This berm was built from river rocks, broken concrete and pieces of wood. It is planted with a mixture of ornamentals and edibles.

It’s planting season here in the PNW and on my travels through Portland I’ve been seeing raised beds popping up like dandelions. This trend makes me very happy—the fewer lawns and more tomatoes, the better.

This curved raised bed is constructed of “urbanite” (found broken concrete) and holds asparagus, onion, lettuce, chard and sugar snap peas which are grown up an old cyclone fence gate.

Wooden raised beds are neat in appearance and function well, but the expense of a raised bed constructed of cedar or teak can be a roadblock for some people wishing to grow vegetables. But it need not be. The primary purpose of a raised bed is to increase drainage and to help heat the soil. If the aesthetic of a wooden bed isn’t necessary to your landscape design, mounding soil up about 6 inches (called an “open mound” or “unconstructed bed”) or using found materials—rocks, old broken concrete, large wooden branches etc.— to create a raised bed does the job just as well. (Treated, painted or stained wood should never be used due to the danger of chemicals like arsenic leaching into your soil). Freeing yourself of lumber also allows for more interesting and sometimes more efficient bed shapes, such as a keyhole bed.

A keyhole bed takes up less room in your yard than rectangular beds that require more space for the rows between the beds. I find keyhole beds and curved beds to be a nice fit in many gardens and their shapes flow and guide the garden visitor through your yard more naturally. People tend to plant rectangular raised beds in monoculture rows — all corn in one bed, all tomatoes in another and so on. Adding a curve to your bed and treating your vegetables as ornamentals or planting them with ornamentals is both beautiful and better for pollination and pest control since the pollinators and other beneficial insects will be drawn to you food crops because they are adjacent to a wider variety of flowers. You can find a good list of ornamental plants that benefit your vegetable garden here.

This is a keyhole style mounded bed. The branches used as a structure for the beans have been in the ground for 4 seasons and are still sound.

I have nothing against rectangular wooden raised beds. I have five of them myself and if tall enough they can make gardening more accessible for people with mobility limitations. To me, though, the blurred lines between food production and ornamental plantings are where my garden is the most interesting. After all, it’s not what you plant in that matters, it’s what you plant — and thay can be achieved in any kind of bed.

A propos of nothing (except, perhaps Nau’s new Cinder colorway in men’s and women’s shirts for spring), visit Sissyfish and check out the great Red Photoset. From surfboards to Star Trek, Stumptown Coffee to Olle Lundberg:

See the entire photoset on Sissyfish.

[For this, the second installment of The Thought Kitchen's ongoing conversation about design, Josie sat down with Nau designer Peter Kallen to discuss the finer points of the Succinct Trench. For More of The Design Eye, check out last month's inaugural post, on the Lightbeam Jacket. —Ed]

Josie: So tell us about the Succinct?

Peter: Ok, well, just so you know, only the Succinct Trench for women is new this year—the Succint Trench for men is so genius that we didn’t change it. When we find something we like, we run with it! But they’re both inspired by this use of new technology: the lightweight 2.5-layer recycled polyester fabric. The reason why we chose 2.5 layer is the fact that it’s waterproof, it’s breathable, but it’s really light. You can compact it, compress it, take it with you: it packs down to the size of a small cantaloupe.

What we decided what we wanted to achieve with this was a trench with the silhouette of a longer length coat, something not unlike what you would see back in the Quadorphenia, mod scooter days.

Josie: ???

Oh, you know the old longer length jackets they used to wear on scooters? That whole ‘mod’ movement? These jackets take on that kind of role, but with new technology. They’re a very refined, modern approach to a trench that’s not trying to be so stuffy or uptight but a bit more spirited and on the move. And that’s why the 2.5 layer fabric was used—the fact that you can stuff it into your bag or your pack or whatever. And it’s kind of cool that while this fabric performs really well in any kind of condition, and it has this really cool style. It’s just an opportunity to make a silhouette that fits really interestingly into your wardrobe: the trench style allows you to be really professional in it, but you can use it for other things too.

We wanted to make something really precise and pointed in this versatile way.  Use the cues that it’s a trench, and then keep it vague in the sense of how you would interpret its use in your wardrobe. It becomes really versatile in that way.

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In addition to working for outdoor brands, fashion companies and a couple of his own labels, Nau designer Peter Kallen has started a garden store, run a snowboarding business and ridden professionally. This unusual resume is reflected in the unexpected sources he draws on for inspiration, from art to architecture to the shapes that wind sculpts into snow.

Recently, Peter sat down with Off The Grid to talk about his approach to design, and how it informs pieces like the new Lightbeam Jacket, a lightweight windbreaker in one of our most versatile, 100% recycled polyester, fabrics.

Off the Grid: What other areas of design, outside of the worlds of fashion and outerwear, do you look to for inspiration?

Peter: I’m attracted to the same things in a garment that I am in a building or a space: from the Bauhaus movement through the modernist movement in the 50s through today, I’m attracted to architecture that reflects a confident sense of what you actually see in nature. That’s what good design is ultimately about for me: people who can mimic the natural world and not make it feel forced. Andy Goldsworthy and his landscapes; Steven Holl’s beautiful buildings that invite people both inside and outside; the amazing things Peter Zumthor does with concrete. What I see in their work is that it reacts to nature. It’s like when you go out on a snow day and you see these cornices hanging on the edge: the tension in that moment, it feels dangerous and it feels inspiring. It’s the placement of things that creates that tension and invites you in.

OTG: So how do those ideas carry over into a design like the Lightbeam Jacket?

Peter: I think there’s something really great when you put just enough features and deal with enough of the elements that make up a jacket that they become elements of design. The fabric in the Lightbeam Jacket is the same fabric we use in the Lightbeam Shirt or the Chrysalis Dress: it’s a wonderful recycled fabric with a very pronounced ombre stripe that gives it this optic of dimension on the surface. But it has so many horizontal lines that if you ran a straight, center front zipper up it, it would feel way too rigid. So on the men’s jacket, we don’t run the zipper right up to the chin, but Read More »