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Museum is moving forward with Capen House plans despite lawsuit
On Wednesday morning, directors of Winter Park’s Albin Polasek Museum Sculpture Gardens gathered to break ground on the site that’s set to be the future home of the historic Capen House.
A day earlier, the city was served with a lawsuit that aims to keep the home, which traces its origins to 1885, from making its planned voyage across Lake Osceola to the museum grounds.
The suit was filed on behalf of a group of city residents calling themselves “Concerned Citizens for Historic Preservation” who live near the home. It also names as a defendant 520 N. Interlachen LLC, the entity formed by the home’s owners, John and Betsy Pokorny.
The couple wants to build a new home on the lot, and agreed to postpone demolition until the house could be moved.
The plaintiffs are represented by Orlando attorney Richard Wilson, who stepped in after Howard Marks stepped aside. Marks did not respond to requests for comment on why he left the case.
Wilson said the suit — which alleges the home’s historic designation was improperly removed, making it vulnerable to demolition — aims not only to keep the home on its lot at 520 N. Interlachen Ave., but to undo any changes made to prepare it for the move across the lake by barge.
Those changes are already moving along, said contractor Frank Roark. Landscaping and paving have been removed, and workers have been taking out electrical and plumbing connections.
Mark Terry, president of the Polasek board, said work would continue despite the suit. Under the museum’s agreement with the Pokornys, the house must be removed by year’s end. “If we don’t move forward,” Terry said, “we risk it being demolished.”
Commissioner Carolyn Cooper, while sympathetic, called the suit “baseless.”
“The lawsuit grew from frustration, and I understand that frustration,” she said.
dbreen@tribune.com
Students help plant rain garden for Trees Forever
By Luke Smucker
Posted Oct. 22, 2013 @ 12:50 pm
Pontiac, Ill.
Prison Gardens Grow New Lives for Inmates
By ABC News
ABC News photo
ABC News’ Bill Ritter reports:
From Enfield, Conn., to New York City and the San Francisco Bay, lush gardens filled with ripe fruits, vegetables and flowers are growing in unexpected places — prison yards.
Prisons use them to rehabilitate inmates and to teach them basic landscaping skills that they can use to get jobs. All of the prisoners involved in each garden’s program are eligible for release.
Related: From Prison to Poetry — Former Criminal Advocates for Juvenile Justice Reform
Bernard, 46, who’s been in trouble with the law about 10 times in the last 30 years, now helps in the gardening efforts at the Willard Cybulski Correctional Institution in Enfield, Conn.
“I get a sense of peace and a sense of serenity being that I’m in a hostile environment at times and then coming out here to pick these vegetables. It brings calmness to me,” Bernard said.
For the last three years, all 18 state prisons in Connecticut have had garden programs. None cost taxpayers money.
Last year, Connecticut prisons produced more than 35,000 pounds of produce – saving taxpayers $20,000 a year by putting produce back into the prison system. Additional food is donated to charities.
Related: The Problem With Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Tent City
“We give 25 percent of what we pick back to the community and that’s the most fulfilling thing, that I’m helping someone, because in my life I have taken in trouble so, to me, it’s almost like paying back a debt to be able to pick something and be able to give back to others,” Bernard said.
“We believe that everybody has a heart and everybody has a chance for transformation,” said Beth Waitkus, the director of the Insight Garden Program that started 10 years ago at San Quentin prison. “What happens with gardening is … they reconnect to themselves. They reconnect to their feelings. They reconnect to each other as a community, a small community in the prison, and they really reconnect to nature. And, I think that offers a huge opportunity for transformation when we reconnect to ourselves and to the natural world.”
“I’ve been in and out since I’ve been 15 and this is the first time I’ve done something like this. I can connect spiritually with something as simple as garden. … To me that was different,” said Rasheed, who has already served two years and has six years left on his term.
While Waitkus spends her time in San Quentin teaching inmates how to plant flowers, take care of soil and prune plants, she also keeps the connection strong once they leave prison. Nationally, the recidivism rate is more than 60 percent, according to the 2011 Annual Recidivism Report.
For garden prisoners at San Quentin, Waitkus said the return rate is less than 10 percent, and most other prison gardens report return rates in the single digits. In Connecticut, officials say not one of the garden graduates has returned.
“The garden program to me in San Quentin was really therapeutic because it breaks up the monotony of everyday life in prison and I also used to watch my mom garden, so it kind of brought me back to when I was a child, and it’s just a real calming effect in a real, not normal place,” said Kevin Williams who has been out of prison since 2012.
He now works for a group called Planting Justice, which gets jobs for released prisoners who have gone through the garden project at San Quentin.
“It feels great. And even when I was inside, people would ask me, ‘Kev, why do you seem so happy all the time?’ [It was] because you know, we’re blessed. We’ve got another chance to go home and get it right,” he said.
“What we’re trying to do here is to bring people together, find their inner gardener. If they’re successful and not committing crimes, we are indeed creating a safer, more humane society,” Waitkus said.
Gardening Tips: 5 T: Here are some gardening tips to help you
Gardening Tips: 5 Things To Do This Fall!
Details
Published on Wednesday, 23 October 2013 14:06
Written by EarthwormTec
Here are some gardening tips to help you prep for fall from EarthwormTec, an environmentally-conscious business seeking to reduce food waste via composting and sustainable garden practices.
Given the busy spring and summer season, we all might be getting a little tired right about now when it comes to our yard work. However, if you can muster up the energy to get out there you might save yourself a lot of work when next Spring arrives. Besides, the weather (especially, in Connecticut and the rest of the Northeast) has been absolutely gorgeous this October…what a perfect time to go out there and dig our fingers in the dirt!
Here is a top 5 list of Gardening Tips we recommend you try to do this month so you’ll be smooth sailing next Spring:
- Do make sure you are cutting back spent flower heads from infamous flowers known to re-seed (such as Brown-eyed Susans or Morning Glories).
These particular flowers are dropping a tremendous amount of seeds at this time of year. The seeds are also very winter hardy and come Spring, you will be throwing out your back pulling out all those new shoots.
You can also cut back some of your spent perennial flowers / shrubs in the Autumn or leave them if you want some winter interest (picture snow resting or icicles forming on your favorite evergreen Azalea, like ours below). Ornamental grasses are also very serene in the winter when the feathery seed heads are covered with snowflakes.
Some gardeners use “Preen” in the soil to stop seeds from germinating but at Earthworm Technologies we don’t condone the use of any chemicals in your land. Instead, we encourage you to use organic products or implement more preventative / sustainable methods. (Keep in mind, if you use Preen in any planters where you grow annuals from seed, you will be hindering the germination of those “good” seeds, as well as the bad ones you don’t want. Preen is not selective).
- Do harvest those seeds from your favorite annuals in the garden so you can enjoy them again next year.
Many annual flowers can be harvested – Zinnias, Marigolds, Cosmos and Celosias are among the easiest to harvest seeds from.
Make sure the flower has completely faded, turned brown and crumples in your hand – this is a good indication that the seeds will be ready to harvest. Pluck them too early and they’ll be too green (not ready) and won’t germinate for you.
Want to know another trick: We actually harvest some of our favorite Rudbeckias as we are walking around the garden. We then dig some seeds into the soil of our favorite spots and leave them there to overwinter. Poof – green shoots in the Spring!
- Do put those annoying dead leaves in your yard to good use – why pay good money to have them hauled off?
You are actually paying someone to get rid of something that is organic and very beneficial in your garden.
Either mow the lawn yourself (including the leaves) or tell your lawn guy to do it and let the natural decomposition process take over for the next few months…allowing the nutrients of those dead leaves to seep back into your lawns (the leaf mulch will also be a nice added buffer for your planters during the winter months).
- Do clean up those leaves and twigs in your flower planters!
Especially if you have any rhizome-type flowers (i.e. Irises). Some insects will overwinter or lay their eggs in the piles of leaf debris (especially moths and iris borers). They’ll continue to incubate there and eat their way through your plants in the Spring.
- Do compost all the dead leaves, flowers, twigs, branches, etc. (as long as they’re not diseased) that you are not currently using – you’ll thank us in the Spring!
You can have a very simple compost setup in your lawn for leaves / twigs. If you want to go a step further you can even compost those old Fall pumpkins, squashes and any of your family’s raw veggie and fruit scraps that are currently going in the garbage, with a small worm bin.
Don’t want to have worms composting in your house? No problem…If you live in Fairfield County, CT or Westchester County, NY – you can join our organic vermicomposting program and we’ll make it easy for you to be “Green” without all the hassle, for the nominal cost of a weekly Starbucks visit. In return, you also get 10lbs of pure organic ultra-compost free to use in your outdoor garden or on your indoor plants.
If you’re not in the area – we might have extra product to ship out to you. If you’re interested in any of these services or products, please contact us here and sign-up your email for our blog updates.
About EarthwormTec: Earthworm Technologies (“EwT”) offers an innovative, comprehensive Eco-friendly solution to the enormous food waste problem we have in America. We guide you in separating your pre-processed food waste scraps (i.e. raw veggie / fruit scraps, coffee grinds and filters, tea grinds and filters, breads, uncooked pastas, etc.) as well as newspaper / cardboard products. We then offer a weekly hauling program to pick up this waste. Utilizing an in-depth double composting process with the eventual help of thousands of our hardworking little earthworm helpers, we divert all that mineral-rich food waste scrap away from poisonous landfills and instead convert it into a superior organic and highly beneficial microbial quality soil amendment which we can then offer directly back to you as a lawn / shrub / trees / flower beds treatment program.
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Follow These Important Garden Tips Before The First Frost (VIDEO)
The days are getting shorter, you’ve brought your wool coat out of storage and you’re coming home to that fall scent of fireplaces. There’s only one more sign we’re waiting for before fully admitting that winter’s near: the first frost. Though we all have a little mental prep to do to deal with that, in the meantime, there’s a few things you have to do to prep your garden before that unpleasant morning surprise. (Can you tell we’re not “winter people” here?) Watch the video above to see the easy routine you should start…well, now.
Seasonal maintenance isn’t (too) much of a problem with these great houseplants.
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Formal vegetable garden in St. Paul is beautiful, productive
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St. Paul’s Highland Park neighborhood is a long way from the French countryside. But Eileen and Bill Troxel have managed to create a little slice of Provence in their back yard.
The couple’s French-style kitchen garden is so picturesque that even the tomatoes, which usually look straggly by late summer, are tamed and tied into attractive submission — suitable for an elegant dinner party.
In fact, dinner parties al fresco are almost a weekly occurrence during the growing season. The menu often features Eileen’s signature Tomato Tart, a French recipe made with heirloom tomatoes and Gruyère cheese, and meals are served on the massive harvest table that Bill built using cedar planks and metal pipe.
“It’s all about the tomatoes,” said Eileen of her favorite produce. “We wait all year for this.”
They’ve even hosted outdoor dinners in pouring rain, thanks to a canopy that can cover their entire patio. “We’ve sat out here when it was raining so hard you couldn’t hear the person next to you,” Eileen said.
“The meal must go on,” Bill quipped.
Eileen’s passion for gardening is intertwined with her passion for cooking and baking. “This is what I do. I’m in my kitchen all day,” she said. She loves creating recipes (her orange chocolate cookie took first place a few years ago in the Star Tribune Taste Holiday Cookie Contest), sharing recipes and whipping up gourmet treats for her family, friends and neighbors.
When winter forces her inside, she spends more time on her blog, Living Tastefully (www.livingtastefully.com), which she shares with her sister, an antiques dealer, and contributions from a couple of German friends.
Gardening was a tradition in Eileen’s extended family. “I grew up in the Amana [Iowa] Colonies; my mother and aunt lived next door to each other — they had a massive garden,” she said. “Summer was gardening.”
But she didn’t start gardening on her own until she and Bill, a recently retired 3M executive, moved from a townhouse in New Jersey to their home in St. Paul in the mid-1980s.
A huge, spreading maple tree made the yard too shaded to grow much food. But as Eileen got more immersed in culinary pursuits, she started longing to grow her own fruits and vegetables. “It went hand in hand,” she said.
In 1997, the Troxels took down some trees, and with more sun coming into their yard, they began planting vegetables. “We started with two beds and kept adding,” Eileen said. Bill provides the heavy labor, while Eileen does the garden design.
French inspiration
Eileen had a very clear vision for her garden. “I knew I wanted a formal vegetable garden,” she said. “I go to France quite a bit, and a lot of the old chateaus have them.” After one trip, she remembers saying: “I don’t want to go home. I love it here.” She returned to St. Paul determined to re-create that feeling in their back yard.
A former art student, she was committed to making the garden pretty as well as productive. “It’s all intuitive,” she said. “I just see everything a certain way.”
The Troxels now grow a wide variety of edibles, including peppers, beets, beans, zucchini, eggplant, strawberries, rhubarb, grapes and herbs. But they also grow some food plants primarily for their looks — like cabbage, of which they have many heads, both green and purple. “I like cabbage, but not this much,” she said, pointing to her garden. “It’s for color. Without the cabbage, it would look kind of boring.”
They also grow a few strictly ornamental plants, including roses and marigolds. Bill built an arbor to support the roses, although he suspects the roses are now supporting the arbor.
The Troxels use raised beds, trellises and braces to provide structure for their plants. “I’m constantly tying,” Eileen said.
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New Virtual Garden Designer Tool From the Suntory Collection Makes It Easy to …
Now professional landscape design help is just a click away with the new Virtual Garden Designer from The Suntory Collection.
Creating a home garden brimming with beautiful blooming color starts with a design plan. It’s okay to ask for help. What looks sweet in the garden center might not be the best color scheme in the garden.
Tokyo, Japan (PRWEB) October 23, 2013
Beautiful gardens abound on home shows and in gardening magazines—and that Eden of beauty can seem unattainable for the average home gardener. Just how do these experts make landscapes look so beautiful?
“Creating a home garden brimming with beautiful blooming color starts with a design plan. It’s okay to ask for help. What looks sweet in the garden center might not be the best color scheme in the garden,” says Evelyn Alemanni, an award-winning gardener, author and designer.
Now professional landscape design help is just a click away with the new Virtual Garden Designer from The Suntory Collection. Best yet, the free online tool lets gardeners “test drive” color and plant choices before making the purchase.
“When entering a garden center, shoppers are surrounded by explosions of color, and that can really be overwhelming,” says Alemanni. “Like a kid in a candy store, a gardener can go overboard, using the ‘some of these, some of those’ approach and mixing without much concern for matching.”
The Virtual Garden Designer is a simple drag and drop online tool that allows users to compare flower color combinations planted as a group in a particular area as well as across the entire yard.
“It can keep gardeners from making costly mistakes,” says Alemanni.
How It Works
The Virtual Garden Designer is a simple drag and drop online tool. Users first choose one of several planting areas in a virtual landscape, select up to three different flowers and then drop them into the selected garden spot.
A thumbnail of the garden illustrates those plant combinations. Want to see them? Just click OK to see how they will look fully grown in the landscape. “This is important because sometimes plants grow much bigger or smaller than you think,” warns Alemanni.
Clicking the clear button allows users to start over to create the combinations of plant color and forms again and again until just the right look is achieved. Proceeding in this way with each of the planting areas helps users design an entire “virtual landscape” step by step.
Design Tips
When it comes to creating a beautiful garden and yard, Alemanni is ready with expertise. She suggests using just one color in large swathes of the garden border or in garden islands. The Surfinia® Trailing Petunias, for example, create waves of spreading color. Choosing one Surfinia petunia color creates a bold and visually stunning garden.
Repeating that bold color in smaller plantings or in combination containers brings a cohesiveness to the landscape, Alemanni adds. The Virtual Garden Designer tool offers more than 20 types of plants from The Suntory Collection and many colors within each to create subtle repeating of color.
Lastly, Alemanni suggests going for broke by adding at least one large showstopper of a plant, either hanging in a container or growing up a trellis. The Sun Parasol® Mandevillas, which now come in a variety of colors and flower sizes, fit the bill with their somewhat tubular tropical flowers and glossy green leaves. Natural climbers, these mandevillas are stunning trained to a trellis or cascading from a hanging basket.
“The Virtual Garden Designer tool has saved me time in the garden center,” Alemanni says. “During the busy growing seasons, the tool helps me decide in advance what I am looking for, and that helps me get in and out of the store quickly. I have better things to do on beautiful sunny weekends in spring and summer!”
To access and use the free virtual garden designer tool online, find it at:
http://suntorycollection.com/popup/garden_design.html.
To learn more about The Suntory Collection of beautiful flowers, visit http://www.suntorycollection.com.
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Leland, Muppets to get new landscaping thanks to grant
The Muppets’ Kermit the Frog is famous for singing, “It’s not easy being green.” Perhaps he is feeling better about that color after a landscape architecture grant awarded to the city of Leland.
Mississippi State University was recently recognized by a $25,000 National Endowment for the Arts grant benefitting the city of Leland.
Officials with the university’s landscape architecture program and John C. Stennis Institute of Government and Community Development collaborated with counterparts in the Washington County municipality and its Jim Henson Museum to apply for an “Our Town” grant.
Joan Shigekaw, NEA acting chair, said these awards fund community projects designed to improve quality of life through creative placemaking. The grant will be used to develop the Jim Henson Creative Park, to be located along the shores of Deer Creek where the Muppets creator may have first imagined Kermit the Frog.
Joe Fratesi, Stennis project director; Jeremy Murdock, Stennis research associate; and Taze Fulford, MSU associate professor of landscape architecture, were instrumental in securing the selective grant. Of the 59 awarded communities, Leland is the only one in Mississippi and one of just seven first-time grantees with populations under 5,000.
“Being the land-grant institution that we are, it is our mission and our privilege to work with Leland and offer assistance in landscape architecture and community planning,” Fratesi said. “That expertise, combined with the institute’s ability to identify what resources the university can provide, is just another good example of the university engaging the community.”
MSU faculty and administrators have forged a long-term partnership with Leland leaders, he explained. After Stennis representatives completed a community assessment in 2012, Fratesi and Murdock invited Fulford’s landscape architecture design studio to assist the community by addressing the design-related challenges the assessment identified.
The students toured the community and developed ideas for a master plan. Students focused plans on the site along Deer Creek, and their emphasis on that area inspired Fratesi, Fulford and Murdock to apply for the grant, Fratesi said.
“When the students got there, they just sat down and started sketching ideas along the creek,” Fulford said. “They really fell in love with the site and came up with a lot of different types of design, from geometric to organic forms. The more we looked at the site, the more we all realized the creek is the lynchpin.”
Deer Creek is the center of Leland, Murdock said. Not only is the Jim Henson Museum nearby, a school is also quite close. Additionally, a floating Christmas parade has been held on Deer Creek for more than 45 years, and many residents fish there.
“Deer Creek links the entire town, and it’s the best spot for a community space–a space they can use and enjoy while creating a city-wide amenity,” he said.
Fulford said he is excited about the site’s potential to become an ecological park, which informs residents and other park visitors about the need to protect water.
“It’s going to be a great place, right in the heart of the community, to teach about why we need to protect water,” he said.
MSU’s long-term collaboration with Leland is special, Murdock said, because the residents there are invested in improving their community.
“There’s passion in Leland; people there know they can make a difference,” Fulford agreed. “They want to see their community improve, and when we find those little spaces that want to be special, that’s where we spend our effort.”
Fulford, Fratesi and Murdock recruited 1986 MSU alumnus Robert Poore, landscape architect, to develop a design for the Jim Henson Creative Park, Fratesi said. Poore is a principal of Native Habitats, a Flora-based landscape architecture firm.
Because community input will be critical, a series of design charettes, or collaborative planning sessions, will be held to establish the community’s vision for the park, Fulford said. Once the design is finalized, Fratesi and Murdock will assist Leland leaders in developing an implementation strategy.
Fratesi said the city already has set aside some money to supplement the grant award, but more will need to be raised.
Park features will include pathways, seating and a feature piece of art, he said. Also, an abandoned city-owned building could become an additional exhibit space for the Henson Museum.
“This project is about teaching and learning through research and service,” Fratesi said. “It’s all about making Leland a better place and making a difference.
“All of us want to see Mississippi communities succeed, and this has been another great project that’s making that happen.”
Photo project to highlight downtown pros, cons
It’s been said that a picture is worth a thousand words, which could describe a project under way by a local group to highlight good and bad appearance elements of Mount Airy’s central business district.
“Picture Downtown” has been launched by Mount Airy Downtown Inc. — an organization that recently replaced Downtown Mount Airy Inc. — as part of a visioning process that coincides with the city recently rejoining the North Carolina Main Street Program.
Lizzie Morrison, Main Street coordinator, has sought to recruit 36 local citizens to take photographs of various design elements within designated boundaries of the downtown area. Participants are asked to document a total of nine elements they either like or dislike, in preparation for an upcoming meeting geared toward downtown revitalization.
The Downtown Mount Airy Community Economic Vision 2018 Forum will be held on Nov. 19 at Mount Airy Museum of Regional History from 6:30 to 9 p.m. It will provide stake-holders including residents, business owners, property owners and community leaders an opportunity to participate in shaping long-range plans for the central business district.
That includes its appearance, Morrison said, with the photos now being taken to be a key part of the Nov. 19 session.
“They’ll serve as talking points, so they’ll be at the entrance of the meeting,” she explained.
This will provide meeting participants a visual display of various aesthetic elements that should be preserved, or perpetuated, as well as those which should be corrected or eliminated. At the same time, new ideas could emerge, Morrison added.
The design elements can include such features as buildings, alleyways, signs, trees, streetlights, benches, sidewalks, natural areas and others.
Murals And More
As an example gleaned from the pictures turned in so far, the coordinator said one photographer submitted a scene of a bare wall to make the case that it would be “a great place” for a mural, she said.
Morrison, who began work on July 1 and has a background in art, has said more public art, such as sculptures as well as murals, is one way to enhance the appearance of downtown Mount Airy. That would be in addition to traditional steps such as storefront and landscaping improvements.
The “Picture Downtown” project has met with enthusiasm from the 36 citizens initially selected to participate in the project, Morrison said.
“I haven’t heard back from everyone I’ve reached out to, but I’ve gotten a pretty good response,” she said, which includes about 20 people so far.
Anyone else who would like to participate can contact Morrison at 786-4511 for further instructions.
The photographs must be submitted by Nov. 12 in order to be printed in time for the Nov. 19 meeting, where they will be displayed anonymously.
Vision Is Goal
The objective of the Nov. 19 meeting is the development of a vision statement for the next five years for downtown Mount Airy.
Many agree that the city’s central business district presently is thriving, but that a more-organized approach is needed to sustain its vitality in the future and remain competitive with other cities — including doing a better job of branding itself.
That was among the reasons for Mount Airy rejoining the North Carolina Main Street Program, which it initially became part of in the 1980s before later withdrawing. More than 60 communities were participating in the initiative at last report.
The state program is designed to stimulate economic development within the context of historic preservation. This is accomplished through a comprehensive four-point approach to downtown revitalization developed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and used by the National Trust Main Street Center to assist communities across the country.
By rejoining the program, Mount Airy can receive technical assistance, program guidance, networking opportunities with other communities and additional services.
The Nov. 19 meeting at the museum seeks a broad spectrum of community representation in shaping long-range plans for downtown Mount Airy. In addition to business or property owners, this can include arts and cultural groups, the educational community, civic organizations, city public works and safety officials, real estate agents, bankers and anyone else with a stake or interest in the situation.
Participants will break into small groups to identify strengths and weaknesses and offer suggestions about what they would like to see downtown Mount Airy become on a long-term basis.
Reach Tom Joyce at 719-1924 or tjoyce@civitasmedia.com.