peas in the podded and shelled

…has been on my mind since I first noticed some of those pods plumping up a few weeks ago, and this afternoon I have the gumption to hunt them all down one by one,  then to a stump in the shade to shell, and finally to the kitchen where they go into the the big red pot with everything else looking good today – like kale, parsley, broccoli…

LA sunset landing

…was a welcoming amber view back to the city last night, just able to glimpse my little mound of a hill out the window through the hazy amber veil as we made the familiar approach and decent across the endless sprawl segmented by the occasional freeway and trapped between the chain of mountains to the north and east and by the ocean to the south and west.

Enterprise sitting on a 747 at JFK

…was a pretty cool thing to see as we made our way down the tarmac and spied the space shuttle casually hanging out on the back of a tricked out NASA 747 transporter – which had delivered it from DC a few days ago – and where it continues to rest as it awaits travel to it’s new home on the Intrepid Sea & Space Museum in NYC.

communal chopping

…or F.O.O.D., was the title given to the final public event of our Princeton Student Colony, which consisted of a variety of activities throughout the afternoon, but the highlight must have been sitting in a circle on linen squares around a student-made communal chopping board, wielding knives of varying sharpness, chopping vegetables for stew while chomping on rounds of Weatherspoon Bread Company bread, sheltered from the unexpected rain by a decidedly bougie white rental tent – and finally the last act of the day was the levitation of our well worn orange dome HQ, facilitated by one of the architecture students who had unscrewed it from the platform and fabricated a perimeter tube allowing us to gather around, grab the ring and lift it up, making us realize how fragile the architecture of our classroom had been, and kind of blowing our minds as we carried it away to another part of the campus for fruit, tea, and singalongs.

The Lenard family photographer today by Andras Kare in the middle of their soon to be dug up and planted front yard in Wekerletelep, Budapest

…as the site for the Edible Estate Regional Prototype Garden #12: Budapest, Hungary to be planted over the weekend of June 2nd – commissioned by Blood Mountain Foundation and supported with a grant from the Graham Foundation – and check out this video by Réka Pigniczky of the search for the Budapest garden site at the local market.

veg on the roof

…in their crowded bed – lovingly raked, graded, laid out, and sprinkled with compost just this winter – is dusty green, bright green, lettuce green, strawberry green, onion green, pea green, kale green, calendula green, and a little yellow from the small flowers produced by the beautiful bolting broccoli.

geodesic triangle framed pine tree

…out the geodesic dome window from bed this morning is reminding me of Italian days.

Reconquérir les rues : Exemples à travers le monde et pistes d'actions, 2012

…or “Reconquering the Streets” by Nicolas Soulier is the great looking book about strategies for re-humanizing and re-claiming our urban roads, with examples from Europe and around the world - including a few Edible Estates pages – which just showed up in the mail this morning, but now it needs to come out in English so I can read it.

Sundown peas on the roof

…yes, yes, yes.

Piecing Together Los Angeles: An Esther McCoy Reader

…is the book by Susan Morgan that finally takes on the legacy of this influential woman – often overlooked in the supposedly manly era of testosterone fueled modern architecture – which I’ve been hearing about and anticipating for a while, and it just came out in March as the first book by L.A.’s East of Borneo…

This much-anticipated volume is the first collection of writings by Esther McCoy (1904-1989), a keen literary stylist and attentive witness to the birth of midcentury modernist design.

McCoy’s impressive writing life spanned sixty years and charted the progressive territory of American idealism. During the 1920s, she pursued her vocation as a writer and apprenticed with novelist Theodore Dreiser. In 1932, McCoy moved to Los Angeles where she wrote for literary journals, popular magazines and progressive broadsheets. Her short stories were awarded numerous prizes, featured in publications ranging from Harper’s Bazaar to The California Quarterly, and adapted for radio and television. After completing a wartime stint as an engineering draftsman at Douglas Aircraft, McCoy went to work as an architectural draftsman for R. M. Schindler. By 1945, her attentive writing had turned significantly to architecture and the design-driven optimism of postwar Los Angeles. Her essays appeared regularly in the Los Angeles Times, Arts & Architecture, Zodiac, Progressive Architecture, and Architectural Forum, and her 1960 book Five California Architects has long been acknowledged as an indispensable classic.

From fiction for The New Yorker to her seminal essays on new architectural forms, McCoy articulated the concepts and vibrant character of West Coast modernism as it was being created. This essential volume includes out-of-print essays, articles, and short stories, as well as hitherto unpublished lectures, correspondence, and memoirs that together illuminate the breadth and complexity of McCoy’s groundbreaking work. An introductory essay by writer and anthology editor Susan Morgan provides a lucid conceptual framework for understanding the development and diversity of McCoy’s writing and the region that inspired it.