The Great Outdoors: everyone wants a piece of it.

The outdoor furniture boom is producing design that is anything but garden variety. Just as Padma Lakshmi and the Naked Chef made cooking sexy again, shows like the DIY Network’s Indoors Out and HGTV’s The Outdoor Room are making outdoor dining, bathing, working and living downright pornographic.

Some stats to consider: outdoor furniture imports reached $2.5 billion in 2011, up 8.7% from 2010. Outside furniture sales are expected to boost 21.4% by 2016.

Earlier this month, the New York Times cited a survey by HGTV and Casual Living magazine in which 87 percent of the roughly 5,000 Americans interviewed said an outdoor room in their homes was “important or very important.” An additional 15 percent said they were in the throes of making one.

Also per the Times:

In the $80 billion home furnishings industry, the market for outdoor furniture is “not huge,” said Raymond Allegrezza, editor in chief of Furniture Today and editorial director of its sister publication Casual Living. “The total value is $3.8 billion, but if you’re a retailer in a challenged economy, a $3.8 billion slice of pie is nothing to sneeze at,” he said. “People are actively going after it.”

Husk Outdoor designed by Patricia Urquiola for B & B Italia.

OK Lounger from Kartell.

Blu Dot’s Hot Mesh stacking chairs.  

Functional art/bench by Jim Drain for Cumulus Studios. 

Also from Cumulus, Rirkrit Tiravanija’s outdoor chrome bench. 

It’s hot outside and not cooling down anytime soon, at least if you’re a recreational furniture purveyor like B & B Italia, or alfresco functional artwork producer Cumulus Studios.

We suspect that a post-housing crisis reality check has a lot to do with it. Instead of valuing our houses for their market value, there’s been a definite shift towards venerating them as homes. Trending, too, is mainstream homesteading – and a renewed back-to-nature movement, one that starts at your back door.

Whatever the reason, we’ll take it. We’ll also take Patricia Urquiola’s luxe-woven Ravel series. Armchair backyard travel inspired by field experimentation in the Philippines.

Image: Pfieffer Lab/Plank Collection

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Because life is sexier when you grow things yourself.

Looking for that perfect mate to beekeep and raise chickens with? Kick things off with one of these pick up lines and you might be co-homesteading before you know it.

1. Your eggs are so big.
2. So what CAN you feed your chickens and better yet, what can you hand feed me?
3. Those wood shavings look so soft and comfortable, like a bed.
4. Are you as loud as your chickens?
5. Speaking of raised beds…
6. Your broccoli heads are so big!
7. So roosters are also called cocks? That’s funny.
8. I’ve never seen a Standard so big. Impressive.
9. That honey is thick and runny on your fingers. Mmmmm…
10. These mason jars fit perfectly in my hand. I bet you would too.
11. This compost soil is so dark and rich… like I like my men.
12. I’d like to raise your barn.
13. Can I interest you in some of my compost?
14. No one installs a fence post quite like you.
15. You smell as good as a bundle of lavender tied with twine.
16. I love making pickles, do you?
17. I bet we would brew good beer together.
18. Do you prefer Merlot or Cabernet? Because I think we should start making our own wine.
19. Is this farm table sturdy enough for me to throw you down on?
20. If you were a pea, I would gladly shell you on the back porch.
21. Do these plums feel ripe to you?
22. Can I strum my banjo and sing you to sleep?
23. Want to help me germinate my seeds?
24. That white linen summer dress you sewed yourself would look great on my floor.
25. If you were a berry, I would bottle you up as jam and enjoy you all winter long.
26. Want to make pies together?
27. My cast-iron skillet could really use some love. Can you help?
28. I’d like to make you my backyard bounty.
29. Your heirloom tomatoes are the juiciest I have ever tasted.
30. What’s your ideal harvest season?
31. You would be the perfect fruit of my labor.
32. I can only imagine what’s underneath that bee suit.
33. You just made me as red as a beet!
34. Why drive when you could ride on my handlebars to the farmer’s market?
35. What do you say to a little foraging in the woods?
36. I’d love to preserve this moment.
37. I’ll trade you a juicy cantaloupe for some of your cucumbers.
38. I want to LEED certify you!
39. I wish I could harvest you at peak season.
40. Your organic garden or mine?
41. You don’t look so baaaad standing there with all those goats.
42. When I’m canning with you, this urban blight just fades away.
43. I know this might sound cheesy, but I love everything artisan about you.
44. You’re like a sweet honeybee stinging my heart.
45. Our love could be like heirloom vegetable strong.
46. What do you say we get out of here and free range somewhere green?
47. You sure do know how to handle your chicken coop wire.
48. How about I wear these Carhartts and we plant seeds together?
49. Would you like to be served warm home baked bread with hand churned butter in the morning?
50. How big does your squash grow?

ALSO CHECK OUT:

Pick Up Lines for Jetsetters

Pick Up Lines for Minimalists

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Image: Zimbio 

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Channeling historical  propaganda posters in the name of modern day social progress. 

A long time ago, before food became so industrialized and corny, Americans expressed wartime patriotism through Victory Gardens. Kind of like freedom fries, with the exception that actual vegetables were planted during the two world wars to help feed civilians and troops. The government, private foundations, businesses, schools, and seed companies (Monsanto was busy in the production of sacharine and DDT at this time in history) all worked together to provide the necessary resources and instruction to help communities to grow food.

Posters and advertorials got the word out, and history tells us that it was a phenomenal success. Some 20 million Victory Gardens were planted during WWII, but popularity eventually waned. Activist designer Joe Wirtheim is hoping to renew that fervour, building on the momentum of the contemporary urban gardening and homesteading movement, with his project The Victory Garden of Tomorrow.

Wirtheim works out of a small studio in Portland, Oregon and creates graphic posters that recall old-time wartime imagery.

Posters ($14) are printed on recycled paper, hand pulled screen prints ($40) are printed on paper made in the U.S.A.

Also available in vintage flour sack towels, organic tee shirts, badges and postcards.

Look for Lustables daily at EcoSalon. 100% gorgeous green finds, and never sponsored. Submit your favorite to tips@ecosalon.com

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A weekly roundup of EcoSalon’s top stories.

Angelika Dreams Organic (A.D.O.) clothing is all about feminine essentials for spring infused by the works of Monet, but it’s also one of the greenest lines going. We caught up with A.D.O. designer Angelika Krishna for an interview on how she went from considering a denim line to a chemical free ready-to-wear line.

You’re so damn smart, aren’t you? Well, do you know enough about plug in or electric car technology to hold your own in a conversation? Brush up with A Glossary Of Car Terms to Recharge Your Thinking. You’ll be quizzed later.

You thought the sustainable world was filled with big green huggie bears and organic trees heavy with communal bounty? Well, sometimes, it’s not all what it’s cut out to be. In Bad Blood on the Home(Steading) Front, writer K. Emily Bond wants to know if “urban” homesteading’s reputation of being a crowd-sourced and friendly philosophy for living is being capitalized on. See what you think and don’t stop until you get to the heated comments at the bottom.

Frito Lay may be a natural at greenwash, but they’re certainly not green. In The Green Plate: Frito Lay, How Green You’re Not, columnist Vanessa Barrington writes: “Remember that corporations are in business to maximize their profits and everything they do is aimed at that goal. Though some corporations may do things that benefit some people some of the time, the ultimate goal is profits. Any advertising, anywhere, should be evaluated with a critical eye.”

Sex By Numbers columnist Abigail Wick was recently in Barcelona with a friend and caught up with some very attractive, innocent bystanders to ask them about (what else?) sex. In Sex by Numbers: El Amor en Espana: Seven Lovers, One Weekend, Wick collects her top seven favorite philosophies of love and we are left to fan ourselves…

Image: Moe

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ColumnWhere celebrity goes conscious.

Many of us have long lived off the grid. We grew up chasing prairie dogs through tall grass, wading in creek beds teasing giant crabs, and feasting on vanity cakes on special occasions. We learned to sew a patchwork quilt, play with a pig’s bladder, walk barefoot to school, make a button lamp, and turn blackbirds destroying our crops into vengeful blackbird pies. Sure, this living happened over a century ago. But to us, it’s real. This is because many of us grew up inside the books of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series.

From Little House in the Big Woods to These Happy, Golden Years, Wilder (1967-1957) captured her pioneer girl experiences throughout the American Midwest. Accordingly, many of her young readers have grown up as post-modern Lauras. How does this play out? We tap away on our laptops, sitting under ceiling fans going at full blast in 90 degree weather. Every other minute, we’re checking the news, taking a sip of cool, filtered, BPA-free water, and writing ourselves notes to remember to put out the recycling. Ten emails into the day, we might romanticize a time when our only connection to society required a three-mile walk into town for a sociable.

A post-modern Laura to the core, I love the idea of living off the grid, late 19th century style. To a point. Like, a fun point. I’ll diligently scrub my existence to make it as carbon-footprint-less as I can. I’ll use an outhouse despite a totally rational fear of errant raccoons. Urban homesteading and gardening are right up my alley. But Wilder’s “simple life” also involved near death from malaria, scarlet fever, and Native American massacres, with some bone-crippling poverty thrown in. It’s not so fun to confront an angry (and rightly so) Native American after you’ve illegally settled on his land because of your Pa’s addiction to Manifest Destiny.

Laura Ingalls Wilder

And then there are the politics of Little House. Wilder’s daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, was a highly successful writer and political theorist operating as an early 20th century proto-feminist. Lane, who died in 1968, traveled around the world as a freelance writer and was the first biographer of Herbert Hoover. Alongside Ayn Rand, Laura’s only child is considered one of the mothers of the Libertarian movement. Lane is said to have had a heavy hand in helping her mother craft the Little House series. This is particularly true with the writing of Little House on the Prairie, which captures the Ingalls expulsion by the government off the Osage’s land.

So was Laura Ingalls Wilder really the first green girl heroine of American literature? Or was she more a proto-politico espousing the rights of man’s dominance over the land? Would she secretly laugh at our green inclinations or embrace them like a bone-lined corset under poplin?

Wendy McClure

We contacted expert Wendy McClure to get some answers. McClure is the author of The Wilder Life: My Adventures in the Lost World of Little House on the Prairie. McClure takes us through her utterly delightful journey to recapture her childhood image of “Laura World” and what it meant and means to be a true pioneer woman. She travels through several Wilder landmarks and museums across the Midwest, sharing adventures with butter churning, hay twisting, and wheat grinding. McClure spoke with us about Wilder’s “off the grid” living, her possible Sarah Palinesque politics, and who would win in a cage match – Michael Landon or Charles Ingalls.

EcoSalon: A lot of people might romanticize Wilder’s “off the grid” living without really understanding the downsides of late 19th century frontier living, which included scarlet fever, locusts, and/or near starvation by endless winter blizzards. What do you think Laura Ingalls Wilder would have thought of urban homesteaders or urban gardeners?

McClure: I think she would have appreciated the trend. When she wrote Little House in the Big Woods in the 1930s and described all the self-sufficient things her family did—making cheese and butter and maple sugar, butchering hogs—it was with the recognition that those ways of living and making food were disappearing. You can even see the difference in the family’s lifestyle by the end of the series, by the time they’re living in South Dakota, 15 years later, they’re much more dependent on the railroad and store-bought meat. Today’s urban chicken coops and beehives would probably remind her more of the kind of farming she did as an adult more than her pioneer childhood. She was actually an expert at raising chickens and it helped launch her writing career as a columnist for a farm paper, The Missouri Ruralist, so I imagine she’d be thrilled to see people farming in new ways.

EcoSalon: Environmental issues are more politicized than ever. Considering daughter Rose Wilder Lane is one of the mothers of the Libertarian movement, do you think Laura Ingalls Wilder might have eschewed the modern green movement as “too liberal”?

McClure: I suppose it’s possible that with Rose’s influence, Laura would have a Sarah Palinesque sort of viewpoint, full of contradictions, appreciating the natural world while objecting to regulations that would protect it. Then again, she sure loved her trees—all those years of living on South Dakota prairie had to have helped her appreciate them, and when she was older she wrote Missouri Ruralist columns about the need to restore forests and find clean energy sources. Living on the frontier would have given her a firsthand knowledge of the effects of dwindling resources, so maybe she’d have a different perspective.

EcoSalon: Blizzards, tornadoes, and flooding creeks, as well as swarms of crop-destroying locust and blackbirds were common in Wilder’s books. And yet, when you read them, there’s a clear acknowledgment and love of the beauty of her surroundings. What advice, if any, do you think Wilder would give today to environmentalists trying to preserve this beauty?

McClure: I think the best advice she could give would have to come from more than a century of beyond-the-grave observation. It’s clear from the Little House books that she and her family tended to accept the natural world on its own terms, but like other pioneers, they sometimes misunderstood it, too. In South Dakota they tried to farm the land the same way they did back east, and they hoped that homestead claims dedicated to tree-planting would turn the prairie into a forest. Not sure whether Laura would have recognized the futility of these things during her lifetime, but I’d like to think she’d have plenty of wisdom in the longer run.

EcoSalon: You touch on the latent racism that runs through the books, with Caroline Ingalls’ terror of Native Americans to Charles Ingalls donning blackface for a minstrel show. And yet, in your recent interview with WYNC’s Brian Lerher, African Americans and Latinas called in to share how much they related to Laura Ingalls. Why do you think that is?

McClure: The books were written in a time that wasn’t as enlightened as ours, and the era they portray was even less so, so there are a few dismaying moments in the series. But they’re by far outweighed by the extraordinarily relatability of Laura Ingalls and her family. There’s something so vivid and immediate about the narrative that invites readers to really identify with Laura and inhabit her world.

EcoSalon: And finally, in a cage match, who do you think would win? Charles Ingalls or Michael Landon?

McClure: Charles Ingalls, definitely. Michael Landon was too much of a pretty boy, but the real Pa seems like he’d be scrappy.

The TV cast of Little House on the Prairie (1974-1983)

This is the latest installment in Katherine Butler’s column, Shade Grown Hollywood, where celebrity becomes conscious. “Shade grown” refers literally to shade grown coffee, a farming method that “incorporates principles of natural ecology to promote natural ecological relationships.” Shade Grown is our sustainable twist on Hollywood.

Author photo courtesy of Wendy McClure

The post Shade Grown Hollywood: Laura Ingalls’ ‘Wilder Life’ and the Modern Green Movement appeared first on EcoSalon.

A weekly roundup of EcoSalon’s top stories.

Like wearing statements on your chest? In The Best Graphic, Organic T-Shirts, we give you a plethora of opportunities to choose from. From small indie brands in the U.K., to names you know here stateside, we guarantee you’ll find something you like.

People ask us what we read to get so much interesting information. It’s not just our super powers that help us think outside the box, we’re also inspired by others. In Our Big Fat Conscious Reading List: The Best Websites Of 2011, we break it all down for you by our section sites. Happy reading!

Does the term “Homesteading” inspire thoughts of pioneers? Did you know you could become one no matter where you live? It’s true; keeping bees, chickens and a compost can be done with ease and in her article Making Homesteading Approachable, writer K. Emily Bond will give you some ideas on how to personalize it.

We’re not perfect humans, but we are what we eat. That might mean many horror-inducing things to you if you’re a Doritos freak or a cupcake hound. Consuming junk, or even semi-healthy foods in moderation, allows for toxins to build up over time. Is it time to cleanse? In her article Do Cleanses Really Work?, writer Libby Lowe explores not just different cleanses but why we think we need them.

“However you see the relative attractiveness of human bodies, it is a cultural idea, not an inherent truth, that women are more beautiful than men,” writer Starre Vartan says in her article The Beautiful Man.” A woman’s curves are used to entice consumers “to buy toothpaste and batteries,” because society dictates that “it’s just that women are so much more lovely, you see. Implied is the idea that if men’s bodies were somehow less visually unfortunate, their bodies would be used, too. I call bullocks,” says Vartan.

Image: deltaMike

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A weekly roundup of EcoSalon’s top stories.

It’s hard to compete with Chevrolet and those sexy new ads for the $32,780 Volt voiced by George Clooney, but Ford argues the game plan isn’t really about competition, but rather cooperation when it comes to its soon-to-be released Focus and other electric vehicles. In Ford Revamps Fleet For The Plug-In Revolution, we take a look at what Ford and other auto giants are up to.

We love our moms but sometimes we have to scratch our heads and ask “What the hell did she just say?” In Word To Your Mother, we celebrate all the weird things moms say that we love them for regardless.

Urban homesteading is more doable than you think. With more people vying to be self-sufficient and sustainable while living in cities, there are a number of ways to cultivate ones own food, and even keep chickens while not angering the neighbors. In Making Homesteading Approachable, writer K. Emily Bond shows us some ways to do just that.

Covetable, high end labels like Missoni, Burberry and Margiela have maybe never been within financial reach for you, but there are ways around that. Design loving bloggers and their latest low impact, low price projects are enabling more and more D.I.Y’ers to achieve exclusive runway looks. Writer Rowena Ritchie provides you with the information how-to in her article D.I.Y. Your Own Missoni, Burberry and Margiela.

Mother’s Day is this Sunday and you might be sending mom some flowers right? Think twice, the U.S. Labor Education in the Americas Project reports that in Colombia and Ecuador, the two largest cut flower exporters to the U.S., workers earn poverty-level wages. What’s more, 55% of women workers in Ecuador have been victims of sexual harassment, and 66% of all workers suffer from work-related health problems due to handling dangerous pesticides. Your floral purchase ensures they get more of the same treatment. Folding in from public pressure, flower giants FTD and 1-800-flowers, are offering at least five arrangements and three fair trade gift baskets for those of you that care. In This Mother’s Day, Say It Without Sweat Shops, writer Andrea Newell provides us with links to shop for mom consciously.

Image: Oakley Originals

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