Community Garden Build: Day 1 (Photo Dump)

Obviously a great deal of attention went to the construction of the pergola. I'll have more detailed photos when the build is over.

Mike McGrath @ NCC

I know we have (or had, before we became such lazy bloggers) a number of local readers—so I figured I would share this bit of news that Our Friend Ben passed along from The Morning Call:

On May 10, McGrath will partner with the Greater Lehigh Valley Chefs Association to present a program on small-space gardening. The talk, ''Grow Your Own Kitchen Garden Goodies,'' is at 6 p.m. in Northampton Community College, Bethlehem Township.

''In the Lehigh Valley, there's no excuse for not growing food in your garden nine months a year,'' says McGrath, who in February was eating lettuce grown in his garden. ''The gardening season is not June to August, as many people think.''

Should be a good presentation. And there's food! Can't beat that.

Swing Bees

On our way back from a day at Musikfest we walked by a little community garden. Their space is along the fence of a neighborhood playground. The garden is about four feet deep and half a city block long. We hung out and talked with one of the volunteers and she said that the garden runs on a pretty lax policy of plant what you want, pick what you want. The whole set up is simple and kept up well, but what really got our attention were the number of honey bees and the incredible sound of a neighbor practicing the sax.

Musikfest

It's Musikfest here in Bethlehem. This is actually my first time experiencing the week long shindig and I must say that it is pretty damn awesome. In attendance at the festival they have some pretty big names playing at their larger venues, but the real gems are the not so big names with incredible talent who sometimes don't get a stage at all. The video below is a guy who's shtick is called Cast in Bronze. He made this four-ton contraption and I believe it's the only one of it's kind. Needles to say, I was impressed.



The real surprise of the performance came at the end of his gig and unfortunately we didn't get it on video. So this guy has this whole quite medieval thing going, like he's a monk or from Cirque du Soleil, but then he dropped the bomb and spoke. I kid you not, the cat sounds just like Comic Book Guy. The contradiction was so intense I almost started to drool from laughter.

Buy Local

We have a great little book shop in our city—it's actually the oldest continually-operating book store in the world. Yesterday, when we walked into town to order a few books, we realized that we ought to be blogging about some of the locally-owned businesses nearby.

The ease and convenience of shopping at independent businesses is kind of new to us here, as our previous abode was in the middle of a strip-mall wasteland (except for our favorite brewery and book store). Now, we've got a completely opposite situation—the chain stores are actually more out of the way and annoying to get to, which is no loss for us. Stay tuned for more posts about cool places in our neighborhood.