10 great garden ideas _ The Chicago Tribune photo gallery isn’t fancy, but it shows a bunch of do-it-yourself garden designs.

Garden is a seedbed for green cosmetics – A hand-tended, German garden provides the raw ingredients for an eco-conscious line of cosmetics touted by Hollywood-types as the bestest make-up evah. Interestingly, the company started focusing on herbal remedies.

Organic garden uses every sustainable trick – This eco-savvy garden shows how sustainable, organic gardening can look fit so seemlessly into conventional landscaped neighborhoods that you would never know it’s “green.”

Back to the garden – Author Michael Pollan suggests we all dig up our yards and garden not just for pleasure, but to sustain us in the “calamity to come.” He believes growing our own food we will make a bigger impact on slowing our destruction of the planet than the smaller things we are already trying.

The incredible, edible front lawn – Through the Edible Estates project, the Rodriguez family received a grant to plant a front-yard garden to feed their entire neighborhood. This is an amazing concept, and I really hope someone will create a foundation to help more people convert their lawns to vegetable gardens.

With a high-profile story in this week’s gardening section of The New York Times, urban agriculture has hit the mainstream media big time. With food shortages and rising food prices, it’s no wonder people are taking to the streets (or empty lots, as it were) and finding a place to grow not just what they need, but also a little extra to feed their neighbors. It’s good business that’s good for everyone.

The Times article follows a couple who moved from Jamaica to the rough-and-tumble Bronx. They, along with many other city dwellers looking for a way to save money and have a source of fresh produce, turned a once-vacant lot into a verdant, veggie-and-herb supplying plot. The couple now has several gardens around the city, where they grow vegetables and herbs for their family and to sell at market.

This market-garden-in-the-city trend accompanies an upswing in the number of people growing in community gardens, joining CSAs, and just plain gardening in their own backyard.

For more information about starting your own market garden or more about successful urban agriculture, check out:

• Growing for Market – News and advice for market gardeners. Currently, you receive the special edition “Extending the Season” with your subscription.
• Path to Freedom – Urban agriculture at its best, Path to Freedom is a family-operated urban homestead that offers outreach programs and resources, along with a row-by-row account of life on the urban farm in their blog.

I’m starting a new feature called Quick Links, where I’ll gather a few links about a topic for your reference. First up is edible landscaping, a great choice for folks with little space who would like to have plants that provide more than just pretty flowers or foliage.

• Design and Maintaining Your Edible Landscape Naturally by Robert Kourik – I’ve added this book to my Wish List because it looks as though it has a lot of information about designing your own edible landscape, including comparisons of different plant varieties and color pictures of example landscapes.
• Edible Landscaping and Gardening by Ben Sharvy – Speaking of plant varieties, Ben Sharvy has an excellent list of suggested edible plants which includes pictures and descriptions. I like that he included perennial herbs in the mix, since that’s my main focus right now.
• How to Landscape with Edible Plants by Marion Owen – Marion Owen offers excellent design tips for edible landscaping, including suggesting using a fruit-bearing shrub as a hedge rather than the typical privet and replacing dead or dying trees with a fruiting variety.

I love how-to sites that have so much information you feel a little overwhelmed. Sustainable-Gardening.com had me wishing for more time to look through all the helpful articles about plants, low-maintenance gardening and sustainable gardening methods.

Sustainable-Gardening.com comes to us from Susan Harris, a gardening coach who recently appeared on CBS This Morning to discuss garden coaching and how it works. Susan also blogs at the always-informative GardenRant, a daily stop on my blog-reading rounds. While Susan lives and gardens in the Washington, D.C. area, she provides non-zone-specific information throughout Sustainable-Gardening.com.

One of the things I love about Sustainable-Gardening.com is its ability to grow from reader input. On GardenRant, Susan asked for readers to share their site URLs, relevant blog posts or comments, and a list of favorite books and links, too. As Susan said, she hopes this information will expand the conversation, while making Sustainable-Gardening.com an even better tool for learning about sustainable gardening.

[screen capture image of Sustainable-Gardening.com]