Urban Ecoist

If you cannot tell what is on my mind lately by reading a recent post, then you should know that there is something about winter that brings out the dreamer in me in terms of what I will be doing in my small urban garden this next season. As a city dweller, I am a renter and as such, my dreams for my little garden will most likely never be realized as who knows how long I will live in this house, and hi, it’s not my house, so I don’t get to call the shots on major garden design and projects.

So, maybe someone out there can glean something from my grandiose plans for the grandiose problems that I have in “my” yard. I always believe in leaving a yard in better shape than that in which I found it, so my planning tends to go below the surface in many aspects of garden design. And if I were to undertake a major project this next spring, it would be to build and plant a raised bed garden along the roadside of my front yard. It would reduce noise from the street, increase privacy and add more plants that could be attractive to both wildlife and insects.

The first thing you should consider when building a roadside urban garden is that these plants are on the front lines of pollution from cars. I live on a quiet street that doesn’t not see much traffic, but many urbanites live on busy thoroughfares and should take pollution generated from traffic into consideration when choosing the plants you will use in your roadside garden.

And like the “garden” above, there is no reason that you cannot have a little roadside garden. It may have to be a container (or many, many containers), but hey, it’s still a garden.

urban garden, gardening, pollution, roadside garden, plants, design, planning

January. The cold, the snow, the ice, the cabin fever. Other than the inordinate amount of video games that I play over the winter, I also begin planning out what I will be doing in the garden this next season. I look through seed catalogs, garden supply catalogs, books on garden design, reference books on perennials. I really do spend too much time on my garden plans, but planning in advance can save you a lot of work in the future.

Speaking of the future, or possibly the present for some of us around the country in those regions experiencing drought conditions, water is quickly becoming a scarce commodity. And besides, who likes spending all that time watering the garden? That’s time I could spend in the hammock.

Let me introduce you to xeriscaping, or garden design that requires little supplemental water and produces little waste. It’s one of those made up words using Greek to make it sound all sciency, xeros meaning zero and scape which pertains to a landscape or an area of land. Roughly translated, “dry scene” landscaping uses plants that are native to the area, and if the area happens to be an area like Southern California, those native plants are naturally drought-resistant. Otherwise, they sure couldn’t be natives.

Check with your local nursery to see what they have available that’s native and needs little to no additional irrigation that what it would get from normal precipitation patterns (of course, every summer has a dry spell in which you will have to water everything, but normally, you shouldn’t have to water these plants every day.

Even if you are in an area in which water is not a problem, you should still consider planting species in your garden that don’t require a lot of extra water. Save the water for your veggie garden. You can get lovely flowers and ornamentals in the colors of the rainbow that are also drought-resistant. Save on your water bill or your water table out in the country.

A few examples of drought-resistant annuals

A few examples of drought-resistant perennials

xeriscaping, drought-resistant, gardening, gardens, water, watering, irrigation, garden design, landscaping, plants, annuals, perennials

I’ve been hearing about this for a little while now, but kind of took the “wait and see” approach before believing it. Although the company behind the billboard is Ricoh, and that is a company that has been a leader in corporate sustainability for a while now.

It’s funny, but ever since Napoleon Dynamite, it is hard for me to say Ricoh without an “uncle” in front of it.

Anyhoo, Ricoh’s eco-billboard is just about ready to roll.

What I think is neat is the vertical wind turbines. Instead of the usual blade-style turbine, you can see in the video that a vertical turbine looks like a tube with slots in it. The wind enters through the slots and into the body, spinning the turbine and thus producing electricity.

Of course, those huge billboards in Times Square need a LOT of electricity, so Ricoh added solar photovoltaic panels to augment the power-generation capacity. I am a big fan of coupling wind and solar, because usually if the sun is out, the wind is calm, and if there is little sunlight, you can count on wind.

Not only that but the Ricoh-eco-board (which is fun to say, try it) is using height to its advantage. Wind is stronger the higher up in the atmosphere you get, and most turbines need a healthy amount of wind in order to produce an optimal amount of electricity. You can see in the graph below what I mean.

If the wind gets too strong, the power graph nosedives in a typical blade-style wind turbine, but vertical turbines seem to be able to handle stronger wind speeds and convert them into power. Which is good as these vertical turbines are going to be pretty high up there in Mid-Town Manhattan.

Now, if we could just get NYC and other big cities around the world to install more vertical turbines and solar panels, maybe we could reduce the need for coal-powered electricity.

NYC, New York, Ricoh, billboard, Times Square, sustainability, renewables, electricity, coal, clean energy