button.)

For an even smaller percentage, the embedded video will lock up your browser. If that happens to you, I apologize. But I’d really appreciate it if you’d leave me a comment and let me know what browser and version you are using (the version number is under Help > About). Also, if you know what version of QuickTime you are running.

I appreciate the help.

My favorite video (by student videographer Ian Ward) is the one on the homepage, though the timelapse of that project is a lot of fun, too.

Flower bulb activity ‘webinar’

Thursday from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, I’ll be part of a ‘webinar’ (online web seminar) previewing a new website (The Bulb Project) for educators to help them use flower bulbs to teach science and other subjects. My friend and colleague Marcia Eames-Sheavly (who heads-up the Garden Based Learning program at Cornell) and Elly Cramer (technical wizard with the National Science Digital Library project at Cornell) are the others on the presenter team.

The webinar is basically an online PowerPoint presentation where we’ll voice over the slides. But it also involves interactive features during the presentation, including online chat during the presentation. It’s sponsored as part of an on-going serices by the National Science Teachers Association.

We won’t be detailing any cutting-edge bulb growing techniques. The focus is how to use bulbs in the classroom or informal learning settings, like after-school programs, 4-H groups, homeschooling, etc.

If you or someone you know works with children or youth, this should be right up your alley. Of if you just want to look at some pretty bulb pictures on a cold night, or experience a webinar, tune in. It’s free. And you can find more information at the NSTA webinar website.

Singing Ringing Tree

Here’s an interesting sculpture from northwest England I’d love to emulate. It’s made of galvanized pipes, some of which are strategically placed to catch the wind and make intersting, droning music. You can hear it in the YouTube below.

Hat tip to Dark Roasted Blend for this one. Whenever I can’t digest any more words on the the screen, I turn to DRB for the most fun and compelling visual content on the ‘Net.

Shameless Sunday plugs

Three shameless plugs this morning:

Introduction to Botanical Illustration online course. (Full disclosure: I work with the instructor as part of my day job in the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University.) If you’ve ever wanted to become proficient at illustrating what you see in your garden, this 6-week online course will teach you the basics of rendering plants in pencil and ink.

The instructor, my friend and co-worker Marcia Eames Sheavly, is an accomplished artist who also teaches our popular Art of Horticulture course, recently featured by Julie over at The Human Flower Project.

The syllabus:

Observation of Art in Nature
The Use of Line in Drawing
The Use of Shape and Space in Drawing
Depicting Perspective and Foreshortening in Illustration
Using Light to Add Dimension to Botanical Illustrations
Composition and a Creative Approach to Drawing

There are still a few spots open. But act quickly: The course starts January 21.

Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners website. (Full disclosure: I work on this website as part of my day job in the Department of Horticulture at Cornell University.) When you’re poring over veggie seed catalogs this winter, stop by this site where you’ll find descriptions and seed sources for more than 5,600 varieties.

You can also read more than 3,400 ratings and reviews from fellow gardeners to help you find out which varieties perform best in your garden.

The site has really grown since we launched it in 2004. We’ve got a lot of ideas to develop the site even more. But what we really need now is more passionate vegetable gardeners contributing reviews of their favorite varieties — as well as those that didn’t work out so well in their setting. So if you know some passionate veggie gardeners, please pass this along to them.

Seneca Hill Perennials. No full disclosure needed here. Well, the proprietor of this nursery, Ellen Hornig, is a member of our local Adirondack Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society (I’m a board member and editor/webmaster for the group) and she’s as nice as she can be.

Why am I plugging Seneca Hills? This year is Ellen’s last print catalog. She’s all online from here on out. To echo a quote from her catalog that Graham over at Transatlantic Planstman noted:

Global warming forces us to examine our resource use, and this is one arena in which it can be cut. We will be redesigning the website somewhat to compensate for the lack of a catalog, including addingâ€¦ an archive wherein inactive entries can be kept for reference purposes.

As I look at the foot-tall stack of catalogs on the corner of my desk — most of which will only get a quick flip-through — I know Ellen is right. Sure, there’s something about going to the mailbox and seeing that there are two or three new catalogs in there. But that is increasingly becoming a luxury we can’t afford.

Buying locally as much as possible can also help us reduce our collective carbon footprints. But in the case of plants, I also like supporting folks like Ellen who are good at identifying plants (exotic and native) that perform well where I live.

Sure, she has more reliable snow cover than I do. (I think I read recently that Oswego has averaged about 140 inches of mostly Lake Effect snow over the past decade or so.) But I know that I can find some great plants in her catalog that will do well here and that I won’t find anywhere else.

So, know any other hidden-gem nurseries that folks in your neck of the woods should know about? Plug them in the comments.