While blindly Stumbling the net with our copious amounts of free time, we came upon the EasyBloom by PlantSense. This little device monitors a potential plant habitat–for instance, your window or your backyard–for 24 hours and tells you what sorts of plants would thrive in the environment you have to offer. It uses an online database and even checks with the Nation Weather Service to make sure the data it is collecting isn’t anomalous.
While we find the device useful for those with phobias about killing plants, we thought it would be cheaper to simply buy a thermometer and use a little bit of our Google searching chops to do the same thing. As the device was listed at $60 US, we are willing to do quite a bit of work to replicate its results. We always want to save money and resources. However, this didn’t at all go down as we had thought. Read on.
One of us, Stan, is no stranger to growing things as his mom was a full-fledged hippie for a bit and engaged in the back breaking labor of actually “growing stuff” in the dirt. Horrible times. However, neither of us are experts on growing things ourselves. The web has a flattening effect on the abilities of the average joe/joette because it enables us to find pretty advanced information about plant habitats in a relatively short amount of time. For instance, in a mere couple of minutes we found the National Gardening Association site.
This was a major find for us as it lead us straight to this page on hardness zones. Hardness zones are a way for gardeners to compare their growing conditions to others and thus find plants that may grow well in their area. Well, this makes a bunch of sense to us. We are in an A8 zone.
There are some major drawback to this useful tool if you live on the west coast of the US, however. It seems that we aren’t flat over here and we get a lot of weather in from the Pacific. This makes growing climates very particular and the hardness zones don’t seem to work as well as in the Eastern United States. If you live on the east coast, the hardness zone works wonderfully well for you. If you live anywhere else in the world, then well…you don’t get any love from this particular tool. Sorry.
A bit more searching and a few random blogs later we found this site on Urban Agriculture. Wow, right up our ally! Frankly, this organization is exactly the kind of resource we hoped to collect and use in our drive to become sustainable in an urban environment. They publish a magazine twice a year in pdf format. The issues are all available from the page we linked to so feel free to dig in. We will be.
This simple blurb article on Wired has lead us to a lot of information because we were attempting to find a way of working around any possible need for the device. We’ve noticed that this happens to us a lot. More to the point, we find that if we don’t try and discover how to get around the need for a device, then we almost never find this information.
That leads us to a simple question that should be at the forefront of every urban survivalist’s brain: How can we do this for ourselves? Doing for ourselves is a perfect way to be sustainable in any place, and is exactly the kind of attitude that has informed our quest to become sustainable in an urban environment. It is what leads us to “tool up” so that we can make or fix our own possessions. It is why we want a secured food and water supply. Really, it is what drives people to learn and grow.
If you spend each and every day, looking at new information, assimilating new ideas, and trying to discover how you can do something for yourself, then you will be well on your way to sustainability in any situation and environment.
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