February 2011
12 posts
3 tags
The Composter: Where Kitchen Memories Belong
Ma dukes is re-doing her kitchen. So like a good son, I went home to help out which meant packing up kitchen memories spanning back decades. Or just throwing them in the trash.
Mom with a beer and a marshmallow
She casually handed me some translucent green cups from the dawn of my early childhood, “Just drop these in the garbage, thanks luv!”
DROP THESE IN THE GARBAGE?! Do you...
January 2011
13 posts
Ask Panthy: What is Panthy's Favorite Season?
Anonymous asks, “What is Panthy’s Favorite Season?”
It seems like the obvious answer to this question is spring; when gardeners roll away the great bag of manure from the crypt, or the uh, shed… and um… act like Jesus…? Forget it.
But yeah, spring. It’s when gardeners across the land get back to doing what they love. Unless you live in California where you...
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30 Pounds of Bulbs for the Pro
Just about everyone over the age of 50 thinks my foray into gardening is cute. Maybe slightly gay, but cute. I get the verbal pats on the head like “hey that’s just great you’re trying gardening” in the same way jerks at the grocery store shout “YOU’RE DOING AN AWESOME JOB” at the handicapped bag boy.
But occasionally, I get some serious love. Some comes...
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Studying Dung on the Wicken Fen
I always love when the scientific community releases overly-complicated studies confirming information we already know. Turns out, eating fatty foods can make you fat. Smoking cigarettes is bad for you. Pot enhances the taste of midnight pancakes, and so on.
Newsflash: Animals transport seeds in their poop and help the spread and germination of plant life. I’m fairly sure this was covered...
2 tags
Rubber Hamburgers Don't Need Watering
Oh well looky here, I found some “remarkable sky gardens” for sale. If I had a dollar for every time someone said those words, I’d have roughly two dollars. And I can tell you, if these sky gardens were two dollars I’d buy them all, but like most things for sale at West Elm, they are not two dollars. They’re between nine and twenty-four bucks. Too rich for my blood!
...
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Manhattan School for Children Goes Bonkers with a...
When I’m feeling daunted by the thought of getting 25 bags of potting mix up 5 flights of stairs I try to remember that there are people doing… way… more… than me. Get a load of these three moms who (ready for this?), raised $800,000, pulled all the necessary permits, and had a massive rooftop greenhouse/lab installed on their school roof.
Photo via ChangeObserver
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2 tags
3 tags
Pretention Alert: Heirloom Oranges
Winter can be depressing around here, take for example this heap of mystery hair next to a Mexican take out menu that’s been ripped in half.
See what I mean? Really. Depressing. So when I saw this little basket of wonders at my local fancy food market, you can imagine I was kinda pumped.
The store display even had a picture of where they’re grown, a magical rainbow infested...
2 tags
Johnny's Selected Seed Catalog
Good thing about being into gardening is people start to give you stuff related to gardening, unsolicited. Sometimes it’s in the form of helpful advice, sometimes you get religious garden ornaments. This weekend I was handed the gardener’s equivalent of a porn mag; the Johnny’s Selected Seeds seed catalog. 205 pages of full-color, pure, exposed, natural seed beauty. And like...
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Fake It Until You Have to Take a Class
It’s often been said that when you don’t know what you’re doing, fake it. If faking it results in utter failure, take a class. Then, when you’re wicked smart, teach a class, name that class How Not to Be a Dufus and lord over your students to make yourself feel important. Only then, can you call yourself a success.
With gardening, I might fall in the “moderately...
3 tags
Trash Project, Part 1
Every great project kicks off with a solid root through someone else’s trash. My pops used to let me cruise to the dump with him and without fail, for every three bags of trash we left, we returned home with a least one new project.
My dad gave new life to some cadaver-colored phones that were missing their face plates. He rigged them up to some homemade “additional” phone...
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The Hawks Garden: Get After It.
Nik Hawks and I used to play guns together when we were 13 in the woods of Massachusetts. He was always going way too far, climbing on stuff he wasn’t supposed to, putting itching powder in people’s gym shorts and doing about anything the rest of us lacked the balls to do. And he did it all without hesitation.
One of us went on to become a graphic designer, the other went on to...
2 tags
Panthy New Year
Thanks in part to this saucy mystery punch my wife whipped up, and partly due to the plentiful Cristalino going around, we got down in fine style just feet below Panthy’s Garden to ring in the New Year.
Hell, we even had a baby in a tuxedo over here. (His identity has been concealed to preserve future job candidacy).
After watching about five minutes of drunk people making out on...
