Barb, from Our Fair Home and Garden, saw a few antique windows a yard sale and set off on a path of creative genius. After gathering more windows from family and friends she set out to create her own greenhouse.  After seeing this, you might consider gathering and re-purposing some old windows yourself!

Congratulations to BBrooks Fine Flowers member Floral Art, CA.

What a fantastic floral dress and headdress they created for this special feature with Julia Louis-Dreyfus!  As seen  in Entertainment Weekly.

Yes!! We are a SF-based company!  Yes!! We are SF Giants fans!

Yes!! They did it AGAIN!!!!

The odds were against them… worst stats of any other team entering the play-off season… key veteran players out with injuries…. inexperienced  rookie players in their first world series….  It was going to take a few miracles…

Last night’s game had fans on edge throughout the night, but many were a lot more confident going into the fifth inning. Madison Bumgarner came back on just two days rest after Sunday’s 117 pitch complete game shutout. The 25-year-old relieved Jeremy Affedlt and got the final 15 outs throwing another 68 pitches.

“I’m amazed at what these guys did and the fact we won three times in five years, it’s not that easy, but, when you have a group of warriors like we have, they continue to just amaze you,” said Giants manager Bruce Bochy.

Bochy is now the 10th manager to win three World Series titles.

The future of the Wholesale Flower Mart may be in the hands of The City’s voters come next year.

On the heels of a pending sale of half the site at Brannan and Sixth streets, a group of flower vendors, florists, wholesalers and concerned citizens plan to file paperwork with The City today to get a measure on 2015′s ballot that would protect the San Francisco wholesale flower market from a planned tech office development.

With roughly 100 vendors, the more than 50-year-old covered market connects growers with buyers from across Northern California and beyond and is the nation’s second-largest flower wholesaler. In the early-morning hours, trucks delivering flowers unload their wares for sales inside the large airy building. To many, it is a San Francisco icon whose presence is part of The City’s fabric.

The San Francisco Flower Mart Protection Act will make it impossible for The City to give any planning exemptions, which might facilitate turning the site into a tech campus or other office space.

“We thought we’d take it to the voters of San Francisco,” said Patrick McCann, a vendor at the site. “The Flower Mart has a long history of being heard and it should stay here.”

Former San Francisco Mayor Art Agnos.

Public efforts to protect the Flower Mart began in August when a group of local politicos, including former Mayor Art Agnos and former supervisors Aaron Peskin and Quentin Kopp, held a news conference announcing their fight to save the more than 80 local businesses located there.

Those efforts were meant to notify the public about a pending sale of the site and keep working-class jobs in The City.

Despite such protests, on Sept. 11, a majority of the San Francisco Flower Growers Association voted to sell their half of the Flower Mart to Kilroy Realty Corp. The price, according to opponents, was $26.6 million.

Kilroy, which plans to construct a 655,000-sqaure-foot tech campus on the site, has promised to include flower sellers in any future space. But many fear they will be excluded, at worst, and left without a home for years of construction, at best.

As it stands, many long-term leases at the site expire at the end of the year, and no guarantees beyond vague promises have been given to the tenants, McCann said. Thus far, no communications have been made to tenants by Kilroy, McCann added.

Meanwhile, a lawsuit was filed Sept. 11 by David Repetto, a shareholder of the SFFGA, alleging that the association’s board of directors breached its fiduciary duties by secretly brokering the sale and merger of the SFFGA to Kilroy. It is asking for the court to invalidate the board’s actions.

Before the vote to sell, the SFFGA filed a proposal in 2013 for a 160-foot office building on the site and have until January to file a development proposal.

Supervisor Jane Kim, who represents the district, has also introduced legislation that would postpone construction of offices on land zoned for light industry and distribution until a full-fledged rezoning of the area is complete, a process still several years away.

Next steps for moving the ballot measure ahead include circulation of the petition to San Francisco voters in order to qualify for the ballot.

To read more, please see article by Jonah Owen Lamb from Sept 30, 2014 www.sfexaminer.com

A ward-winning contemporary artist and Syracuse University art professor Sam Van Aken grew up on a family farm in Reading, Pennsylvania, but he spent his college years and much of his early career focused on art rather than agriculture.

While Van Aken says that his work has always been “inspired by nature and our relationship to nature,” it wasn’t until recently that the artist’s farming background became such a clear and significant influence, first in 2008 when he grafted vegetables together to create strange plants for his Eden exhibition, and then shortly after that when he started to work on the hybridized fruit trees that would become the Tree of 40 Fruit.

German architect André Broessel, of Rawlemon, has looked into his crystal ball and seen the future of renewable energy. In this case it’s a spherical sun-tracking solar energy-generating globe — essentially a giant glass marble on a robotic steel frame. But this marble is no toy. It concentrates both sunlight and moonlight up to 10,000 times — making its solar harvesting capabilities 35 percent more efficient than conventional dual-axis photovoltaic designs.

Janet Fish, contemporary American Realist painter, was born in Boston and raised in Bermuda.

  Spring Party 

Birdcage and Daffodils oil on canvas 56″x 54″ 2009

Her father was an art history professor, her mother a sculptor and potter, sister a photographer.  And, her grandfather was American Impressionist painter Clark Voorhees.

Fish knew from a young age that she wanted to pursue the visual arts.  She said, “I came from a family of artists, I always made art and knew that I wanted to be and artist.”

A Janet Fish retrospective hosted by Huntsville Museum runs thru July 27, 2014.

From the rooftops of Washington D.C. to the schoolyards of New Orleans, the South is home to some of the country’s most innovative urban farms that are helping teach students about healthy eating, giving their cities access to local produce and eliminating blight from their communities.

Birmingham’s Jones Valley Teaching Farm, the South’s most dynamic urban farm, is investing in one of the South’s most beleaguered cities by empowering thousands of young students to change their live.  With vegetables.

They’re involved in every part of the process from growing to harvesting and even selling their produce at the downtown farmers market.

As seen in Southern Living magazine, May 28, 2014. 

Limes are used for nutrition, as medicine, and, for aesthetically pleasing accents.  But, have you noticed?  Limes have all but disappeared from your local grocer, corner store and flower markets.  Where have all the limes gone!

A case of limes used to cost as little as $30; prices have shot up to as high as $200. And the limes are smaller — golf-ball-size fruit that doesn’t produce much juice.

Mexico is now the world’s largest producer and exporter of limes, and provides some 95 percent of United States supplies. Generally, the lime harvest is smaller and prices are higher from January through March, but in November and December severe rains knocked the blossoms off lime trees in many areas, reducing lime exports to the United States by two-thirds. California, with just 373 acres, is now the largest domestic lime source — but it produces less than 1 percent of national consumption, and its season is late summer and fall, so it’s no help right now.

Other factors may also be squeezing the lime market. Since 2009 a bacterial disease that kills citrus trees, huanglongbing (HLB, also known as “greening”), has spread across many of Mexico’s lime-growing districts.

As a result of high prices and rampant lawlessness in some Mexican regions, criminals who may be linked to drug gangs are plundering fruit from groves and hijacking trucks being used for export.

All of this suggests an uncertain fate for limes, a fruit we’ve taken for granted for so long. This time the crisis is likely to be temporary. As new crops mature, prices should be back down near $30 by June, and there should be plenty of limes this summer.

Sources are NY Times and NY Post magazines.