Lately I’ve been working on supplementing our rooftop garden’s produce with an indoor, year-round growing system. I’m experimenting on lots of different crops, grown in a half baking sheet (18″x13″) and housed in, no surprise, a baker’s proofing rack, fitted with LED grow lights. The new baker’s-proofing-rack greens system at the Rot. Because the […]
Author Archives: Marc Boucher-Colbert
Put Some Wild Magic in Your Garden This Season
Sometimes it takes somebody else’s wisdom to confirm what you already know or partially know. I recently had that experience when I attended the Pacific NW Flower and Garden Show, where I heard author and designer Stefani Bittner of Homestead Design Collective (http://www.homesteaddesigncollective.com/) speaking about her new book, Harvest. This book confirmed my trials of […]
Hot Pepper Race to the Bottom
In a world where everyone seems to be ceaselessly striving to outdo everyone else and be more, better, stronger, faster, etc., it’s refreshing to be entering a contest of less, meeker, weaker. And what contest might that be? Why, the heatless hot pepper contest. If this pepper shape sends waves of PTSD through you owing […]
Volk Stokes a Farmer’s Imagination
I love books about farming and gardening and books that friends have written, so imagine my pleasure on first realizing that this beautiful farming book was written by my friend Josh Volk. One of the regular joys of attending the NW Flower and Garden Show (http://www.gardenshow.com/) is being bombarded with so many new and […]
Temporary Landscape Interpretation
You’d miss that a rose had been pruned if it weren’t for the sign. Since it has been pruned, it’s a great opportunity to do a little guerilla education. This post isn’t about a particular gardening technique, per se, but about our relationship to the land and how as caretakers of it, we are […]
Get Fresh In the Seed Room
Can you tell whether the foreground or the background had fresh lettuce seed? If you can then you probably don’t need to read this post. It’s an understandable reflex, the thrifty reach for last year’s seeds instead of starting off with the new package you just ordered or bought, but ask yourself the following […]
A Rooftop Garden Primer
Delivered as a TED-style talk at the Greater Portland Sustainability Educators’ Network symposium on Jan 27, 2017 Greetings, my name is Marc Boucher-Colbert And I am here to tell you about a rooftop that once was bare And the garden that now we’ve got At a wine bar in town called the Noble […]
Lovin’ Me Some Heirloom Seeds
So it’s January, and that means we move from the pleasant paging-through of all the arriving seed catalogs to the sharpened-pencil, filling-out-the-form, decision-making that is required to actually order the seeds and move from pure potential (our December state of mind with catalogs in hand) to actualizing those dreams. I’m not going to jump […]
Then God Said….”Let There Be PAR.”
Wherefore this eerie, purple glow in the greenhouse? Read on to find out why. I have just ordered some new LED grow lights for my plant room, and when I finally got down to searching for good ones, I learned a lot about light along the way. In the next few posts, I’ll share […]
Should Your Restaurant Have a Garden?
It doesn’t take much to make a meaningful contribution to a restaurant menu or a home kitchen. Here golden-stemmed chard grows happily in 4 gal. nursery pots. Recently I got these five questions from a restaurateur exploring whether she should start a garden for her restaurant. Perhaps the information will be useful to other […]