By Justin on September 7th, 2009, 9:28 am 0 Comments

I hope you’ll forgive us for the lack of posts lately. I’ve been on a film shoot all day, everyday for the last few weeks, while other BCL folks have been traveling, moving, working, and studying, and so meeting even once a week has been a challenge. Thankfully, school is literally a couple days away and with it comes some kind of stability in a schedule.

However, we’ve still been trying to get some things done, mostly it’s been this planters project and planning for our upcoming event, Welcome to the Neighbourhood. On Thursday, we did some more field tests with our planters where we’re discovering which plants have been doing better and trying to determine why.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL campus planters research university

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 19th, 2009, 12:11 am 0 Comments

Another day at BCL HQ and some more progress on this ongoing magnetic planters project. Michelle and I finished putting in the remainder of our magnets into our plastic bag planters, but there are still some more planters left over. So, with more rare-earth magnets now on the way, we’ll finish up the rest when they arrive next week.

We also have a test planter in the wild now to make sure it works as we assume it’s going to work. The other tests that I’ve done indoors have been fine, with some of the mint I transplanted actually taking root, which is really exciting! It was quite interesting to see all of these individually made designs and see the range of techniques that everyone used when making the planters as Michelle and I worked with just about every one today… we imagine it will look quite great to see them all installed (temporarily) in one place filled with plants before they’re sent off to other magnetic surfaces across the city.

Tagged: BCL magnets planters research

By Justin on August 18th, 2009, 7:33 am 0 Comments

As summer rolls on, we’re continuing our work with the magnetic planters, though we now have the benefit of a front porch to enjoy the evening weather while doing so. Michelle, Josh, and I spent Monday night working on embedding the magnets into the plastic bag planters along with some more writing. We also moved some more stuff into our office and began to organize ourselves. Michelle started out by sorting the planters that had tabs on them, which allow us to fold them over the magnets and use the iron to keep them in place.

Michelle and Josh took turns with the iron—it’s been a while since we’ve worked on them, and with a different iron, we had to work out the kinks of getting the heat exactly right.

We finished up 25 planters, some of them requiring two magnets. Michelle and I will continue on with the rest sometime this week.

Tagged: BCL front porch HQ iron 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 July 24th, 2009, 11:28 pm 0 Comments

Michelle and I spent the afternoon at 406 Pelissier working on more planters. We’ve made 102 planters so far, though we’re hoping to reach 150 before we launch the project sometime in August.

I need to order some more magnets.

Tagged: BCL counting downtown planters project research

By Justin on July 18th, 2009, 6:04 pm 3 Comments

Another week and another day in 406 Pelissier, which as it continues is now part of Windsor’s Visual Fringe. It’s tough to find time to get down there, but I think we made the best of a few hours last Tuesday. We’re continuing work with the planters, which is (as they always seems to be) another fairly long-term research and development type of project. However, we made some great progress and some new strategies for designing the planters, and did a couple more test transplants.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL design downtown ironing magnets planters research transplant

By Justin on July 1st, 2009, 3:42 pm 8 Comments

Another day spent at 406 Pelissier. Working with these plastic bags is really time consuming, but it will be worth it. The projects we have in mind are taking longer than we may have initially aniticipated, but that’s been the case with everything we’ve ever done.

The banner is growing steadily, but we’re hoping for a final length of somewhere near 18 feet. We’ve also scouted a location, but we’re still working on the message for the banner itself.

Our continuing work with the planters is going well, as we’re about 1/3 of the way to the grand total of planters we’re hoping to make. Also, the test planter is doing well, with some wildflower seeds sprouting already. With the planter being indoors, it has certainly helped to keep the soil moist, but also (and as we had figured long ago), the first and second design iterations of the planters were drying the soil very quickly due to the use of newspapers. With the plastic bags, the soil seems to be holding moisture much better. We’ve been careful to create drainage holes, but we probably need to integrate this into the design more effectively.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: banner BCL planters plastic bags research

By Justin on June 23rd, 2009, 12:15 am 8 Comments

Now that Intersession is done, we’ve finally been able to put that downtown space to some use. Cristina and I spent the better part of the day in the space, using it basically as an office, but we’ll be there at least one more day this week and potentially one day on the weekend picking up where we left off on some older projects and inevitably starting some new ones.

On today’s agenda: see the new hybrid buses and look for some Text In-Transit signs (which we found), set up a small work area in the space, make some preliminary decisions about our book so we can get started on it, and photograph a new research site.

Also, we’re looking for any biodegradable plastic bags you may have (hint: Bulk Barn gives out biodegradable bags) for another project. If you have any, please drop them off at 406 Pelissier. We’ll be there Tuesday from 12noon until around 4pm.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tagged: BCL book downtown fence planters projects research