Botanical art is created with real pressed and preserved vegetables and fruits, which are then meticulously hand-painted and mounted in contemporary black frames and shadow boxes. Photos by Michael Levenston taken at a Vancouver craft fair.

Pressing and drying flowers and fruits to create botanical art

Excerpt from the artist’s website:

Diane’s first love is gardening, an interest she developed as a child while tending the large vegetable garden on her family’s Manitoba farm. While raising her own four daughters in small B.C. towns she continued her passion for gardening and creating with the bounty of nature both in her kitchen and in her studio.

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Sherrye Coggiola is the first female president of the Asheville Independent Restaurants. She and her husband, Anthony, are also starting Asheville Urban Farms which uses hydroponics to grow food. Photo by Erin Brethauer.

Air’s New President Has Big Plans For Indoor Hydroponic Farms

By Mackensy Lunsford
Citizen-Times
Nov 9, 2012  

Excerpt: 

“We play Native American music for our plants all day,” said Anthony Coggiola, stepping into his humid hydroponic West Asheville grow room.

If “grow room” conjures up images of a nefarious nature, you’re not alone. But Asheville Urban Farms’ chief goals are ending food insecurity and supplying food for restaurants in Western North Carolina and beyond.

And the only things sprouting under Coggiola’s grow lights are edibles.

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NYC’s urban farms face a climate reality check

By Cathy Erway
Grist
Nov 2, 2012

Excerpt:

Stacey Murphy, founder of BK Farmyards, worries about how these drastic weather patterns might impact young people’s interest in farming. “With the percentage of farmers already having dropped to below 1 percent of the population, we are at risk of losing crucial farming knowledge,” she says. Murphy emphasized the importance of federal programs such as the Beginning Farmers and Ranchers Development Program, which has been in funding limbo since the 2008 farm bill expired last month.

On the other hand, it’s also possible that the weather will shape city farming for the better. “I foresee farmers using new growing strategies in response,” says Murphy.

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