via news.opb.org
Thanks Todd Mundt at Mediavore
"Two women are running a rototiller, breaking up the dirt to plant fall crops. But this isn't a field in the country - it's a front yard in Southeast Portland.
The Sellwood Garden Club grows more than 200 varieties of crops, and sells to several local restaurants, using just a few dozen front lawns.
Co-founder Marie Richie got the idea from outer space.
Marie Richie: "The Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence inspired my garden you could say."
Now, bear with me here. Back in the late 90s, scientists were sorting through telescope data, looking for a message from another planet. But they had more data than their computers could handle.
So ordinary people volunteered to let their computers crunch the numbers at home.
Sadly, researchers didn't find an alien signal. But they did show how this system, called a distributed network, could work."
It's starting to build - networks of gardens that aggregate into scale.
