Sorana Tarmu Art & Design

A Sustainable Network of Community Gardens in Jersey City

Sustainable JC is launching a new project, under the generous umbrella of the Good Food Now! initiative, involving Jersey City’s community gardens. A first step encourages existent community garden patrons to create a free account on Farming Concrete and use the provided data collection tool called Barn for logging garden data. Most of the city’s community gardens are already listed.

This is how the current distribution of community gardens look like, after listing them on Farming Concrete:

Why is it important to monitor and keep accurate track of community garden parameters? Just like in any successful enterprise, measureable indicators make it much easier to manage and improve the gardens’ efficiency and impact, increasing their benefits to the community. We all know that there are not nearly enough community gardens in our city to address the problem of community access to fresh and healty food (the issue of “food security”). Thus, it becomes increasingly important to sustainably maximize the benefits of the existing ones.

Contamination with airborne pollutants such as lead and chromium, as well as the presence of brownfields, are well known chronic environmental problems of Jersey City. What this project aims, upon monitoring, centralizing and compiling these parameters, is to create (and eventually extend) a comprehensive community garden network of our city, initiate exchanges (know-how, seeds, success stories etc.) and hopefully a “quantitative platform” compelling enough to get funding that will initiate and support a city-wide community garden sustainable landscape design improvement project, aimed to maximize productivity and sustainability, while mitigating and reducing urban contamination. A website of this particular project is currently under construction.

If you have any questions or requests for more technical details about this project or the online tool, please feel free to contact the project leader.

Setting Boundaries – The Art of Hispaniola

This event, organized by The Art Garden Shed and Queen of Bohemia Productions for Café Sole and part of JC Fridays, is a call-for-art/art-opening/art-colloquium in one, with a live world music background. Please feel free to bring art objects that you consider related to the theme, and we will exhibit them. Musicians playing ethnic instruments are welcome to sit in. The Hispaniola art is brought by the very owner of Cafe Sole. Join a friendly, stimulating conversation among art aficionados in this newly renovated and ever welcoming entertainment space. Buses stop in front of Cafe Sole and there is free parking provided on site. The event is listed first on the JC Fridays map, available at all JC Fridays venues

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Watercolor Postcards

Summer Art Camp – Day 3

Watercolor postcard – Venice Beach.

Summer Art Camp, Days 1 and 2

 Watercolors

The Unexpected Hollyhock

A few years ago, a gorgeous pink hollyhock grew and bloomed in my backyard - total surprise. I had sown a wildflower mix from American Meadows all over my new garden patches and hoped for the best. Little that I knew that this approach to gardening would be so rewarding. If you are a more result-oriented gardener, check and research the list of plants on the packet.

Blackberries

Lupine Seed Mix

Back to stories from the Art Garden Shed… For this is mainly a garden diary… This year I decided to try some lupine from American Meadows as a “bulb topper”. I have been always smitten with the flowers of the pea family (Fabaceae) and lately I found that they are great heavy metal bioaccumulators, (sadly, there is still plenty of lead and chromium in JC, floating in the air in fine particles, contaminating urban soils slowly but surely…)

These make great cut flowers, too…

 

I also want to try some sweet pea, they are my favorite – I strongly favor fragrant flowers…

A Love for Dandelions

This year’s moody spring delayed the blooming of the lovely dandelions. My Conservation Biology professor at MSU mentioned them fondly last week, and in the recent days, a few bunches bloomed in my yard.

Their gifts and uses are manifold, being that they are an important natural remedy. For instance, dandelion jelly is one of the healthiest sweet spreads you could eat. Since I try to avoid added sugar in my diet, I am considering making a dandelion flower preserve with concentrated fruit juice and chia seeds. However, the whole aerial parts of the dandelion are edible and can be added in salads (the leaves only when they're young, preferably before the plant blooms) and dry the roots for a great detoxifying tea. Here's a remedy for balancing your liver function: eat six dandelion stalks a day (you can cut them and add them to your sandwich if you want) for a few weeks. Be careful where you pick them, though. Avoid those that grow close to a high traffic area, and always wash them thoroughly.

Dandelion’s “flower” is actually an inflorescence. The true flowers are the “petals” that can be pulled off the inflorescence, and which are in fact a long, flat, merged corolla.

Dandelion is a melliferous species, being one of the first foods for pollinators, especially bees.

Their white “seed globes” are whimsical, and kids of all ages love puffing them away.

Speaking of their change from yellow to white, when I was a little girl, I read an enchanting Native-American dandelion legend, in a book that both my brother and I loved dearly: The Story of Hiawatha.

“How the wild rose and the shy arbutus and the lily, sweet and languid, loved the idle Shawondasee! How the frost-weary and withered earth would melt and mellow at his sunny touch! Happy Shawondasee! In all his life he had a single sorrow—just one sleepy little sting of pain. He had seen a maiden clad in purest green, with hair asyellow as the bright breast of the oriole, and she stood and nodded at him from the prairie toward the north. But Shawondasee, although he loved the bright-haired maiden and longed for her until he filled the air with sighs of tenderness, was so lazy and listless that he never sought to win her love. Never did he rouse himself and tell her of his passion, but he stayed far to the southward, and murmured half asleep among the palm-trees as he dreamed of the bright maiden.

One morning, when he awoke and gazed as usual toward the north, he saw that the beautiful golden hair of the maiden had become as white as snow, and Shawondasee cried out in his sorrow: "Ah, my brother of the North-wind, you have robbed me of my treasure! You have stolen the bright-haired maiden, and have wooed her with your stories of the Northland!" and Shawondasee wandered through the air, sighing with passion until, lo and behold! the maiden disappeared.

Foolish Shawondasee! It was no maiden that you longed for. It was the prairie dandelion, and you puffed her away forever with your useless sighing.”

So what’s not to love?

The Way of the Black Stork

I have been fascinated with black storks ever since I learned about their existence. Although they have the same feeding grounds with their white cousins, unlike these ones they live far from human habitations, preferring to nest in the canopies of the oldest forests they can find. If the white stork is the symbol of new life, social interaction and material achievements, I would think the black one is the symbol of seasoned life, solitary pursuits, “ivory towers” and creations of the spirit.

May you be blessed with the gifts of both.

“Black Stork”, Prismacolor pencils on upcycled paper, 2’’x 4’’