We’ve got a new item to add to our garden wishlist:

What’s that, you ask? A Plant Cam! It’s a rugged, weatherproof digital camera that takes pictures of your garden at regular intervals. It stitches the photos together into a video, so that you have a neat little recording of your growing season. (You can imagine other uses for this too: capturing scenes of wildlife, construction projects, etc.)

Wingscapes has developed several versions of these cameras, including  motion-activated cameras for bird watching. You can see a number of photos and videos on their website. We’d like to see what birds and bugs are visiting our green roof too!

Until we have a Plant Cam installed, we’ll keep taking our own pictures and posting them to our Flickr stream. Come take a look at our garden and green roof over the past couple of years.

Images: Wingscapes

We have a water source on our rooftop that we use to water our garden, but we haven’t ventured into the world of rain barrels. 2011 might be the year, especially after discovering the beautifully designed Pure Raindrop and Raindrop Mini by Bas van der Veer:

The Pure Raindrop rain barrel has a watering can built in that fills up automatically and makes plant watering easy. When the watering can is empty, open the tap at the bottom of the Raindrop and refill it!

Here’s the Pure Raindrop exhibited at the Trend Garden in Appeltern, The Netherlands:

For urban and small space dwellers, van der Veer developed the Raindrop Mini, and it is just as beautiful as the original design:

It was designed specifically for use on balconies and in small gardens, and it comes in a variety of colors (shown here with the designer):

Did you know rain barrels could be so sleek?! Neither did we.

Images: Bas van der Veer
via Inhabitat

One of the new initiatives of the Green Team for 2011 is to compost. Although we’ve been composting our food on a small scale for awhile, one of our colleagues has always taken the waste home to her own compost pile. Now we’ve got this terrific new tool, a Nature Mill composter, for helping us compost our food scraps quickly and turning it into soil that we can use for our rooftop garden.

We can lift the top lid and throw food waste in there anytime, and an automatic motor mixes, heats and aerates it, eventually turning it into soil, which it deposits into a lower chamber with a pull out bin.

What we like about the composter is how quickly it breaks down the waste into compost and that it composts dairy, meat and fish, in addition to the more traditional items like fruit, vegetables and coffee grounds. And, of course, no worms or bugs necessary!

We’re just getting the hang of this – trying to get familiar with what we should be putting in it, remembering to put our lunch waste in it every day – and we look forward to using the soil for our garden this spring and summer. We’ll keep you posted on our progress!

Do you compost at home? Have any composting tricks to share with readers?

And, how green is your workplace – does your office have eco-friendly practices? We’d like to hear! Please let us know in the comments below.

You can learn more about Nature Mill composters from their website.

We’re only weeks away from getting our hands in the dirt and planting our rooftop garden—we’ve already cleaned it up and have starter plants of lettuces, dill and radishes in our kitchen. We’re also working with the Freylinghuysen Arboretum to source native and local plants and to help us plan for three seasons of planting.

We took advantage of the warm weather last week to clean up our planters.

Our lavender and chives are thriving already.

And so are our strawberries!

This compost bin is a very happy addition to our gardening arsenal. We have a smaller compost bin in our staff kitchen which we empty into our rooftop bin frequently. In addition to our food scraps, the Dodge Foundation uses compostable plates, cups and napkins which we can tear up and stick in our bin.

Right now, the rest of our green roof is growing beautifully. The color of the sedum is spectacular.

I’ll share more pictures as this year’s garden grows. In the meantime, if you want to take a look at last year’s garden and green roof photos, you can find them on Flickr.

While we’re on the topic of green roofs and gardens, below is an interesting video from the Guardian on green roofs in Sheffield, Yorkshire, UK which I saw on Twitter via our friends at grist. (Follow grist on Twitter).

Here’s a clever idea for small space gardening from Re-nest using recycled soda bottles:

From CRAFT, you might find these best easy garden tips helpful:

And The Crochet Dude helps you plant your garden in an easy grid:

Excited to get your hands in the dirt? What are you planting this year?

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Tomorrow we’re cleaning up (composting!) the remnants of our garden, and we’ll be talking as a group about the lessons we learned from our first year of urban gardening as well as planning for what we’d like to accomplish next year.

For me personally, it was such a treat to watch the green roof grow this year, to pick fresh strawberries and cherry tomatoes at lunchtime, and to see the bees and butterflies come to our flowers. And there’s nothing so restorative during the busy work day than to eat lunch in the sunshine,  surrounded by the trees, flowers and grass—one floor up!

Here’s a look back at our green roof this first year in our new offices, starting with what it looked like before it was planted (November 2008) to the present. Pretty remarkable, don’t you think?

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Dodge has announced its new guidelines. Please visit our website for full details.

We want to connect with you! Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook (where you can see more garden and roof photos).

Try this on for size: according to a recent article in the Guardian, “More than 98% of supposedly natural and environmentally friendly products on US supermarket shelves are making potentially false or misleading claims.” Hm. Gives you pause, right?

Second, here’s an interesting article from the New York Times about incorporating an agricultural component into planned subdivisions – access to locally-grown produce, wholesome family activities at the farm, etc. – in an effort to rethink the types of communities where people want to live.

And last, some updated pics of our garden. The flowers (and dill!) are taller than us, the zucchinis are growing like mad, and we’re about to have tomatoes coming out of our ears!

This was the view just three weeks ago:

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Did you see the recent article in the New York Times about rooftop gardening and the movement to replace traditional roofs with green roofs? Not only does a green roof offer many environmental benefits, it also provides an opportunity, especially for people in urban areas, to grow their own food on a larger scale.

Paula Crossfield (pictured above) persuaded the board members of her co-op in New York City to put a 400 square-foot garden on the building’s recently renovated roof.

Crossfield says that the rooftop garden helps inform her work: she writes a sustainable food blog, Civil Eats, for the Times. See this interesting and useful post about sustainable food blogs she published on Mark Bittman’s “Bitten” blog.

We’re experimenting and learning here at Dodge with our own green roof and garden.

So far, the roof and garden look spectacular (thanks in part, I think, to unseasonably cool and wet weather). It will be interesting to see how the garden performs in the hot August sun.

Take a look at some current pictures; the swiftly growing grasses in the background are an easy visual indicator of the roof’s progress.

Sunflowers and zinnias are getting tall. We’ve already started harvesting herbs.

Zucchini! I never noticed before how growing zucchini looks like blowing up balloons to make balloon animals.

For comparison, here’s what the roof and garden looked like a couple of weeks ago.

Stay tuned throughout the summer for garden updates.

Top photo: Robert Wright for the New York Times

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We’ve talked a lot about our three-story biowall on this blog and on our website – that it is a central aesthetic feature of our new office space, and how it embodies the connection between human health and the natural world.

It’s quite a privilege to walk past it each day and to hear the sound of the water trickling down the wall. We marvel at its beauty and its clever design, as it efficiently and naturally filters the air we breathe.

In fact, some visitors come to our office just to see the wall and learn how it works.

Lately, I’ve seen some other interesting examples of bringing nature indoors.

If you are interested in your own vertical garden, for example, ELT Living Walls sells kits that you can install in your home. How about one for your home office or kitchen, like these?

Check out ELT’s terrific photo gallery here.

Greenworks, based in Stockholm, recently exhibited their concept for a self-watering, mobile plantwall at the International Contemporary Furniture Fair. How would you like one of these for your home?

Also a prototype, this bathmat designed by Nguyen La Chanh of Switzerland is made of a variety of mosses planted in a type of foam called plastazote. The mosses get watered as you towel off from your shower or bath.

small stump + studio choo is clearly thinking about our connection to nature, with its “Outside Inside ” print:

From another Swiss designer, here’s the “Growing Chair” by Michel Bussien. The chair sits on top of a rolling planter with willow trees growing into each of the chair’s legs and Russian vine wrapping around the willow branches to fill out the greenery.

(Ok, this is art, and it’s not meant to function as a real chair).

And just for fun, take a look at the website gallery of Patrick Blanc, who pioneered the Vertical Garden concept (for both indoor and outdoor installation) and has created many living walls, especially in Paris, including this, the Musee du quai Branly:

Here’s an extra-curricular project we’re excited about at Dodge: our rooftop garden.

We planted our containers two weeks ago. We filled them with herbs (sage, rosemary, dill, parsley, cilantro, basil), flowers (zinnias, dahlias, sunflowers), strawberries, squash, and several kinds of tomatoes, including the Ramapo – the famous Jersey tomato that time almost forgot. Many of the plants came directly from Rutgers’ own greenhouses.

Two weeks later, our plants are growing like mad (note how the grass in the background has grown too).

Our flowers are blooming:

We can see our first squash:

And our first strawberry!

We’re thinking of this year as an experiment, to see what will grow, what will withstand the summertime heat and what will not. Stay tuned: we’ll keep showing the garden’s progress and sharing what we’re learning about our urban gardening experience.

How about you? What’s in your garden this year? Did you do anything different – whether in response to the economy, the increased awareness of the benefits of growing your own food, or some other reason?

What’s unique about it?

It’s made of wood beams from the former Epstein’s department store, which previously existed on this site. The beams were identified and salvaged by CitiLog, a New Jersey-based firm which specializes in reclaiming and recycling wood, such as trees knocked down by storms, or wood from soon-to-be-demolished buildings.

After Citilog removed the beams from the site, they sent it to Mifflintown County, Pennsylvania, where an Amish group repurposed the wood into two decorative woods walls for our office.

As the folks at Citilog will tell you, building material reuse diverts tons of waste from landfills and reduces the amount of raw materials that must be extracted and processed for use in construction.