Greenhouse

The township supervisors have voted unanimously to restrict residents from building commercial greenhouses on properties of less than 10 acres. James J. Garrity, township solicitor, said the new ordinance, which takes effect immediately, was needed because two residents wanted to build two large commercial greenhouses next to homes. "We don't want a huge greenhouse on a real small lot," he said at the Wednesday night meeting. The vote was 3-0. Garrity said the supervisors reduced the restriction from 25 to 10 acres after James Boswell, who owns a nursery on Kriebel Mill Road, complained at the July hearing.

Last winter brought double joy to Franklin and Barbara Shores - their first baby arrived, and they completed a greenhouse. By profession a conservator of works of art on paper, Franklin Shores has become a gardener by avocation. Encouraged by a neighbor, who had developed a garden on the rooftop adjacent to the family's Philadelphia house near the Italian Market, Shores has caught a bad case of gardening fever. Frustrated by the shortness of Philadelphia's gardening season, Shores, a compulsive Mr. Fix-It-and-Build-It, decided it was time to turn this into a year-round activity by building a greenhouse.

The owners of Linvilla Orchards in Middletown Township plan to ask for a variance to allow the construction of a 14,000-square-foot greenhouse on the property. The Linvills want to grow plants, including pansies and primrose, in the greenhouse and sell them. Linvilla Orchards already sells Christmas trees and poinsettias. Linvilla Orchards, off Knowlton Road, is owned by Paul and Peg Linvill. Steve Linvill, the owners' son, said he also hoped to use the greenhouse as part of the schoolchildren tour program.

An early impression of the Greenhouse was that it was one of those Main Line restaurants that banked on a two-martini fog to keep diners from being too picky about what they found on their plates. The ambience has always been just dandy, however. Flowers, ferns, glass walls and a pretty patio set the scene for romance and/or relaxation. They still do. But now, there is the bonus of decent food. When competition proved that you could attract and keep crowds with good eats, the Greenhouse became an Aliza Green house.

A small solar greenhouse that was built behind the borough school nearly 20 years ago by the former shop teacher, Cleve Bryan, has matured enough to have its own curriculum. The 15-by-25-foot greenhouse has been used sporadically over the years to teach students the basics of growing plants, school board president William Stauts said. "By adopting a curriculum, we will make sure it continues to be used every year instead of periodically falling into disuse," he said. The board action was taken last week.

The multimillion-dollar containment project has been completed, and the landfill has been put to bed. Don't look for it to sleep, however. Instead, expect it to serve as an energy source for years and years to come. As part of an agreement several years ago between the state and the freeholders, methane gas from the Florence Land Recontouring site, which is now covered, will be used at the nearby Burlington County Resource Recovery Complex to grow tomatoes. Completion of the covering of the recontouring site was announced yesterday by the state Department of Environmental Protection and Energy.

State-of-the-art greenhouse equipment seized during a Chester drug bust will soon be used to grow vegetables and legal herbs in Philadelphia, In May, Chester police found a sophisticated marijuana-growing operation inside a former drug store. They confiscated 80 hydroponically-grown plants, small industrial generators, grow lights, large plastic tubs, 55 gallon drums, hosed Miracle Grow containers and other items, said the Delaware County district attorney office Tuesday.

In 1989, Don and Jane Eyre of Medford sank some money into a vacant greenhouse in Berlin Township, with full intentions of establishing a plant- and-garden business. Within a couple of months, they changed their minds. Instead of dusting, watering and selling plants, Jane Eyre had visions of nurturing something else - artists. Eyre, an artist herself, converted the greenhouse into an art studio, a place where both established and aspiring artists could go to meet, create, and showcase their talents.

Several residents have objected to a proposed greenhouse-nursery business on Calcon Hook Road, prompting the Darby Township Board of Commissioners to delay action on the facility until a horticulturist can address their concerns. Ernest R. Roth, president of Valley Forge Engineering Inc. of Villanova, said that in addition to the nine greenhouses proposed for the former sewage treatment plant property on Calcon Hook Road, the site might be used as a horticulture technician-training center for unemployed minorities.

It wasn't just the taste of tea prepared from his own mint leaves that attracted Raymond Marano to gardening. "I escape, to a certain degree, by being in this program . . . "I'm freer than being on a (cell) block with 500 people, making noise. " As he talked of freedom and escape one morning last week, Marano walked past personal gardens grown by inmates at Graterford Prison in central Montgomery County. Marano, 35, has spent seven years behind prison walls, for a crime that he declines to discuss.

WASHINGTON - Worldwide levels of the chief greenhouse gas that causes global warming have hit a milestone, reaching an amount never before encountered by humans, federal scientists said Friday. Carbon dioxide was measured at 400 parts per million at the oldest monitoring station, which is in Hawaii and sets the global benchmark. The last time the worldwide carbon level was probably that high was about two million years ago, said Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Paul Lightfoot, marathon runner and local food zealot, is determined to change the way highly perishable, expensive-to-ship produce is grown and distributed to supermarkets in the Northeast and other parts of the nation. Starting in Yardley. As CEO of BrightFarms Inc., a big-picture company with a hyper-local focus, Lightfoot wants to "create beautiful local produce, near grocery retailers, that's thousands of miles fresher, and do it with the same food safety and year-round commercial volume as a large, centralized supplier might have been doing from a huge facility in California.

In making a documentary to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Michael Jackson's "Bad," director Spike Lee says combing through footage was like opening a "treasure chest of findings. " "We have footage in this documentary that no one's ever seen, stuff that Michael shot himself, behind-the-scenes stuff," he said in an interview with the Associated Press. "We had complete access to the vaults of Michael Jackson. ... He wrote 60 demos for the ‘Bad' record. Only 11 made it. So we got to hear a lot of that stuff, too, so it was just a great experience.

Mary Mitchell Bentley, 87, owner of the former Greenhouse restaurant in Radnor from 1975 to 1993, died Thursday, March 29, of complications from cancer at her home in Radnor. Her son James said in a phone interview that running the restaurant was even more of a life-changing event than it might have been for some others. "In terms of a job as we know it, she hadn't worked" at any job since World War II, when she was a general's driver in the Marine Corps Women's Reserve.

Howard Brosius is trying to be heard above the buzz of a dozen small children recently liberated from day care. "Who wants some black-seeded Simpson?" he shouts, holding up the ruffled, light green leaves of this 150-year-old lettuce variety. In a room full of veteran vegetable gardeners, this would provoke a stampede. Here, in a small classroom at Awbury Arboretum in Germantown, the kids have no idea what black-seeded means or who Simpson was. But they know whatever "Mr. Howard" is offering, they want.

Seven Pennsylvania coal-fired power plants are among the 100 highest industrial emitters of greenhouse gases in the United States, according to data released Wednesday by the federal Environmental Protection Agency. Ranking 12th on the national list is FirstEnergy Generation Corp.'s Bruce Mansfield plant in Beaver County, the state's biggest. The other plants are Brunner Island, Conemaugh, Hatfield's Ferry, Homer City, Keystone, and Montour. No New Jersey plants made that top 100 list.

JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - The hard-won deal at a U.N. global climate conference in South Africa keeps talks alive but doesn't address the core problem: The world's biggest carbon polluters aren't willing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases enough to stave off dangerous levels of global warming. With many scientists saying time is running out, a bigger part of the solution may have to come from the rise of climate-friendly technologies being developed outside the U.N. process. Scientists say that if levels of greenhouse gases continue to rise, eventually the world's climate will reach a tipping point, with melting of some ice sheets and a catastrophic rise of several feet in sea levels.

State-of-the-art greenhouse equipment seized during a Chester drug bust will soon be used to grow vegetables and legal herbs in Philadelphia, In May, Chester police found a sophisticated marijuana-growing operation inside a former drug store. They confiscated 80 hydroponically-grown plants, small industrial generators, grow lights, large plastic tubs, 55 gallon drums, hosed Miracle Grow containers and other items, said the Delaware County district attorney office Tuesday.

Sculptor Jordan Griska couldn't talk for long Monday. "I'm in the middle of lifting an airplane," he said over the phone from his West Philadelphia studio, an old trolley shed on Haverford Avenue. The airplane in question, a decommissioned Cold War submarine bomber, has taken on a new life in Griska's hands. It has become a work of art, a sculptural installation for the pristine Lenfest Plaza. There, in the shadow of Claes Oldenburg's newly installed giant paintbrush at Broad and Cherry Streets, Griska's plane will rest, nose driven into the ground next to the historic Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

Museumgoers this fall will be able to piece together crime-scene evidence via mass spectrometry, ponder bloodsucking creatures of the imagination, and consider the imperfect mosaic of nationhood as a parade of diverse and unusual exhibitions and programs marches through the region's specialized museums. Offerings include the start of a yearlong project seeking to "imagine Africa," a show of works exploring the African American imagination, an outdoor exhibition focusing on worldwide malnutrition, and a portable greenhouse of the future, complete with room for future fossils - a kind of museum-to-be.