Urban Jungle Bloggers - Page 22 of 26 -

Modern Terrarium Studio Book Review

Post author By Judith de Graaff
Post date 29 June 2015

Megan George is a pretty talented lady: She is a social media marketer, a plant lover, an entrepreneur and a fantastic terrarium artist. She combined her professional knowledge and her passion for plants to found The Zen Succulent, a modern terrarium and crafts small business with fans and customers spanning from the United States over Europe all the way to Australia. And as if this was not enough, she also published her first book: Modern Terrarium Studio. As fellow plant lovers and Urban Jungle Bloggers we could not wait to get our fingers on it and review it here for you!

Modern Terrarium is not just a book to get inspired – it is a hands-on guide to create your very own terrarium designs. Megan structured her book in a very helpful and practical way: Going from tools and materials over various containers, decor elements to her top 25 plants to use in your terrariums. She also shares plant care tips for cacti, succulents and air plants in terrariums – super helpful if you wonder how to keep your terrarium healthy and happy.

The book’s main section however will get you itching for creativity and your own DIY terrarium. Megan presents 25 easy-to-make terrariums and living landscapes with evocative names such as ‘A Vibrant Shore’, ‘Cascading Rock Collection’ or ‘The Star in a Jar’. Just flipping through the book makes you want to get started right away – I feel very inspired to create the ‘Cascading Rock Collection’ soon. I am now hunting for a nice rock!

If you love plants and terrariums and if you are a crafty soul, we warmly recommend to get hold of this practical and great book – plus we encourage you to create your own terrarium and why not share it with us on Urban Jungle Bloggers? You can get your copy HERE.

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Event

Spectacular! Blogtacular!

Post author By Igor Josifovic
Post date 17 June 2015

Hello friends! We are back from London where we attended the bloggers’ conference Blogtacular and spoke about you: our thriving green community Urban Jungle Bloggers. We came back absolutely thrilled, happy and totally sleep deprived. But it was all worth it!

This was the second Blogtacular conference in London and it was held at the magnificent Royal Institution of Great Britain in central London. More than 300 enthusiastic bloggers attended the conference last Saturday and we were honored to be invited as speakers among great names such as Grace Bonney of Design*Sponge and visual storyteller Marte Marie Forsberg.

At the Pintacular evening event at West Elm we were surprised with all kinds of Urban Jungle Bloggers inspired craft workshops! So much fun!

Our audience was very eager to learn about online communities and we found ourselves in a room where all seats were taken and people were sitting on the floor. With the perfect example of the Urban Jungle Bloggers community we explained how bloggers can unite forces and leverage trends into communities. We also revealed that with every community there is a big load of work and responsibility – creating a community requires constant engagement and community management. But this is also the most rewarding thing to do: running a community of like-minded people, giving back to the community and inspiring each other has no price!

Giving back to the community was one very important aspect of our presentation. We decided to give back in real time: for all attendees (and for you!) we created some green gifts to download HERE. And we also wanted to surprise 10 of the attending bloggers with a real plant. We choose 10 winners of the plant of the month July courtesy of The Joy of Plants: a wonderful Ficus Ginseng.
These are the lucky winners: @18ChelseaMews, @annabsexton, @peasandneedles, @curiouszhi, @jessicaasims, @Monsieur_Torres, @Han_House, @xantheb, @91Magazine and @littlebeeeblogs. Congrats! Please email us your addresses so that we can arrange for the plant delivery!

During our stay in London we were happy to be invited to stay at the cool and new Motel One – London Tower Hill which offers fine rooms, a cool design lobby and yummy breakfast for a very affordable price – a rarity in London!

Plus the hotel is perfectly located – just a few walking minutes from the famous Tower of London and the Tower Bridge. We were absolutely happy with our stay there and can recommend it for your next London weekend if you don’t want to spend a fortune on a multi-star hotel. Thanks again to the friendly team of Motel One!

Our London stay was kindly sponsored by Motel One but our opinion remains our own.
Second image by @jessicaasims, third & fourth image by Mollie Makes.

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Tags bloggers, Blogtacular, creating communities, giving back, Green Gifts, london, urbanjunglebloggers

Planty Product

Click & Grow – grow herbs with zero effort

Post author By Judith de Graaff
Post date 9 June 2015

There are so many reasons why growing your own herbs (fruits & veggies, plants) is good for you: it’s healthy and tasty, it’s environment-friendly and you can see your own plants grow, which brings you closer to nature. But we all have busy lives and enjoying some fresh basil and thyme in your dinner or salad, takes a little bit of TLC (time, love & care). That we sometimes prefer to spend on plants, our loved ones, on life! And that’s exactly where the Click & Grow smart herb garden comes along: it helps you grow fresh herbs with zero effort. You simply open the box, take out the herb garden, install the cartridges, connect the power cord and fill the tank with water… and in 2-4 months you’ll have 3 full plants!

Click & Grow uses innovative NASA-inspired technology that helps the herbs grow a little faster but still 100% naturally. No GMOs, pesticides, fungicides, insecticides, plant hormones, or any other suspicious substance, just nature!

The specially developed “smart soil” balances oxygen, water and nutritional ingredients at an optimal level. It’s all nature at its purest.

This is how it works:

Each Smart herb garden comes with 3 different cartridges (yes they are really called like that!) that are ready to use. Simple pull off the green sticker and place them into the herb garden. You can name the plants by writing something on the white lids on the cartridges:

Once you have plugged in and added water to your herb garden, it’s time to wait and do something else. Enjoy life and check back on your herbs whenever you like. In a few days or weeks, you’ll see the first sprouts… And the best thing is, you don’t even have to water your herbs, the container takes care of giving the right amount of water to your plants for at least a month! No more over-watered basil plants or dried out thyme!

The process of growing herbs in the Smart Herb Garden:

https://instagram.com/p/0z-xqttm4D/?taken-by=clickandgrow

We really like the clean design (with the geometric pattern on top!) and the low-energy function of growing our own herbs with this Click & Grow Smart Herb Garden. Now we cannot wait to taste our first Caprese salad with our home-grown basil!

Do you want to treat yourself (or someone else) to a Click & Grow smart herb garden? We have a special discount code for you: enter JUNGLE25 when you order your smart herb garden and get 25% off!

A little update after 2 weeks:

And this is what the lemon balm, basil and thyme look like after 4 weeks. Time to harvest: yummm!

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Tags click & grow, grow herbs, smart herb garden, technology

Planty Inspiration

We #LoveNature with Brabantia!

Post author By Judith de Graaff
Post date 26 May 2015

We as Urban Jungle Bloggers share our love for plants, they bring us closer to nature, to our roots, even in the middle of the city. But we also share our love for nature. Being a plant lover and not caring about our environment seems like a very absurd combination, right? So yes, we love our environment and we love to make conscious decisions to save our environment wherever possible. So it’s no wonder that the new #LoveNature campaign by Brabantia, a brand for beautiful home products, caught our attention.

What’s it all about this new green campaign by Brabantia? It’s easy and it’s so wonderful: The idea behind the #LoveNature campaign comes from a very mundane activity – laundry drying. If you let your laundry dry naturally and let the sun and wind do the job, you will not only save energy but also save our environment. The core idea stems from one of Brabantia’s signature products, the rotary dryer. But instead of focusing on selling for charity, they decided that yes, if you buy a rotary dryer, they will plant a tree in Burkina Faso; but they will plant a tree for any person of your choice regardless! No purchase required! And that’s what we love about it – it’s a true and honest commitment to nature. Why wait? Tell Brabantia to plant a tree for a loved one – after all, isn’t it wonderful to tell them that a tree is planted in Burkina Faso in their name?

Brabantia has also enriched the #LoveNature campaign with a giveaway. You can enter the giveaway by checking the box ‘Would you like to win a LoveNature gift set?’ and come up with a creative green slogan. If you do so, you are in for a chance to win one of six #LoveNature gift sets, each 300€ value. So we are off planting a tree virtually with Brabantia. You can join in HERE.

http://youtu.be/pkwc1DsrwxY

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Planty Inspiration

Urban Jungle Bloggers love Pinterest + tips!

Post author By Judith de Graaff
Post date 6 May 2015

Today, let’s talk about Pinterest. Before creating our Facebook page or even launching this website, we started with an Urban Jungle Bloggers Pinterest board. For the past 18 months we have been pinning green inspiration on a daily basis. Beautiful interiors with plants, green rooftop gardens, creative botanic DIYs, and of course all the fabulous blogposts from our bloggers.

Our goal is to show and share all kinds of plant inspiration on our UJB board, in many different styles: we pin everything from bohemian homes to ultra slick Scandi homes, from creative plant pot DIYs to semi-professional greenhouses. As long as there is something planty in there. Our Pinterest board helped us to grow the Urban Jungle Bloggers community, to share the blogposts from our bloggers with a larger audience and several brands discovered our community through Pinterest. And regularly we find new monthly topic inspiration just by browsing our board. By now we pinned more than 5.300 images and over 32.000 people follow our board. Our most popular pins reach more than 60,000 impressions and some get almost 1,000 repins (like this pin in April). Even though it’s not about the numbers, we like all the connections via our dear Urban Jungle Bloggers board. To go short: we love Pinterest! But it is not only about love and passion, it is also a bit of know-how that will help YOU perform on Pinterest at your best. Here are some of our tips!

What can you do to improve the repinnability of your blogpost? We collected some tips for bloggers:

⚫ Always insert a big portrait (vertical) image in your blogpost. Portrait images show up much bigger than landscape images on Pinterest (or your mobile phone!).

⚫ Add an alt-text to your images. Pinterest automatically picks the alt-text of an image as the description of your pin. It’s smart to include your blogname and the specifics of the image. Usually we change the description of UJB blogposts that we pin to “Urban Jungle Bloggers: topic by @ name of pinner.

⚫ Make it easy to find your Pinterest name. Like with all social media, it’s best if your name is the same on all social platforms (if possible). Add a visible link to your Pinterest board on your blog.

⚫ Add a pin-it button to your blog images (click here to see how that works). Make it easy for your readers to pin your content to Pinterest.

If you want to grow your own Pinterest account, these are some additional tips:

⚫ Pin daily. Make it part of your daily routine.

⚫ Sign up for a business Pinterest account. It’s free and you get all kinds of statistics, which allows you to get an idea of what your followers like, what gets repinned a lot and what your less popular pins are.

⚫ Create very specific boards. Not “inspiration”, but “yellow elephant toys with big eyes”. Or anything that you truly fancy 😉 In your boards, stay very close to a certain topic or style. If you have a broader theme, make sure the pins look nice together, make it interesting to look at. Or create a new board for your related topic.

Pinterest is a fun, exciting and useful platform for our Urban Jungle Bloggers community and they have lots of news coming up in the near future as revealed in this article. Stay tuned & happy pinning!

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