Green Somethings: The Blog

Garden Designs to Die For

My last event in Chandigarh got an incredibly amazing response both in terms of sales and feedback. Compliments poured in from almost every person who stepped in our mini-store; if there was one that I remember and that clearly made my day, was when one lady commented that the look of the products and the stall overall was very European. Now, I am not some wannabe or someone who likes all things non-desi. Quite on the contrary, I love the made-in-India handiworks and always amaze at how much the handicrafts industry in India has grown. What truly moved my heart was how I was finally able to touch the right chord with people who understand and appreciate good designs - with a bit of hard work, and a lot of belief that the GS offerings will sell, I really made it work!  It clicked, and I guess now, there's no looking back :)

Inspired by the adoration, I am now working on some French and Victorian styles for the next collection of planters and garden accessories. Of course, there's no work complete with a good amount of Googling - here's what I dug out recently; just some beautiful eye candy for all my beautiful followers.  

Awesome images & content courtesy House to Home - UK  (these were so cool, I just had to steal 'em!)
 

Colourful Provencal-style patio: Brightly-painted shutters with a café curtain at the window for a truly French-style feel. 

 

Styled with sustainables garden: Notice the tyres used as planters, scaffoldboard decking and discarded brick rubble to create this very sustainable & low-maintainence urban garden. 

 
Low-level garden: Create a casual space for lounging around in the garden by choosing low-level, ergonomic seating to relax in, teamed with vibrant, stripy rugs. Add a mix of pots planted with moss and ferns around the edge of your garden for a smart boho mix. 

 

Modern Courtyard: I love the use of clean lines and simple plants with large grey slates that form a path between beds of stipa, rudbeckia and crocosmia. Wall hung flowerbeds in a metal that reflect the light, draw attention to the back of the garden 

Outdoor garden style: Bring your living room style onto the patio. Add splashes of color with bright accessories like this pink throw and lantern lights and butterfly accessories. 

Outdoor kitchen-diner: A built-in barbeque, just  ideal for family meals as well as entertaining in the summers. Add comfort with colourful cushions. Low-maintenance planters can be grouped in threes or fives for displays with impact.

 

Outdoor dining: Give your summer garden party a Moroccan feel with a collection of tea lights, suspended from a parasol. Add soft roses in pink and yellow and complement with fuschia-coloured tea glasses. 

Corner showcase: Although this courtyard garden is compact (perfect for apartments), a cleverly positioned mirror (left corner) makes it appear much bigger than it is. A decorative table and chairs with lots of lanterns and plant pots create a pretty spot for outdoor suppers. 

 

Garden lighting: For an interesting effect in the garden, line modern lattice lanterns up a row of steps and keep the scheme monochrome for a striking contrast against the green of the plants.

 

Summer pots: Pots of succulents, including houseleeks, enjoy the summer sun in their places on this circular patio in a Somerset country garden. 

Now Get Paid to Recycle Your Cell Phones!

Hey this is so cool! We've heard of ever increasing amounts of e-waste being dumped in landfills every passing second, but what's being done to stop or at least decrease the impact of it, no one knows yet! I found this site during my casual internet browsing, and thought how much we need this to be run in an organized way in India as well with over 1,46,000 tones of e-waste being produced every year (source: http://www.e-waste.in/weee_basics/weee_statistics/) 

Flipswap.com (based out of the USA) is a free service that helps you first value your cell phone via their website and then pays once you recycle cell phone. So you basically determine the real-time value of your used cell phone on the flpswap.com site, provide your contact information, print out the FREE shipping label, prepare the package (paste the shipping label that allows you to ship it out for free) and that's it. A couple of weeks later you get paid for the little effort (but big contribution to the environment :)) you just made!

Flipswap claims that they are able to re-purpose nearly all of the millions of mobile phones received each year. For some of those phones which can not be reused and must be recycled, Flipswap pledges to plant a tree for every phone that is recycled through their inStore service.

Flipswap estimates that about 25,000 trees were planted through this reLeaf initiative in 2008. More trees mean cleaner air to breathe, less carbon dioxide to heat things up and cleaner water for drinking and washing your hybrid car.

So what happens to the millions of cell phones that get collected at Flipswap? With a larger part of the eWaste that is filling the landfills made up of fully functional phones, Flipswap makes sure that the mobile phones can live out their full functional lives. When you trade in a cell phone with Flipswap, all the data is wiped off, the phone is polished and then put back into the hands of someone who really needs a phone. Now that's a no waste solution that you can truly feel good about.

Zero Budget Natural Farming

The Management Development Institute, Gurgaon is organizing a lecture series along with GAP Inc. on the 9th and 10th of Nov.  The topic of discussion is of great personal interest so thought should share with all my readers. In case you are in New Delhi or NCR and wish to join, please send an email to sugandha118@gmail.com. 

 Zero Budget Natural Farming

  
 

Subash Palekar, the man behind zero budget natural farming has been practicing it for the last 25 years, He says, “zero budget farming technology could solve the food and farm crisis in the country by cutting the cost of production and doubling productivity and production.” Over 25 lakh farmers in different parts of the country, including Kerala, have adopted the zero budget farming technology today.

For over sixty years, Indian agriculture was in a slumber. Lands were scandalized by an unknown thing called as synthetic fertilizer. This was done to help the farmer get a 'better' harvest.

As the farmers started using it, they noticed that the soil had become infertile and could no longer bear crops for the next season. Advised to add more and more fertilizer to the soil to compensate for the nutrient loss, the farmers kept on adding fertilizers but soon realized that plants that grew with fertilizers now needed pesticides. Thus not too long after, they started using pesticides. But gradually the pests became resistant to these chemicals leaving the farmers puzzled.

The farmers forgot one basic thing about the soil – that it HAD LIFE. 

Zero Budget Natural Farming means for all the crops, the production cost will be zero. In Zero Budget Natural Farming nothing has to be purchased from outside. All things required for the growth of the plant are available in the soil that they are grown in, more specifically around the root zone of the plants. 

In the forests, there is no human existence, but, even then the trees bear enormous fruits. That means nature has supplied all the nutrients needed for the plants. In year 1924, Dr. Clark and Dr Washington, the world famous soil scientists came to India in search of crude oil. They took the samples of thousand feet deep soil and tested it at their American laboratory. The results proved that as we go deeper in the soil, the nutrients required for the growth and production of the plant increase in quantity. 

However, thanks to the excessive use of synthetic fertilizers and poisonous pesticides in farms these nutrients are not available because the micro-organisms who convert these non-available nutrients into available forms are destroyed. 

Gap Inc. in partnership with MDI is looking to spread this message of sustainability which has the potential to combat the scourges of both poverty and climate change. Mr. Subhash Palekar will be available in Delhi to address this critical issue during the 9th and 10th of November.

For details about the event please contact sugandha118@gmail.com. You can also check the agenda on the Facebook event page.