S A L T

salt's secret properties
salt's history
saltmaking

Geography is Subjective

Wikipedia breaks it down (and keeps it up-to-date):

Meet Me in Golden Gate Park

To do list: add photos to our Specimen Garden map (places that want online visibility)

T H I N K

X E R I S C A P E

Did You Know?

"Bumbleberry is a made-up name that suggest lots of different berries in one pie or jar of jam. Our bumbleberry jam contains blackberries, red raspberries, rhubarb and apples."

- Lehman's Mail Order Catalog, Spring 2007

Our library is growing

LibraryThing is a site that allows you to catalog your books--it thrills librarians partly because you can create catalog records using the Library of Congress information, so each book includes things like the Dewey Decimal call number! The LOC call number! The citations for the book using APA, MLA, Chicago!

And what is more exciting than a catalog? A catalog is metadata.

More about metadata soon.

Specimen Garden's catalog is now available on LibraryThing.

Living the good life

Frightening and so appealing at the same time:



"We were planning a functioning homestead, not a business; nevertheless we tried to be systematic as though we were handling a large-scale economic project. Our card index of activities had a place for 'jobs to be done', divided into 'clear weather jobs' and 'rainy day jobs', for 'construction planned', and for 'finished projects.' Each project had its cost cards with records of materials used and money outlay for specific purposes. Separate loose-leaf books . . . contained the plans, current activity reports and records from previous years."



Nearing, H. & Nearing, S. (1954). Living the good life: How to live sanely and simply in a troubled world. New York, NY: Schoken Books.

Plants We're Obsessed with

Vegetables
- Yacon
- Cardoon
- Quinoa and Amarinth (love lies bleeding)
- Chicory/endive/escarole/radiccio-what are they? what's a category of what? what do you do with them?
-Early Scarcity Beets
-Sugarloaf cabbage
-Long marrowfat peas

Fruit
-my architect friend Donna West just told me about "magic fruit"--a berry that makes everything taste sweet for one hour after you eat it. article from the NYTimes "The Miracle Fruit"

Herbs/Medicinal/Misc
-Mullein

Honesty

The Meaning of Odds & Ends (+ see also)

odds & ends
knick knacks
the ampersand as a punctuation mark poets and information architects can't live without.
what does it take to be a botanist?
blog in progress is a redundancy (what's that term)
study group: literary terms (word a day)
focus and the challenges of not doing it
meditation
blog as a series
blog as scrapbook
blog as storage bin/filing system
blog as communication technology

that when, 10 years ago, you thought 'ah that's really trendy now' you had no idea that it would be a cultural explosion / dependency now

future trendspotters: another of our specialties
- is it intuition, research/social involvement/community, or manifest destiny

self-determination and what it means

challenges of special characters on the internet (file under: ampersand)

psychological analysis of our blog posts

odds/ends

• better image posting workflow
• workflow diagrams!
• I KNOW WHY WE NEED TO BLOGS: because we only have a one-page website and this is the only way to have a second page
  

Taxonomy/Botany Notes

• What does it mean that a plant comes from the same family? What characteristics does that family tend to share, and what distinguishes them? (brassicas share the same leaf structure). Take a botany class?
• Do we want to make a taxonomy/glossary/tool related to the differences / similarities / overlap between different disciplines and terms?
  

Garden Experiments & Fun Projects

• Do we want to set up some lab trials to document how plant distance affects the plant (Note: "Control Group" is an interesting term to explore)?
• Try propagating various things
• Make beauty products from the garden (salt scrubs, etc.)
• Jam/jelly/canning?
• Make crazy old-fashioned foods?
  

Gaps in my Garden Knowledge

• Planting distance: How far apart do you really need to plant things? (I tend to ignore the directions on the packet and plant much closer together)
  
• Mulch: What is it really? What's the best kind?
• Seedling mix recipe (I've heard peat moss is bad for environment--draining bogs and wetlands--and also too acidic)
• What is pH really? (create a key /cheat sheet for identifying pH and adjusting soil pH)
• Worm compost vs. hot compost
• How to be more water-wise and ecologically conscientious in growing food (I think the Indians in SF at acorns. Would that be the real "macrobiotic" thing to eat --what's native to this area? What does it mean to have altered the landscape)
• Future gardens: Native plants, xeriscaping

For each species, I need to know

When to:
--start seeds
--transplant
--harvest
--collect seeds

Specimen Garden is making a calendar-tool.

Seasonal Ingredient Map

Seasonal Ingredient Map

Inpiration for My New Business Model

The Sheep Market

Map Iconography

We heart icons:


What do these icons say about (americans) (google) (designers)?

On Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs are an IA term, derived from Hansel & Gretel story (to find your way back home). It would be nice to use this here somehow, but usually it's within the context of a site with a navigation scheme (which unfortunately we can't easily create w/in Blogger).

e.g.
SPECIMEN GARDEN>CATALOG>Tagging notes (keyword selection)

Our Favorite Words & Concepts

Concepts
-The Conceptual Razor (my genius friend Ignazio Moresco came up with this; he does interaction design)
-Simplicity
-Instant readability/legibility
-10 minutes a day
-About-ness

Words
-Squint
-Blink

Our Favorite Subjects to Geek Out On

Terms information architects, librarians, and botanists love:
-Labels (terms, systems and physical objects used to catalog the garden, online, etc)
-Concordance/s
-Glossary/Lexicon
-Taxonomy/Ontology (species, genus, etc.)
-Field Guides
-Tools to Measure/Predict (Divining Stick, Weathervain, Thermometer...)
-Documentation

Information Design Challenges:
-Documenting Scale (show egg or hand in a photo to indicate its scale)
-Consistency in Nomenclature & Categorization
-Multi-lingual/internationalization
-Iconography

Hot Topics: Frontlines
-"Dashboards"
-All things eco (urban homesteading,...)
-Water conservation and the coming apocalypse
-Iconic indicators (=signage?)
-Literary terms (word of the day, the word that means a microcosm representing the larger topic)

To Do List

Online
-Post brainstorming notes
-Can we add a tag cloud to our blog
-Define our web 2.0 toolset (del.icio.us, flickr, etc.)
-Get our blog signature set up

Our Projects

1. Collect and Analyze Information Design Tools (a la Tufte)
2. Create Urban Homesteader Tool