a poster

SMS a query to a local weather station. Receive a reply with the temperature, humidity and noise levels of the spae. Decide if you want to go there or someone else.

Maybe a good place for a quiet evening is Khirkee and a good place for a drift is Chandni Chowk and and good place to sweat is Connaught Place?

an introductory graphic for the project

Often it is just a question of putting one up.
But after it is stretched a claim is made.
And accepted.
A claim to shade. A livelihood. Space on the street. Protection from rain.

And then in some months, it will get torn. And replaced. Or patched.
CANOPY scripts some stories in between

CANOPY is a series of temporary (flexible, mobile, sturdy), multi-purpose roofs for shops on Indian streets.

The first set of canopies are for tea-shops in Chandni-Chowk (New Delhi) and will attempt to have these features:

1. water collection (rain, dew, fog)
2. storage
3. marking (creating an identity for the tea-shop through art on the canopy)

Some drawings and sketches will be posted soon.

We talked about how each child will care about his plants, tried to gather some feedback about the process and discussed ideas for next time. I described the soil workshop to them and discussed the concerns behind it.

So anyway, not knowing much about the feasibility of using local soil, since the land is mostly muskeg, we brought two giant bags of potting mix and a wealth of seeds with us on the plane.  The captains (who had to load the plane) didn’t seem too impressed, but we were giving them about 500 CDN each for a two-hour flight, so we didn’t think too much of it.  The ages groups we were working with were 5-9 year olds and 10-12 year olds.  We found many empty water containers up there because although they don’t have much in terms of supplies on reservations in Canada, they almost all have a water treatment facility, so the design was really useful for that.   I made a kit for groups of four kids, containing a sawed container, seeds, popsicle sticks and arrows for marking, an 8″ by 8″ piece of cotton cloth for wicking and a step-by-step “how to” instructional page, so that they could figure out by themselves how to put it together.  Looks like they turned out all right, no?

We planted zucchini, chives, beans and radish seeds, and the radish seeds actually sprouted after only three days!  The zucchini and bean plants grew to over 4 inches by the third week, and the kids would run in and track the progress of their plants each day, balancing precariously on a chair so they could see better.  It was nice.  Even the staff at the school where we were running the program became interested in making their own, so I gave them some soil and seeds as well.  This year, the community is planning on building a greenhouse behind their school, and they said that it would be useful to incorporate the container gardens.  Here is a picture of the container gardening page from the “plant book” we compiled (now in their school library for reference):

overall, good design, thanks.  Pictures of the fully-grown plants, soon to come…

From a nearby flea market I managed to get some petis (wooden cartons used for transporting and storing fruits and vegetables. With a few modifications, the petis were usable as containers to grow plants in. We spread gunny bag at the bottom of the petis, put a mixture of soil and compost in it and then sowed the seeds.

The “Delhi Public Food Map”:

View Larger Map

Photos

From the nearby Qutub nursery, I requested the head gardener, Ram Shankar, to come over to the shelter and demonstrate and explain to us the process of sowing the vegetable seeds and preparing the seedlings. I am interested in seeing if I can get the children connected to the gardener community over the long term. I see a lot of potential there for exchange of knowledge and skills.

Later we started talking about making a map of fruit which the children had seen or eaten in the public spaces of Delhi. The children described jamun, banana, amrud and mango. They also described temples, gurudwaras where they go food for free on a regular basis. We worked on a map of many of these places on Day 5.

Day 3: get baskets, setup baskets, get containers made, talk to neighborhood gardeners, put audio recordings on the Internet

Read more about the workshop at http://st.ation.in/wiki/projects:invisible-farm

Today we talked about growing vegetables and why, „unknown“ friends and sharing, mapped places around their shelter where they can grow vegetables and learnt to record short audio narratives using audacity.

Mitti Chakkar (Hindi), Soil circle (English), exploring urban soil ecology

An effort to sample/archive soil from public spaces around Delhi, grow mustard plants (sarson) in it. Sarson acts as a phytoremediation agent and cleans the soil of toxins like Lead by storing it in its cells instead.

For a detailed description and find out more about the effort go here: http://st.ation.in/wiki/projects:soil-workshop

I will post some sketches from my note-book soon.

updated: September 8th, 2008