By Justin on August 29th, 2009, 1:44 am 7 Comments

Our magnetic planters have finally been finished and installed (temporarily) along the alley that runs behind our headquarters. Consider yourself cordially invited to take a planter or two and move them to some other space in the city in need of a micro-garden.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL installation interventions magnetic planters plants research

By Justin on August 20th, 2009, 9:37 am 3 Comments

We’re doing some field tests of our magnetic planters with some plants in them. Basically, we want to test to make sure the soil isn’t drying out too quickly and we’re also checking to see how well some plants respond to transplants. Above, you can see there’s a wire around the planter that helps it to keep its shape—some of the planters without a wide edge on either side are more prone to open up really wide at the top, which makes it difficult for the soil to fill the planter uniformly. Without it, the soil eventually sinks and adding any more soil would risk making the planter too heavy for the magnet.

Michelle’s running these tests, checking on the plants daily and testing a few varieties of planter shapes in preparation of the installation of all of our planters sometime in the next week or so.

Tagged: BCL fence field test magnetic planters research

By Justin on August 16th, 2009, 9:47 pm 0 Comments

Josh and I spent some of the day in the heat collecting some interesting flowers and plants to transplant for our magnetic planters project. Overall, it was fairly successful, as we did learn quite a lot about transplanting, but we’re still going to be looking for some more plants to finish up this stage of the project (hopefully) in the next week or so.

Tagged: BCL flowers magnetic planters research transplant

By Justin on June 8th, 2009, 6:31 am 0 Comments

We finished putting soil and seeds into the magnetic planters and set them on a sunny window ledge to start germinating. We figured the planters would stand a better chance at surviving (and staying in place longer than just overnight) if there were some wildflowers starting to grow.

We also went to the downtown space and started brainstorming, but I’ll make another post on that later.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL magnetic newspaper planters research seeds soil

By Justin on May 30th, 2009, 12:48 pm 9 Comments

Friday afternoon turned out to be more productive than I thought it would. We finished embedding all the magnets we have, which means we have 25 planters either done or drying and ended up with 3 installed on various surfaces to see if they survive the rain this weekend.

If they turn out, I’ll order some more magnets, but in the meantime we’re still working on stencils (the BCL stencil above was just a test), and we should be able to get the rest up in the next week!

Owen over at Windsor Visuals also already made a great post on Friday’s Office Hours, and some of his photos are included in this post as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: magnetic newspaper planters research seeds soil stencils wheat paste wildflowers

By Justin on May 28th, 2009, 12:00 am 0 Comments

Danielle and I spent Wednesday afternoon making some more planters, patching up some of the planters made last Friday, and adding magnets to other planters. Hopefully by Friday these will be dry and ready for departure from my studio.

I’m anxious to see these up (and this project finished, many other things to do!)

Tagged: magnetic newspaper planters wheat paste

By Darren on May 22nd, 2009, 11:06 pm 4 Comments

Justin couldn’t stay too long today since he had to leave for a Media City engagement.  So he set us up with the things we would need then left us alone.  He was showing Josh how the new design I started last week held up better and works with the magnets better too.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL magnetic newspaper paper mache planters research

By Justin on May 20th, 2009, 10:01 pm 3 Comments

The new model for our Magnetic Planters—basically just using a paper mache technique. Darren figured this one out, and after some testing, it looks like this is the strongest and easiest planter we can make! We did more research last Friday to get to this point, but we’re happy to have come up with a really workable solution.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL magnetic planters pulp research wheat paste

By Justin on April 30th, 2009, 11:20 am 5 Comments

After taking a week off, Broken City Lab Office Hours started up again with a focus on getting a number of the shells for the magnetic planters completed. It was a really productive meeting with some more welcomed new faces and a whole bunch of planters now ready for the next step. It wasn’t all fun though, we lost an invaluable BCL member—Mike’s blender.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL blender community garden magnetic paper planters pulp research shopping

By Justin on April 26th, 2009, 5:09 pm 9 Comments

The rain held off, so today was a good day to get out and do some field tests for our magnetic planters. We just stuck around the neighbourhood, but did a general test to see what surfaces were magnetic. Unfortunately, the street signs that I had anticipated being a perfect surface for these are not magnetic, but chain link fences are, along with some other random surfaces.

We’ll continue with research on making these planters this week, but also start to think of what we can stamp / stencil / draw onto the flat surface of these.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL fence field test magnetic planters research surfaces