By Justin Langlois on December 18th, 2009, 9:11 am 3 Comments

Canadian-born / UK-based designer, Vanessa Harden has invented a number of camouflaged devices meant to ease the process of guerrilla gardening.
Among things like ankle-attached mechanical seed distribution, briefcases that dig holes, and purses designed to easily carry plants to the site of installation, Harden hacked a Pentax camera to create what she calls, the Precision Bombing Device 1, pictured above.
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Tagged: context design gardening guerilla hack hardware seeds
By Justin Langlois on June 14th, 2009, 7:24 am 19 Comments

As part of Green Corridor’s Open Corridor festival, I’ll be working with 500 biodegradable balloons with “YOU ARE WORTH IT.” printed on them. The balloons will be filled with helium and some wildflower seeds, 200 of them will be launched anchored throughout the Green Corridor area and handed out to those in attendance next Thursday, June 18th.
Over the next few months, the remaining 300 balloons will be used for a variety of smaller launches and handed out in small bunches.
The balloons will act as a kind of seed bomb, meant to distribute wildflowers to some of the many ideal locations across the city for new gardens.
Tagged: balloons biodegradable helium research seeds text Windsor
By Justin Langlois 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.
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Tagged: BCL magnetic newspaper planters research seeds soil
By Justin Langlois 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.
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Tagged: magnetic newspaper planters research seeds soil stencils wheat paste wildflowers
By Justin Langlois on April 7th, 2009, 3:53 am 12 Comments

We’ve been working on paper planters for a while, but over the last couple of days I started experimenting with magnets as well. Ideally, these could work with having some rare earth magnets embedded in the paper. Still more research and development to be done, but I think it’s getting closer.
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Tagged: BCL magnets paper planters research seeds