This week’s constant rainfall conspired to keep me indoors for most of the week. Lacking the ability to do any actual gardening, my obsessive geek brain quickly went into project mode, creating a project that is completely and utterly unnecessary, yet successfully tricks myself into thinking that I am actually doing something productive. Thus, project “Epic Garden Signs” had begun.
I arbitrarily decided that what our garden was missing were signs identifying the plants growing in each row. Simply sticking the empty seed packet on a stick wasn’t an option. I needed a project. I needed something decidedly more complicated, so I promptly got to work trying to figure out how to make a garden sign interesting. Simply writing out the name of the plant in an interesting font wouldn’t have held my concentration, being that I have the attention span of a gnat. Not to mention, such a project lacked the nerdy flair that these signs needed.
Sweet Korn
After getting bored with actually thinking, I settled on creating signs that used pictures from pop-culture to communicate the name of the plant, rather than words (because language is too mainstream). At first, this was easy: Mr. Potato Head for the potatoes, “The Onion” logo for the onions. However, this became decidedly more difficult with lettuce and watermelon. It seems that there is no pop-culture equivalent that correctly communicates the identity of lettuce (try using that out of context, I dare you). Therefore, I picked the most interesting picture that showed up in a Google search (“Watermelon Death Star“, and “Head of Lettuce“).
Lando effing Calrissian!
This process hits a snag when you search for “funny cucumber” images. Therefore, I decided to use the phrase “cool as a cucumber” to justify using the head-shot of geek culture’s coolest smooth talker, Billy Dee Williams (a.k.a. Lando Calrissian from the original Star Wars trilogy). Although, to be honest, no justification is necessary. I mean it’s Lando effing Calrissian! Besides, It just so happens that we plan to plant our cucumbers directly behind our watermelon, making for an absolutely awesome coincidental perspective shot of Lando making his run on the Death Star.
Marigolds are to deer what Fire Flowers are to Koopa Troopas
On each sign I placed a qr code, linking to the Wikipedia article about that particular vegetable, making it possible for to get answers to almost any question I have about the plant by simply waving my smart phone over the sign. For the uninitiated, a “qr code” is essentially a 2-dimensional bar-code. Where a bar-code can only store a short set of numbers (i.e. a serial number), a qr code can carry an entire web address. Stores, such as Best buy, place them on their product displays, instantly linking shoppers with online reviews with a simple swipe of their smartphone.
Finally, I placed a progress bar on the bottom of each sign, because a progress bar always strangely makes watching a slow process more compelling. In other words, staring at a rectangular plot dirt becomes more interesting when I look at it as my sprouts slowly leveling up.
I’ll leave you with a few more pics. Next step: Planting: Check… and Broken Hoes.
Black Eyed Peas
Mr. Bean can't wait to plant the beans
Lando making his run on the Watermelon Death Star
The garden so far
The Geek's Garden 