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1. Dropping a little something in the piggy bank has a whole new meaning with the Payday Acrylic Toilet Seat with Realistic Coins. Who needs Donald Trump’s gold toilet when can sit on the money seat?

2. If you find yourself praying to the porcelain god very often, you’ll want to be sure to pick up this Our Lady of Guadalupe toilet seat to help facilitate your religious experience.

3. Just a friendly reminder for anyone considering a translucent blue toilet lid: yellow and blue makes green. You probably shouldn’t try to conserve water if you’re closing this toilet seat.

4. If you’re toilet seat is a little too plain Jane, now’s your chance to dress your toilet like a Jersey housewife. I’m sure they also do a brisk business in matching tanning bed covers, too.

5. While I had thought airbrushing was limited to vintage van murals, it looks like airbrushing lives on in the custom toilet seat industry.  Though maybe it’s just for people who bring that vintage van lifestyle indoors.

6. This classy faux mother-of-pearl toilet seat is perfect for those times when you don’t want to get too fancy and fake actual pearl. Because you just don’t want to be a show-off.

7. Charcoal black, chrome, and totally manly—I’m not sure whether this seat belongs on a toilet or a motorcycle, but either way, I’m sure it’s a high-performance machine.

8. With rocks and shells embedded in this toilet seat, it’s just like camping in your own home when you use this one. Just replace the toilet paper with leaves, turn the lights out, and leave a big rock out to trip on for the complete outdoor experience.

9. I suppose we should be grateful that this hand-painted dragon isn’t breathing fire, preventing what could be some burns in some sensitive locations, but I’m extraordinarily curious about what it’s swooping down to catch in the toilet.

10. And this one’s just for you, Woodrow—I hear you have quite the thing for gnomes.

While staring out the window of the bus, attempting to avoid making eye contact with a guy who was engaged in an extended monologue about certain feminine assets, I noticed something odd for the neighborhood—a swarm of little old ladies with watering cans, tending to container gardens.  But this wasn’t a community garden, or even a backyard—it was their housing project’s concrete yard. And while I do live in the land of Edible Schoolyards, I was still a little awed to see that even such a blighted area could be put to such good use.

Housing Project Garden

But the little old ladies aren’t the only ones who are growing affordable produce in unexpected locations. Over the last few years, projects designed to help residents use whatever space they have, from suburban lawns to urban roofs, have been gaining momentum.

Home and Garden

Before Michelle Obama pulled her trowel out at the White House, Edible Estates was working to replace front yards with vegetable gardens. It’s a simple idea: make your lawn more productive by growing your own food and less wasteful by reducing the resources and chemicals associated with conventional grass lawns.

Edible Estates, Maplewood, NJ

In the eight prototype gardens, homeowners replaced their lawns with vegetable gardens designed specifically for their region, climate, site, and needs. By documenting and sharing each of these prototypes, the project is meant to demonstrate that anyone with a lawn has the space, ability, and resources to grow productive, low-impact gardens.

If you’re interested in turning your yard into a vegetable garden, you can find basic tips, issues, materials, and instructions at the Edible Estates website.

Above and Beyond

Of course not all of us are blessed with lawns, especially in urban areas. Even so, we do have other spaces we can make use of, and Bay Localize’s Use Your Roof guide is a great resource for using your roof to produce food, water, and energy.

Kathryn Rogers' DIY Roof Garden, Berkeley, CA

While intended for Bay Area audiences, the guide’s resources, tools, and best practices for roof gardens, rainwater catchment, and solar power, are a good place to start for anyone interested in green roofs.