Rewilding Your Lawn

SUBHEAD: Now that we've entered the Anthropocene you need to do your part in supporting the living environment.

By Amy Brady on 28 July 2018 for Orion Magazine -
(https://orionmagazine.org/2018/07/rewilding-your-lawn-in-the-anthropocene-an-interview-with-author-jeff-vandermeer/)


Image above: Photographs of a yard gone wild. From original article.

Jeff VanderMeer, award-winning author of Borne and the Southern Reach Trilogy, is also an avid environmentalist. 

As part of his desire to make outdoor spaces more habitable for birds and insects, he’s embarked on a yard rewilding project that involves letting native grasses and plants (many of them deemed “weeds” by some less-than-pleased neighbors) take over his lawn.

If you follow the author on Twitter, you may have read his amusing—and educational—anecdotes about the project. Here, we discuss the yard project in more depth, including the benefits a wild yard provides for local wildlife and what others can do to improve their own neighborhood ecosystems.

AB: What inspired you to re-wild your yard?
JV: I was the writer-in-residence at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in upstate New York in 2016 and lived in a house with a very lively bird population. I started putting out feeders. 

Then Trump was elected president and my stress level went through the roof. We returned to our home in Florida and, to distract myself from the news, I put up a lot of bird feeders and tried to emulate the things that we’d loved about upstate New York.

We got several more birds than in the past, although I’d always been an avid birdwatcher. The feeders made me feel like I could help semi-urban wildlife and migrating birds in the moment, which was important at a time when I felt useless and worn down by the news.

I then began investigating how to make the yard more bird and bee and butterfly friendly. Given that our attempts at a “normal” lawn had always led to bare dirt, I figured nothing would grow. 

But as soon as we gave the yard over to whatever would naturally grow there, we had a great burgeoning of 
plant, insect, and animal life. We even have, ironically enough, a fair amount of grass in the yard now.

AB: What do you hope to achieve by doing this? Do you anticipate an environmental impact?
JV: I already know we’re creating a safe haven for migratory birds. We’re also helping to cement a corner of an unacknowledged greenway for raccoons and possums and other nocturnal animals, none of which have been a bother. They also eat insects and are beneficial in other ways. 

I’ve also seen more toads and frogs and in general a healthy little ecosystem quietly building up. Contrary to the generalizations people make about non-traditional yards, we’ve not seen any ticks. Either the possum eats those or they just aren’t present.

In addition, we’ve had some exciting finds, like Florida lupine growing in one part of the yard. Florida lupine is rare these days and should be encouraged.

Does all this mean much in the grand scheme of things? I don’t know. But it acknowledges that in addition to dealing with things on the macro level, you can support the environment in your own backyard by not using pesticides and, while not letting things look totally unkempt, support life rather than a mono-lawn that nothing else can thrive on.

AB: You’ve said on Twitter that your neighbors are less than thrilled. How would you sum up their response to your yard?
JV: I think it’s accurate to say that the “neighbor complaint” has become in my mind an existential threat from The Neighbor. By that I mean I feel like I need to anticipate the possible objections to what I’m doing, and thus The Neighbor is always on my mind. 

This is probably very unfair to the actual neighbor in question, which is why I keep everything very anonymous [on Twitter] and try to acknowledge that it’s the system and our assumptions at the neighborhood association and city government level that are flawed.

We also have lots of lovely neighbors, and even the neighbor who complained is not automatically not-lovely. But the system is crap. 

The fact that I can grow weeds only so long as they’re in a straight line and look like a garden—or put up a white fence around a part of the mayhem to ritualistically create a “lawn”—is hilarious and also a bit depressing to me. 

A traditional “lawn” is really about signs and symbols and status. What we’re really talking about is whether you admit life onto your property or decide to kill it off.


Image above: Photographs of a yard gone wild. From original article.

AB: What kinds of wildlife have entered your yard since starting this project?
JV: In addition to a regular polite possum and raccoon, we have many more bats out at night. We also have a wealth of birds that we didn’t have before. For example, the thrashers are out in force and very comfortable. 

We’ve had migrating grosbeaks, a first, and we have almost all of the Florida woodpeckers in our yard: downy, hairy, red bellied, flickers, and pileated. They used to be much rarer sightings. We also have a resurgence of snakes and tree frogs and toads of all kinds. 

We used to have a few skinks, pretty big ones, and now we have a lot more. And more bees. And tons of different kinds of plants—too many for me really to go into. Except, of course, the famous one, Fred the Weed, a giant wild lettuce.

Fred blew down in a storm, but is currently convalescing and plotting his return. I’m only just learning more about the plants in our yard, and some are likely invasive, but I must admit that paying attention to what’s growing in the yard has made landscapes so different for me in general. I used to think of plants as the backdrop for animals, but now I see acutely the plant life and how it’s growing. 

I feel like when we visit other people’s houses I can tell a lot about them just from the yard. I’m grateful to Jenn Benner, an Orlando friend, who helped me identify a lot of these plants.

AB: Have any of these lifeforms inspired new characters or settings in your writing?  
JV: This sense of plants being in the foreground will definitely seep into my fiction. The fact that I know individual cardinals and individual downy woodpeckers—that I can see them interacting with other individual birds—is also something that will influence my work. 

Somehow the whole world is now more alive than before, which is, to be honest, also painful, because suddenly I’m aware that even yards that seem green and healthy are actually sterile spaces. 

That’s hard to take. It’s also quite frankly hard to take when I find a vole dead in the yard, a victim of some passing cat. 

Luckily, we don’t get cats much—I chase them away and sometimes squirt them with orange juice, which they hate. In a sense, I feel very connected to this little piece of land and I feel it in my body when something goes wrong.


Image above: Photographs of a yard gone wild. From original article.

AB: Do you have any tips for readers who’d like to do something similar with their yards?
JV: I’d say let the space speak to you and really observe what’s going on. Go with the flow of what seems to grow well—don’t try too hard to push back against what nature tells you needs to happen. 

And before uprooting a plant, make sure you know what you’re doing. Early on I wound up taking out some beneficial plants and leaving some that weren’t from pure ignorance. And be aware that herbicides aren’t really any better than pesticides in many cases.

Bring in a local specialist for a consult, even if you don’t want them to do any actual landscaping. 

Finally, where possible, do leave some dead leaves around, especially in places in shade, where they’ll help form good habitats for toads and worms. These are really beneficial creatures that will only add to the richness of the place.

AB: Do you have any suggestions for people living in urban and suburban areas who want to have a positive environmental impact but who can’t let their yards grow wild?
JV: You can always do something. Even a few potted plants that your local nursery says are good for butterflies or birds can be of use. 

Even a small bird feeder can be of use, too. 

In that case, I’d learn what migratory birds pass through your area, what they tend to eat, and when they tend to appear. 

Keep in mind that birds might take as long as a month to find a new feeder and deem it safe. 

Finally, and this is controversial in some areas, keep in mind that outdoor cats do kill lots of birds. There’s no two ways about it. 

So keep your cat inside if at all possible. If your cat seems too energetic for that, all apologies, but you may need to increase your efforts in engaging and playing with your cat inside.

AB: What has been the most rewarding thing about this project?
JV: Rewilding the yard has largely saved me from situational depression, which means I can be more effective in my other, wider environmental efforts. 

Also rewarding has been the daily connection, in some form, to our environment. It is so important to our health in general to understand what it is we’re losing and what we need to save and why.

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Obscuring Nature

SUBHEAD: How cleanliness and energy efficiency are damaging our relation to nature.

By Gunner Rundgren on 16 April 2018 for arden Earth -
(http://gardenearth.blogspot.co.uk/2018/04/how-cleanliness-and-efficiency-obscure.html)


Image above: A techno-optimist trying to grow "Green" food under artificial light in PVC irrigation tubes. From (http://www.thecoolist.com/geeky-gardening-how-to-grow-vegetables-with-green-technology/).

Alienation
Instead of retreating into urban eco-sanctuaries and buying industrial fare in hygienic and eco-friendly packaging, people need to grow, tend to animals, muck, dig, cook and bake. Only then can we expect people to become ecologically literate and realise that we are part of nature.

After the discovery of ”germs” and their role in disease, humans initiated a war on bacteria for two centuries. It is just the last decades that we start to realize that we are totally dependent on them.

There are so many of them inside our body and on our skin that one could almost claim that we are an agglomeration of germs. While we still know that there are the bad ones we should avoid we are also aware of that some dirt is beneficial. Somethings similar need to happen with efficiency.

The realization that there are fairly hard physical limits to our civilization, sometimes called Planetary Boundaries, has made efficient the buzzword of the day.

Efficency
Of course this is hardly nothing new, scarcity was the rule for most of human existence and efficient use of resources was part of the daily struggle. When fossil fuels were systematically put into our service followed a period of assumed limitless growth and limitless waste.

For a long period, efficiency was defined mainly in relation to the use of labour and the silver bullet of enterprise was to substitute nature resources with labour. Which meant more use of energy, more use of minerals, water, rocks and sand; more everything – but labour.

Now, there are growing insights that nature resources are not as abundant and limitless as we believed and that there are also limits in the receiving end. We can’t just pump our waste into the natural pools be it the oceans or the atmosphere.

It is therefore quite natural, and good, that we look for more efficient ways of using resources. But in my view the solutions are often misguided.

Technology
Farming is perhaps the best examples of this. Nowadays we are told that we should grow plants or fish indoor with artificial light to save water and land.

And the most used argument in favour of a vegan lifestyle is that there I less need for land to grow plants than to grow animals.

Lab meats are said to solve our craving for meat in a better way. Efficient use of land is also a major argument for the use of chemical fertilizers, pesticides and GMOs.

Most urban dwellers have no idea of how food is grown and how animals and plants interact in natural systems and they therefore easily buy into a narrative that goes like this:

“Humans are squeezing out other species, raze the rainforest to feed cattle or oil palm and cut down mangrove to grow shrimp.

Agriculture destroys the water and the atmosphere, pesticides kills, it even destroys its own foundation, the soil. Most agriculture land is used to feed cattle which also are most harmful for the climate.”

While there is some merit in all this (with the exception for the blame on grazing cattle) the solution which has gained traction is to withdraw humanity into sustainable cities where the food is grown within city walls. In this way we can leave the rest of nature to all the other creatures in God’s garden.

Overall, the alleged efficiency of most of these systems is an illusion because land and resources are mostly used to the same extent as earlier – but somewhere else. See example further down.

What worries me a lot more than the miscalculations, however, is the view of our relationship with nature that is reflected in this narrative.

The idea that we can save both ourselves and nature by retracting from nature, limit our interaction with nature to watching Animal Planet and going whale watching or gorilla spotting on eco-touristic trips.

For sure, those creatures need all those nature reserves that we have created and we need to expand those in parts of the world, in particular to coastal areas. But, as with germs I am afraid we draw this too far.

Many advocate artificial production systems in a similar way as sterility was promoted as an ideal for hygiene.

But distancing people more from germs mostly make them much less able to strike a balanced view on the merits of washing their hands or throwing away leftovers.

Dirt on Hands
In a similar way, I think that instead of withdrawing into urban eco-sanctuaries people need to immerse themselves in nature and dirt.

They need to grow, tend to animals, muck, dig, cook and bake rather than buying industrial fare in hygienic eco-friendly packaging.

Only then can we expect people to appreciate the real work, the resources needed, the interaction between humans, animals and plants.

Only then can we expect people to become ecologically literate and realise that we are part of nature.

Saving Resource Myths
The most flagrant myth is that vertical indoor farms powered by LED lights saves space. When you point out that they require a lot of energy, you are told that that energy can come from solar panels, fully renewable and benign.

We can leave the discussion about exactly how benign solar panels are when it comes to resources.

We can also leave the discussion how to store solar energy over the seasons in the Northern parts of the globe, and just focus on the area used.

Do indoor farms really save space?

Let’s envision a house with a vertical farm in the basement and let us put solar panels on top of the building. The roof is hit by sunlight with an intensity of some 1000 W per square meter.

Our solar panels are very efficient and convert 15% to electricity that will give us 150Watts per square meter. The basement is powered by efficient LED lights.

If we want to grow lettuce we will need about 250Watts per square meter for 12 hours per day. Assuming very small losses in transmission and for the light we can grow 0.6 square meters of lettuce for each square meter of roof area.

Each layer of plants in the vertical farm thus needs a much bigger area of solar panels to produce the electricity needed. And this is only growing lettuce. If we were to grow tomatoes, grain, potatoes or cabbage we would need much higher light intensity.

These calculations are in reality extremely optimistic. Of course, in the winter where I live there is almost no solar energy produced at all. To produce food in winter we would need solar panel areas perhaps 25 times as big as each layer in our indoor farm!

So for a farm with 10 layers we would need 250 times the area somewhere else, outside of the sustainable city’s walls.

These are back-of-the-envelope calculations, an art which seems long forgotten. You can read more here.

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Growing my way out of Dystopia

SUBHEAD: Can we stop feeling so helpless and hopeless about a world on the skids by growing food.

By Frida Berrigan on 11 July 2017 for TomDispatch -
(http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176305/)


Image above: World War One era patriotic poster. "Uncle Sam says; Garden to cut food costs." From original article.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s inauguration, George Orwell’s 1984 soared onto bestseller lists, as did Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, which also hit TV screens in a storm of publicity.

Zombies, fascists, and predators of every sort are now stalking the American imagination in ever-greater numbers and no wonder, given that guy in the Oval Office.

Certainly, 2017 is already offering up a bumper crop of dystopian possibilities and we’ve only reached July. But let me admit one thing: the grim national mood and the dark clouds crowding our skies have actually nudged me in a remarkably positive direction. Surprise of all surprises, Donald Trump is making the corn grow in Connecticut!

Maybe I'd better explain.

My kids and I planted corn seeds in a square bed in our front yard this spring. Really, they just dumped the kernels in the ground and stared expectantly, waiting for them to grow. Three hundred corn plants seemed to germinate overnight, crowding each other out as they worked to reach the sun.

I’ve been steadily thinning the clumps into rows and now we have a neat line of a dozen or so corn plants, each just about three feet high, along with lettuce, kale, collards, peas, basil, and a few tomato plants in a four foot by four foot raised bed. The kids -- Madeline, three, and Seamus, four -- visit “their” corn plants, name them, argue over whose are whose, and generally delight in their bona fides as Connecticut corn growers.

It’s all part of a (somewhat incoherent) plan of mine that’s turned most of our front yard over to vegetables this year, including more tomatoes sprouting beside that raised bed along with plenty of cilantro. We have a fig tree, too, and apple trees, blueberry bushes, even a Shinto plum in back of the house along with a little potato patch and more herbs of various sorts. It’s a fertile little urban oasis.

For water supplies, I went as far as to install rain barrels at our downspouts, which tend to quickly fill to the brim whenever we get a half-decent rain and then cause moisture problems in the basement as water begins to gush out of their mosquito-proof tops.

I worry about those barrels whenever I go away, but also feel a strange pride when I water my vegetable patches from them instead of the hose.

If I stop to think about it, however, they drive home the point even better than a haphazard row of jaunty corn: I have no idea what I’m doing.

That’s not the end of the world, though, is it? This spring, as the political scene turned from truly bad to criminally bad, I began to see how not knowing what you’re doing could be a legitimate path, if not to power, then to resistance -- and therapeutic as well.

Seriously, it was therapeutic to dig and plant, weed and water. It was healing to do that with my kids, to hear them teaching each other about a world of growing things, to watch them go from grossed out to awed by worms and beetles, to see them bend their noses almost to the earth to follow the wiggly movements of such creatures.

We’re now picking peas from plants that grew from seeds Seamus planted in little cups at the end of his school year.

Every time we come home, he says, “Daddy, look at how tall my peas are!” and he runs over to trace their curly tendrils as they climb the twines we tied.

It’s Pretty, But Can We Eat It? Stalking Self-Sufficiency
Sometimes, when the dystopian possibilities of our world sink in, I think about the importance of self-sufficiency.

Still, to be perfectly honest, given the costs of the rain barrels and the lumber for those raised beds, given my time and effort and ignorance, we may be growing some of the world’s most expensive peas, tomatoes, and kale. And it’s not like we have to wait for the kids’ corn to grow (and cure) to make popcorn.

We do, however, make a lot of our own food. We bake sourdough bread from a pungent starter kept in the fridge. We ferment our own yogurt and stir up batches of granola every few weeks. It’s fun. It’s work our whole family gets into.

It helps teach our kids what real food tastes like -- that yogurt doesn’t come naturally in a plastic tub loaded with sugar and fruit on the bottom; that bread can emerge from the oven hot and chewy and is best eaten at that moment slathered in butter.

Like all but a microscopic number of Americans, however, no matter how we toil in our spare time, most of our food doesn’t come from anywhere nearby, thanks to the wonders of the global transportation system and the work of exploited laborers in distant fields and orchards.

My kids eat berries all year round, not just in those wondrous brief windows when our little strawberry patch produces and our blueberry bushes bend with their weight of blue orbs.

The pecans for our granola are a product of the U.S.A. -- so says the bag without specifying where exactly the trees grew in these 50 nifty states of ours -- and are certified kosher.  The flour for our bread holds the same secrets. Where did that wheat grow?

We live in New London, Connecticut, a small city in a small state.  Throughout the summer months, you can go full bore locavore and feed your family Connecticut-grown milk, eggs, fruit, vegetables, beef, and pork, serve local wine, and all sorts of locally caught or raised seafood.

No bananas or chocolate or coffee of course, but the bounty of our state has inspired food producers, professors, and policy people to promote New England as a “food shed” potentially capable of growing, processing, and distributing enough stuff to essentially feed itself. It’s a goal of such types to locally produce 50% of all food distributed within

New England by 2060, thanks to programs to promote the retention of family farmland, an expansion of urban gardening, and a generational effort at education. Right now, however, 90% of our food is grown outside both the state and New England.

You might be wondering at this point whether such an agrarian vision isn’t both utopian and utterly retro.  After all, why worry about locally grown food when we can Fresh Direct asparagus in November?

You Never Know...
I work part-time for a small nonprofit that builds and manages community gardens. It employs (and hopefully empowers) young people to do the physical labor and community improvement work of growing food in and for our urban center.

As we were organizing a new community garden in a poor and isolated part of our small city recently, a woman told me that she was excited about growing her own food because “you never know when they are going to stop shipping food in here.”

Over-the-top paranoid? Maybe. But it rang a bell of worry with me. Yes, the planet is changing radically and an erratic and vengeful man in the Oval Office eggs it on.  Donald Trump now being the boss of the largest nuclear arsenal on the planet puts a new spin on the phrase “You’re fired!”

So, the thought that we might be left to fend for ourselves in New London seems less than paranoid these days -- but of course maybe I’m just paranoid!

History shows that empires fall, that money can suddenly lose its value (think of the Weimar Republic just before the rise of Adolf Hitler), that promises can be broken, and treaties trampled, that rain can suddenly stop falling, and madmen can consolidate power, and it may someday show that martial law can be declared by tweet.

Who, in fact, knows what can happen on our extreme planet, which means that we need to learn how to do things, make things, grow things, fix things ourselves instead of assuming that others will continue to do all of it for us. I need to learn how. My kids need to learn how. Enough at least to do our best to take care of ourselves and our neighbors.

Write all of this off as my overactive imagination, if you wish -- fed by works like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower or Cormac McCarthy’s The Road -- but my own lack of self-sufficiency has been on my mind for a while.

And on that score, I do have cause for alarm. With luck we won't have to fend off the zombies or defend our turf from some future well-armed local militia, but as of now we can barely protect our blueberries from the birds or our lettuce from the grubs.

My front-yard garden is modest and haphazard at best, but working on it does make me notice and admire the other front-yard gardeners in my neighborhood. A woman up the street has an amazingly impressive crop of tomatoes and string beans coming in. Two streets over, someone built hoop houses in their front yard and grew greens of various sorts all winter long.

When I pluck my own kale leaves and feel connected to the larger urban farming community, all of us eating something out of our own yards, I’m sometimes reminded of the Victory Gardens of the World War II era.

Back then as a practical response to war-induced scarcities and to a massive and sophisticated propaganda campaign, Americans dug up their lawns in staggering numbers and put in gardens, turning the clock back briefly on rapidly suburbanizing communities and industrializing lives.

For a few years, neighborhood farmers genuinely helped feed America.

Victory Gardens have their spot in the history of the home front in World War II, but I was surprised to learn recently that they actually date back to the First World War. In 1917 and 1918, Americans planted eight million gardens, producing food worth $875 million. In that era of war against Germany, those homefront farmers even renamed sauerkraut “liberty cabbage.”

Embedded in the propaganda of the time, however, was an early recognition that Americans had lost something real in the concrete jungles of the country’s cities and that it was still possible to reestablish a connection to the land and be producers again, no matter where you lived.

Victory Gardens and Zombies from Washington
When World War I ended, however, most Victory Gardeners put down their hoes and went back to buying food, not growing it -- until, that is, 12 days after the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, when the National Defense Gardening Conference revived the idea and everyone got back to work.

In those war years, many farmers were drafted and food and fuel were rationed. Meanwhile, the War Department’s propaganda machine launched a brilliant campaign to promote “Victory Gardens” to grow food for family consumption and canning for the winter months.

A poster of that time caught the mood of the moment perfectly: a suburban housewife, her arms full of lidded glass jars, her eyes wide with excitement or exasperation (or both), exclaims, “Of course I can! I’m patriotic as can be -- and the ration points won’t worry me.”

Victory Gardens enlisted women, children, the elderly, and the infirm in the war effort. Everyone had a role. In 1943, 20 million gardens produced 8 million tons of food; more than 40% of all the vegetables consumed in the nation.

That remains a phenomenal feat and it wasn’t just restricted to front and backyards. The city fathers of San Francisco turned over the lawn at City Hall to local farmers; the Boston Commons was quilted with gardens; and public land nationwide was hoed and rowed and made to produce.

Now, I dislike rank propaganda as much as the next person, but face it, Victory Gardens were cool!

And the posters appeal to so many traits we think of as inherently American: can-do-it-ness, self-sufficiency, hard work.

In those years, Rosie the Riveter was joined by Wendy the Weeder and Peggy the Planter and, miracle of all miracles, those Victory Gardens helped feed America just as they had in the previous world war. Not too long ago and a million years before the advent of the Internet, we did that. It’s possible again.

Start Feeding Hope
In the age of Trump, however, it’s so much easier to focus on what we can’t do and on what disastrous harm is being done to us and the country. We can’t build bridges, or get out of any of our wars, or scrub the insides of industry smokestacks, or even think about stopping those global waters from rising. But, if we put our minds (and hands) to it, we can still grow food, block by block, yard by yard, and feel a hell of a lot less dystopian in the bargain.

What would it be like to be mobilized by my government -- and I emphasize “my” because as far as I’m concerned, Donald Trump’s version of it doesn’t qualify -- into some collective effort to make this country a better place.

When we entered World War II, the United States rushed onto a war footing and, disastrously enough, in many ways it’s never gotten off it again -- except when it comes to the public.

We Americans were demobilized long ago when it comes to war, even as military spending headed for the heavens (or for hell on Earth) and the national security state became the defining branch of government. We, who are eternally to be kept “safe” by that militarized state are also eternally not to raise a hand when it comes either to the war “effort” or much else.

No Victory (or in this era, possibly, Defeat) Gardens for us.  Few of course could even name all the countries in which the U.S. military is at war these days, no less list the strategic or political goals behind our trillion-dollar conflicts. Many of us don’t know any active duty service members in our now “all-volunteer” military.

Our eyes tend to glaze over when we stumble on a war news story.
All our government has wanted from us in its war effort (and this has been totally bipartisan) is our complacency, our inattention, our distracted and ill-informed consent or at least passivity.

In exchange, our leaders regularly suggest to us that there’s no need for sacrifice or scarcity or hardship on our part.  We are, that is, to be prepared for nothing.

President Trump has put a new twist on this American compact. He’s ready to mobilize us, but only to render him our loyalty (whatever that may mean) and adoration. Giving him such loyalty these days is a growing white supremacy movement emboldened to emerge from the shadows and into the streets with its hate and violence on display.

The Trump presidency has certainly provoked disdain, disgust, mistrust, resistance, and protest -- but so far, not sustained, alternative, creative activity, the sort of things that would support this country literally and figuratively over the true long haul.

Still, Victory Gardens are alive and well, at least in Milwaukee.  There, the Victory Garden Initiative will come to your house (if you ask them and pay them) and install garden beds in your yard. In the Bay Area, a “gardener on a tricycle” will deliver your Victory Garden starter kit and build garden beds for you out of untreated redwood.

For those thinking about sustainability in tough times, you can find a dozen books that contemplate the concept.

I must admit that I haven’t yet gotten into the habit of calling our front yard a Victory Garden, but it is at least vibrant and vital. It already sustains me (and Madeline and Seamus) in tough times, even if it will be months before we can actually eat the few ears of corn our little patch produces, if the birds and bugs don’t feast on them first.

The kids want to have a corn party with our neighbors. It’s an idea that fills me with satisfaction, even if those ears won’t nourish us for more than a few minutes.

Still, our fleeting (and delicious) ability to feed one another might help us grow a bigger patch next year and face with a greater sense of self-assurance whatever zombies Washington sends our way.

• Frida Berrigan, a TomDispatch regular, writes the Little Insurrections blog for WagingNonviolence.org, is the author of It Runs In The Family: On Being Raised By Radicals and Growing Into Rebellious Motherhood, and lives in New London, Connecticut.

Ecovillage Rescuing Los Angeles

SUBHEAD: They transformed it into a traffic-calmed and car-restricted promenade with fruit trees.

By Albert Bates on 26 March 2017 for The Great Change -
(http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/2017/03/rescuing-los-angeles.html)


Image above: View from site of the Ecovillage in Los Angeles. From original article.

In the concrete desert that is downtown Los Angeles we were blessed to find a green oasis at the corner of Vermont and 1st Avenues known as Los Angeles Eco-Village (LAEV).

How we can use our hard wiring to communicate to the herd that it is time to veer off from a race towards the cliff’s edge which most don’t yet see?

LAEV has taken a two-block area of random residents and small storefront businesses, alleys and churches and transformed it into a traffic-calmed and car-restricted promenade with fruit trees, mosaic tables and cob benches built around larger canopy trees, verge gardens, interior courtyards and attractive outdoor classrooms.

It has created attractive residences affordable to lower income people, stores and kiosks selling products and services made or provided by neighbors.

It has converted large apartment complexes to low income, ethnically diverse cooperative housing, and is transforming four-plex garages to 3 or 4 story mixed use development with retail, offices, and super affordable “tiny” housing, with small ecological footprint and no parking.

It created California's first bicycle kitchen (starting literally from the kitchen in an apartment house) — a way of cooperatively building, sharing and maintaining bicycles and the skill-set that goes with that.

A recent purchase of an abandoned building and vacant lot on the corner of Vermont Avenue will allow them to create People Street Plaza with two parklets and an enclosed bike corral, a solar arbor for small electric neighborhood plug-in vehicles and pedal hybrids, plus metered parking and expanded city repair functions at two intersections.

Next year the ecovillage plans to eliminate sidewalks and parking lanes on north side of White House Place and install an urban organic working farm/food forest.

In the future they would like to acquire 5 four-plexed apartment houses on White House Place to ensure permanent affordability for 80 to 120% of poverty-level income if existing/future qualifying residents will commit to going car-free within a specified time, and providing convenient car share options.

They would power these new homes by installing neighborhood solar PV over the school parking lot. Beyond 2030, when the parking lot is no longer needed, they would create an urban farm.

More ambitious, and requiring more city approvals, are plans to acquire and retire the auto repair shops, raze them and reopen the concreted-over hot springs, Bimini Baths, that were overtaken by sprawl and pavement almost a century earlier.

They'd like to open a center for therapeutic and recreation and to offer affordable housing for healers (so they can charge lower rates for lower income residents).

They'd like to bring back the trolley service to the tracks that used to carry bath patrons to and from other parts of the city. For the immediate future, a vegan café and outdoor garden is planned to replace the auto repair shops. 

Much of this will be accomplished by local residents, using a Cooperative Resources & Services Project (CRSP) Ecological Revolving Loan Fund (ELF) which has the potential to generate about $2.5 million every three to six month period.

Imagine, for a moment, all cities transformed from the bottom up in this fashion. LAEV does not plan to produce all its own food, water, power and other needs from within its two-block area, but it could. Instead, it encourages doing some of that while also participating in cooperatives that join together the products and services of other parts of the city.

Once upon a time the founder of permaculture, Bill Mollison, was asked how cities could become sustainable. He responded that it was only by providing for all their needs within their boundaries.

Los Angeles, even now, at 5000 persons per square mile, could do this. But then, like LAEV, it would need to take another step and begin the process of producing food, fiber and energy while progressively withdrawing carbon from the atmosphere.

Ecovillages similar to LAEV — The Farm, Earthaven, Findhorn, ZEGG and Seiben Linden — have already demonstrated their ability to net sequester more than their own carbon in order to reverse climate change, even while implementing the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, using a combination of for-profit and non-profit social enterprises and a holistic, deliberative approach.

Over the past few years they have risen still another step and are embarked, with Global Ecovillage Network, Gaia University and Gaia Education, upon a process of building curricula and the cadre of trained instructors that will carry the work to a global scale.

This core idea, brought by ecovillages at the cutting edge of an historic shift, is part of the British Commonwealth's new Regenerative Development to Reverse Climate Change strategy announced at COP-22. It is also allied with the Chinese Two Mountain Policy we described here last December.

Ecovillages are like a shadow world government. They are not top-down electoral, C3I or Deep State puppeteers; they are grass roots, spontaneous, semi-autonomous networked infiltrators. Their weapons are not Death Stars or enslaving financial schemes but viral memes spread by new media, art and gardening.

They run on the energy and creativity of youth. They are a bullet train on a return track back out of the Anthropocene.

What is needed now, today, is exactly that sort of low cost, rapidly deployed, hugely scalable approach to reversing human misery, ecological destruction and climate change that will find apolitical social acceptance, quickly, without the requirement of carbon taxes or offset markets that only serve to line the pockets of the obscenely obtuse.

Indeed, to scale quickly, it should use tested, off-the-shelf technology, be antifragile, employ lots of young entrepreneurs, and provide a sensible return benefit for those in the older generations who hazard their limited time and resources to assist.

The adoption process for carbon-sequestering economies could benefit from the ideas Malcolm Gladwell expressed in The Tipping Point: How Small Things Make a Difference (2000).

Gladwell argued that the ability of viruses (whether diseases or ideas) to spread quickly, and universally, depends on their ability to be attractive and sympathetic. They need to be able to cross cultures, genders, age groups, and races.

Gladwell pointed to three elements that cause epidemics to spread, and said these same elements are fundamental to any large-scale social change. They are:

1. The Law of the Few — some people spread disease (and ideas) better than others.
2. The Stickiness Factor — the potency of viruses (or ideas and actions) to become universal. Ideas and actions to reverse climate change need to continue evolving and draw in people from around the world. The greater context of our climate dilemma suggests that if a favorable human tipping point is to occur, it needs to be able to cross cultures and to be sticky across all those differences.
3. The Power of Context — the conditions under which the change is considered tend to either reinforce the change or thwart its spread. Commitment is not enough. The committed have to act, and share their commitment with others.

If a cultural tipping point is required, the tools most associated with cultural evolution should be employed. These include artistic movements (visual arts, performance, music, etc.), fashion (attraction to styles), and celebrity endorsements, among others.

Humans evolved as herd animals and we constantly signal to each other our affiliations, tastes and choices. Tapping into this natural process allows memes to propagate when stickiness and context cohere.

This leads us to an examination of the concept of style. What is it in the human genome that makes us such dedicated followers of fashion? Likely it is hard wired by an evolutionary choice our species made several million years back.

We hairless apes are more like army ants, gray wolves, dolphins, lions, mongooses and spotted hyenas than jaguars, frogs and horse flies. We are pack hunters.

Herd behavior has a defensive purpose, too. Witness zebras crossing a river full of crocodiles or a young buffalo calf being stalked by wolves. Some will be picked off, but most will survive.

We continuously signal to others in our herd that we are with them. We are part. We are in this tribe. We seek tribe approval, acceptance, respect. We may do this the way birds do, with colorful plumage, or the way horses do, with speed and agility. A necktie or a pants suit are forms of that signaling. A sports car is another.

How can we use our hard wiring to communicate to the herd that it is time to veer off from a race towards the cliff’s edge that most of our group most don’t yet see?

We need to make the change in direction fashionable.

For many if not most, the need to survive is ever present. To Westerners captured by the meme of money, their fragility can be measured by the number of digits left of the decimal point in their bank accounts, real estate valuations or securities portfolios, or by the (thin) thread of an enduring job with health benefits.

Standing at the edge of the Seneca Cliff, all of those indica are profoundly perilous routes forward.

Is it possible to break the fantasy of citizens of industrialized countries — that our jobs can continue to provide a magic elixir to meet our needs and debts? Difficult. Not impossible, just difficult.

Greed and familiarity cushion against sensibility. In other cultures, survival is bound by the timing and amount of rains needed for good crops, or the attractiveness of a female to acquire a supportive mate, or the fighting skills and tools for a warrior to dominate. But these also have a dark side.

Given how essential to survival rain, a mate, or fighting skills may be, they are also powerful drivers of aberrant behavior, like the magical belief that if we dance and pray that rain will come, or that anyone who can act the part of ruthless, selfish seducer can attract wealth, power or handsome mates.

That is all going to change, and quickly. Either that or we will all be extinct, and soon. If you want to get in on the change sooner, and avoid the hardship of late adoption, look into joining an ecovillage.

There is one trend afoot that few have seemed to notice. In the two-thirds world trade and commerce have always been dominated by nimble opportunists who see niches, swoop in and exploit them, and move on when the niche is no longer productive.

This independent spirit runs against the grain of wage slavery and so harsh sanctions like the withholding of health care and the destruction of public education have been used like cudgels to beat “employees” back into their roles as cogs in the machine.

So it was that Columbus destroyed the unsuited-as-slaves Taino and Arawak, or Francisco de Toledo instituted the mita system to compel Quechua and Yanacona encomienda to work the silver mines of Potosí.

Today, the tuned-in, spirited youth force of the world has undergone an evolutionary shift from encomiendista to free-agent. They want to be social impact entrepreneurs, not cubicle rats — blackmail-style benefits be damned. That instinctual shift provides the fuel to ignite the ecovillage revolution.

[Author's note: This post is part of an ongoing series we're calling The Power Zone Manifesto. We post to The Great Change on Sunday mornings and 24 to 48 hours earlier for the benefit of donors to our Patreon page.]

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Lawns are for Suckers

SUBHEAD: Plant a garden. You have to grow plants that are happy with your soil and weather.

By Nathanael Johnson on 21 September 2016 for Grist -
(http://grist.org/food/lawns-are-for-suckers-plant-a-garden-for-the-climate/)


Image above: The economic crisis in Venezuela is forcing residents of Caracas to embrace urban farming. From original article.

Ripping out your lawn and planting kale and peppers won’t just lead to great stir-fry — a new study finds it could make major contributions to fighting climate change, too.

Two pounds of carbon emissions could be prevented for every pound of homegrown vegetables consumed, according to researchers at the University of California Santa Barbara. And that could add up to a big impact: Give a highly productive garden to every family in California, the researchers calculated, and it would take the state 10 percent of the way to its previous goal of cutting emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Of course, those are sweet potato pie in the sky numbers, but that shouldn’t keep you from doing your part. And the study includes crucial caveats if you want your garden to be climate-friendly.

“We have these assumptions about what works, but we can go off in the wrong direction if we don’t make sure they are correct,” said David Cleveland, the research professor who spearheaded the project, the findings of which were recently published in the journal Landscape and Urban Planning.

If you want to make sure your garden is a climate boon, not bane, here are some tips.

Cherish and honor your compost pile

Image above: Save all all compostable household material for building more soil and reducing CO2 emmissions. From original article.

The main emissions reduction from gardening comes from diverting your food waste from the landfill, according to the study, where food rots and spews methane and nitrous oxide. That means that the way you handle your food waste can make or break this whole enterprise.

If you have good composting intentions but then forget to aerate and manage your compost pile, it can fart out a “buttload” (I believe that’s the precise amount) of potent greenhouse gases.
 
Not all dumps allow their rotten vapors to drift into the firmament. If your landfill captures methane and burns it to generate renewable energy, then it could be better to send your table scraps to the dump than try to compost at home. The best option, Cleveland said, is to have a centralized composting facility that captures gases and sends compost back to home gardeners.

This also suggests that we could reduce emissions by reusing waste in other parts of our food system. When I asked crop scientist Toby Bruce for an independent assessment of the study, he said it seemed reasonable, and pointed out that conventional farmers could also use composted food waste for fertilizer.

And, he said, if we wanted a truly closed-loop system, we could recycle human sewage for fertilizer.

Plan to commit

Image above: “If you planted a garden then just forgot about it,” according to Cleveland, you’ll end up emitting more greenhouse gases than if you never even started..

To get it right, look to someone like Karrie Reid for advice. Reid has an obligation to garden well: It’s her job. She’s an environmental horticulture advisor for the Cooperative Extension Service at University of California.

There are extension officers like Reid associated with every state university system, and they’re basically hands-on ag educators. You can find your own version of Reid by looking up your local extension’s master-gardener program.

Reid doesn’t abandon her plants midway through summer, and she doesn’t over-plant and then end up throwing out dozens of thigh-thick zucchinis.

Sure, when the cucumbers peak, there are more than she and her husband can eat, she confesses, but they share with their neighbors. The neighbors also come over to harvest herbs from the sidewalk. Follow her example, and you’ll be on the right track.

Ask about local government incentives

In the drought-ridden West, you can often get some money from the government if you tear out your lawn (and more importantly, your sprinkler system). But, in most places, to get these rebates you have to replace the lawn with something that doesn’t need irrigation — not tomatoes, Reid said.

However, you can often collect rebates when you replace a lawn with perennial food-producing trees, shrubs, and vines. Check with your local water district.

There may be more incentives to come. Cleveland hopes that his paper might lead local or state government to pay home gardeners for their carbon-reducing services. California’s climate law allows for this kind of reimbursement, but the state hasn’t done much to encourage it so far.

Work with your environment, not against it

You have to grow plants that are happy with your soil and weather if you want the numbers work in your favor. “Don’t grow things that are difficult — let the environment speak to you,” Cleveland said. “If your strawberries keep failing, the environment is telling you something.”

So don’t try to grow flood-dependent rice in a region better suited to prickly pear. (Get ready for a lot of prickly pear, California.)

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Great Lake Rust Belt environment

SUBHEAD: Gary, Indiana is facing either the greatest crisis in its 110-year history, or the greatest opportunity.

By Winifred Bird on 31 May 2016 for Yale e360 -
(http://e360.yale.edu/feature/greening_rust_belt_cities_detroit_gary_indiana/2999/)


Image above: A Pre-settlement ecosystems map of the Indiana Coastal Region where plant biodiversity rivaled Yellowstone National Park. Click to embiggen. From (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitats_of_the_Indiana_Dunes).

Depending on how you look at it, Gary, Indiana is facing either the greatest crisis in its 110-year history, or the greatest opportunity. The once-prosperous center of steel production has lost more than half its residents in the past 50 years.

Just blocks from city hall, streets are so full of crumbling, burned-out houses and lush weeds that they more closely resemble the nuclear ghost town of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, than Chicago’s glitzy downtown an hour to the northwest. Air, water, and soil pollution are severe.

Yet in the midst of this, Gary has quantities of open space that more prosperous cities can only dream of, and sits on a stretch of lakeshore where plant biodiversity rivals Yellowstone National Park.

Now, the big question for Gary, and for dozens of other shrinking cities across the United States’ Rust Belt — which collectively have lost more than a third of their population since the middle of the 20th century — is how to turn this situation to their advantage.

The answer that is beginning to emerge in Gary and other cities of the Rust Belt — which stretches across the upper Northeast through to the Great Lakes and industrial Midwest — is urban greening on a large scale. The idea is to turn scrubby, trash-strewn vacant lots into vegetable gardens, tree farms, stormwater management parks, and pocket prairies that make neighborhoods both more livable and more sustainable.

These types of initiatives have been evolving at the grassroots level for decades in places like Detroit and Buffalo; now, they are starting to attract significant funding from private investors, non-profits, and government agencies, says Eve Pytel, who is director of strategic priorities at the Delta Institute, a Chicago environmental organization active in Gary and several other Rust Belt cities.

“There's a tremendous interest because some of these things are lower cost than traditional development, but at the same time their implementation will actually make the other land more developable," she said.

Or, as Joseph van Dyk, Gary’s director of planning and redevelopment, put it, “If you lived next to a vacant house and now all of a sudden you live next to a forest, you're in better shape.”

Van Dyk noted that city planning in the U.S. had long been predicated on growth. But, he added, “That’s been turned on its head since the Seventies — Detroit, Cleveland, Youngstown, Flint, Gary have this relatively new problem of, how do you adjust for disinvestment? How do you reallocate your resources and re-plan your cities?”


Image above: Brother Nature Produce Farm, a  community effort in Detroit, which has been a leader in green urban renewal. From original article.

Detroit, which has at least 20 square miles of abandoned land, has been a leader in envisioning alternative uses for sites that once would have been targeted for conventional redevelopment.

The city has 1,400 or more urban farms and community gardens, a tree-planting plan so ambitious the local press says it “could serve as a model for postindustrial cities worldwide,” and $8.9 million from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development to implement green infrastructure projects and install solar panels on other vacant lots.

But while demolition itself has added an estimated $209 million to the equity of remaining homes in Detroit, Danielle Lewinski, vice president and director of Michigan Initiatives for the Flint-based Center for Community Progress, said hard data on the value of greening projects is more difficult to come by.

“There's opportunity in Detroit to see an impact in surrounding property values, and therefore people's interest in that area,” said Lewinski, who has been involved in land-use planning there. “The key, though, is that it needs to be done in a way that is strategic and links to other attributes that would attract a person to move into a neighborhood. My concern is that green reuse, absent a connection to a broader vision, may not be nearly as successful from an economic value standpoint.”

In Gary, the broader vision is to concentrate economic development in a number of “nodes,” each of which would be surrounded by leafy corridors of “re-greened” land. The corridors would separate the nodes, helping to give each neighborhood a more distinct identity, as well as bring residents the benefits of open space and serve as pathways for wildlife moving between existing natural areas.

A land-use plan for preserving Gary's core green space is already in place, and officials are currently revising the city’s Byzantine zoning regulations to make redevelopment of the nodes easier.

Projects in Gary are at an even earlier stage than in Detroit, however, and walking the city’s cracked sidewalks, it can be hard to envision a turnaround. Decades of layoffs at the steel mills, compounded by white flight, have left behind a population that is 28 percent poor, 19 percent unemployed, and 85 percent black, living in a landscape where more than a fifth of the buildings are, more than a third are blighted, and almost half of the lots are empty.


But van Dyk and many of his colleagues, including Gary’s dynamic mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson, have high hopes for a green renaissance. Standing in his office on the second floor of a re-purposed bank, van Dyk unfurled a map of the city to illustrate what the future might hold.

Around 12,500 tiny blue rectangles dotted the map, representing orphaned parcels whose property taxes haven’t been paid in more than a decade.

“There’s a lot of flooding over here,” he said, pointing a pink highlighter at the Midtown district. “The infrastructure’s decrepit. There’s really low population, and really high ecological value.”


Image above: Site of an abandoned house in Gary, Indiana that can be "mined" for materials and returned to the natural environment. From original article.

Wielding the highlighter like a miniature bulldozer, he traced a winding path over solid blocks of blue, knocking down houses so that strands of wilderness interlaced the neighborhood and neglected parks returned to wetland.

That green network, he said, could help alleviate many of the city’s problems. “Vacant property affects everything from quality of life, public safety, and property values to economic development and stormwater management,” said van Dyk.

Van Dyk currently has $6.6 million from the federal government to tear down about a tenth of the city’s abandoned homes.

To make sure it’s used in a way that benefits both the environment and the remaining residents, he is working with Pytel’s organization, Detroit’s Dynamo Metrics, and staff in Gary’s parks and stormwater management departments to develop a comprehensive demolition strategy.

One part of that strategy entails “deconstructing” rather than simply demolishing buildings, so that contractors can comb them for valuable old-growth timber, vintage fixtures, and other reusable elements.

This spring, the Delta Institute received a $385,000 grant from the Knight Foundation to build a reclamation and reuse facility in Gary similar to one it launched in Chicago in 2009, which has since diverted around 9,700 tons of building materials from landfills. Jennifer White, a former Chicago architect who now lives in Gary, has launched a similar project to salvage building materials and use the money from reselling them to remodel or demolish homes in her neighborhood.

The second part of the strategy involves finding conservation-oriented uses for lots opened up by demolition.

One idea already being piloted is to turn them into tree farms. Fresh Coast Capital, a real-estate investment firm based in Chicago, is planting poplar trees on 60 acres of abandoned land in Gary and six other Rust Belt cities; the fast-growing trees suck up heavy metals and other industrial pollutants with their deep roots, and will potentially sequester 14,000 tons of carbon dioxide over 15 years.

They will then be harvested as timber and the revitalized land returned to municipal governments. By then, city leaders hope, they will have the resources to redevelop it.

Another idea is to use vacant lots to augment or link the rich wilderness areas that already exist in Gary.

The city hugs the southern curve of Lake Michigan, sitting on top of a globally rare ecosystem called dune-and-swale, where cacti, orchids, black oaks, and more than 1,400 other plant species grow in alternating strips of wetland and sand dunes.

Although the U.S. Steel Corporation destroyed much of this ecosystem when it founded Gary — and the steel mill at its heart — in 1906, roughly 500 acres survive in the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore and several other preserves that abut the mill. The mill continues to operate with a fraction of its former workforce.

City officials have approached the managers of these preserves about expanding their holdings by rehabilitating vacant lots. But Kristopher Krouse, the executive director of the Shirley Heinz Land Trust, which manages about 50 acres of intact dune-and-swale habitat in Gary, said that could be difficult.

While he enthusiastically supports the city’s efforts, and believes some of the properties targeted for demolition might work as buffers around existing preserves, Krouse questioned whether taking on scattered properties degraded by crushed foundations or former industrial use would be meaningful from a conservation perspective.

A third, and so far more promising reuse strategy, is to link demolition with stormwater management. Brenda Scott-Henry, director of green urbanism for Gary, said that whenever crews take down a property they create a three- to four-inch depression on the site and plant grass so that rain soaks into the water table rather than running off into sewage pipes.

In areas with severe flooding, her department is starting to install more extensive green infrastructure, such as infiltration beds made up of buried gravel that act like an underground sponge to slow down the flow of water.

These measures are crucial because Gary, like many older cities, has a combined sewage system that carries rainwater, sewage, and industrial wastewater to the treatment plant in the same pipes.

During heavy storms — which are becoming more common due to climate change —rainwater overwhelms the system, forcing the sanitary district to discharge huge amounts of raw sewage into rivers that lead to Lake Michigan, the region’s largest source of drinking water.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has ordered Gary to fix the problem, but doing so with traditional infrastructure would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

“If we have to spend that money, why not use it to address some of the other issues we have here, like high unemployment [and the need for] buffers to reduce flooding in severe weather events?” Scott-Henry said.

She plans to meet the EPA’s demands through a combination of gray and green infrastructure, as many Rust Belt cities are doing. Workers trained through a city jobs program for ex-offenders will maintain the plantings over the long term.

Rain gardens bring more direct benefits to neighborhoods, as well . In Philadelphia, several studies have linked a city-wide initiative to landscape more than 16 million square feet of vacant land — part of a stormwater-reduction effort — to reductions in violent crime and stress.

Those are urgent problems in Gary, where murder rates are high (though declining) and police have found the bodies of at least 7 victims inside abandoned homes.

Even more than safety, though, community organizer Jessie Renslow said she values the hope that greening projects bring.

“It’s easy to be cynical, because Gary has been planned to death, and people have had their hearts broken before,” she said. “The people who have decided to stay are ready for a positive reincarnation.” 



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No Dig Vegetable Garden

SUBHEAD: There are several styles of no-dig gardening, including straw bale gardening.

By Linda Ly on 5 March 2014 for Garden Betty -
(http://www.gardenbetty.com/2014/03/the-no-dig-vegetable-garden/)


Image above: Claw foot porcelain tub planter. From original article).

[IB Publisher note: This article wasn't posted for the cute claw footed tub, but for the thin, efficient, economic soil recipe that is described using mostly straw, alfalfa and newspaper.]

I started a new garden bed last fall, and I didn’t dig a thing. It actually would’ve been pretty challenging to dig anything, as I started the new bed in an old bathtub. In my backyard! Four months later, the first plants seeded are finally thriving, thanks to the longer days.

I inherited this vintage, enameled-steel clawfoot tub from the previous owners after I moved into my house a few years ago. They had it propped up under the feijoa tree on a stack of stones, and for many summers it was our repurposed party cooler, filled to the brim with ice and stuffed with cases of beer. But having the tub sit empty the rest of the year seemed silly, especially since we weren’t using it as an actual tub to wash anything in the garden.


Image above: Rusty clawfoot porcelain iron tub.

I envisioned turning it into a planter (especially a future planter for potatoes and sweet potatoes, where the tubers could be contained), but the massive size made filling it with good-quality soil a little cost-prohibitive, considering we needed to top off all our existing beds as well. I started looking into no-dig methods for building raised beds, which pile on layers of organic materials that decompose over a season to create humus-rich earth.

There are several styles of no-dig gardening, including straw bale gardening, lasagna gardening, and sheet mulching, but I was most intrigued with Esther Deans’ method, which appeared suspiciously simple. The Australian gardener and author promoted a style of no-dig gardening (you can still find her book online) that popularized no-dig gardens throughout the 70s and 80s, and inspired the ideas of permaculture designer Bill Mollison.

Deans’ method comprised a specific formula that started with newspaper and added fertilizer, alfalfa, straw, and finally compost. The layers could be built over a soft surface like grass or dirt — or even a hard surface like concrete, though the raised bed would have to be deep enough for deep-rooted vegetables to thrive.



Image above: No-Dig Gardening Chart.

I decided to try this method for filling my clawfoot tub, since straw and alfalfa are cheap and easy to come by at my local feed store, and I could use them to mulch and amend several other beds in the garden.

I started with about 10 sheets of newspaper layered in the bottom of the tub. In my case, they were less for weed suppression, and more for adding brown matter and providing food for the worms that will make their home in the tub.

Next came a generous dusting of fertilizer — I chose bone meal and blood meal, but animal manure or any high-nitrogen fertilizer would work. Rather than following the suggested application on the packages, I tossed in a few handfuls of each, then watered them in well. (A few handfuls is much more than you would typically use if you were fertilizing a bed, but in this case, the extra bone meal and blood meal is added to accelerate the breakdown of the layers.)

Then came the alfalfa. Alfalfa (also called lucerne hay) is the same stuff used as horse feed. It comes in bales that pull apart in 3-inch pads and makes an excellent base for a no-dig garden.


Image above: "Bale of alfalfa (lucerne hay)


Image above: Close uo of alfalfa.


With its super nutritious and high nitrogen content, it rots quickly, providing rich organic matter for plants and helping other materials decompose. I covered the bottom of my tub with two layers of alfalfa pads (about 6 inches), a few more handfuls of bone meal and blood meal, then soaked them thoroughly with a hose.

On top of the alfalfa, I added a thick layer of straw (about 12 inches, or double my alfalfa layer).

Straw is basically hay without the grains; it’s the hollow stems and dried leaves left behind after all the grains and seeds have been harvested. It’s not as nitrogen-rich, but breaks down quickly into compost and contains fewer seeds, meaning less weeds growing in your no-dig bed.

Really pack in and pack down the straw in your raised bed (even building the layer up to the lip), as it will greatly compress after a couple of months.


Image above: Bale of Straw.

Following the straw was another generous dusting of bone meal and blood meal, and another soak with the hose.

Finally, the topmost layer was a healthy addition of compost (about 3 to 6 inches). Whatever you use, it should be well rotted and teeming with microbes. This is the layer you’ll be seeding and planting in, so don’t skimp on the compost. Wet it down, and you’re ready to plant!

In a standard-depth raised bed, the ratio of layers would more likely look like this from the bottom up:

• 10 sheets of newspaper
• 3 inches of alfalfa (one pad)
• 6 inches of straw
• 3 to 6 inches of compost (or well amended soil)

Scatter bone meal and blood meal over each layer and saturate with water before adding the next layer. It might seem like you’re piling on a mountain of materials, but the alfalfa and straw will compress under repeated watering and reduce to about half their height by the end of the season.

The no-dig method also works for reviving an old raised bed; just omit the straw layer and add the rest on top of the existing soil. I had a bed sit empty and dry for a couple of months, and its soil had turned into heavy, compacted earth. I stacked on the newspaper, bone and blood meal, alfalfa, more bone and blood meal, then topped off with homemade compost, and sprayed each layer with water.


Image above: Neglected garden bed.


Image above: Alfalfa pads spread across raised bed.


Image above: Newly revived garden bed.

I didn’t plant in the bed, but watered it with the rest of the garden through winter and now have lush, aerated soil to plant in spring.

Going back to the bathtub, this is what it looks like today, planted with kale, turnip, and lettuce.


Image above: Leafy greens in clawfoot tub.


Image above: Portuguese kale.


Image above: Red lettuce.

I started everything from seed and they sprouted within a week. I watered like normal and did not fertilize the bed. (Though going into spring, I’ll be amending with fish emulsion or compost tea to replenish the nitrogen in the soil.)

I’ve read from a few sources that newly built no-dig beds work best with shallow-rooted plants until the layers break down into humus. But from the looks of it, my turnips (shown here in the foreground) are faring well so far.


Image above: Kale, turnips, and lettuce growing in bathtub planter.

I probably wouldn’t plant, say, carrots or daikon in a first-season bed as they’re very deep-rooted. I’d avoid planting peas and beans as they can be sensitive to the salinity in high-nitrogen fertilizers.
Excess nitrogen can also cause fruiting plants to produce lots of foliage but fewer flowers. By the second season, however, all that alfalfa and straw will have turned into rich black soil that’s ideal for all of those varieties.

Like any raised bed, you should top off and amend your no-dig bed every season with soil and compost. But once it’s established, maintaining it requires no real effort and reviving it (if you’ve neglected to plant or amend) requires no back-breaking digging. Simply build upon the layers again and let nature do the work.


Vintage bathtub planter.



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World made by hand transition

SUBHEAD: “Collapse now and avoid the rush.” - J. M. Greer. It’s good advice and I’ve taken it to heart.


By Lindsdey Curren on 4 August 2014 for Resilience -
(http://www.resilience.org/stories/2014-08-05/transition-to-a-world-made-by-hand)


Image above: Block print of urban gardening with bees by Lindsey Curren. From Kickstart Page video..

Peak oil commentator of Archdruid fame John Michael Greer, who foresees an inevitable if gradual collapse for industrial society, advises the equally doomstruck to “collapse now and avoid the rush.”
It’s good advice and I’ve taken it to heart.

Transition girl
About six years ago I moved to the small (but widely-hailed) city of Staunton, Virginia. Shortly afterwards, I helped start our Transition town here.

Say what you will about whether anybody’s personal efforts — from carrying your own bags to driving less to raising chickens — makes a damn bit of difference in a world hurtling toward climate hell and energy crisis, but I remain in the camp that would rather being doing something positive that builds resilience and community than helplessly awaiting the end.

And while I understand why some people become survivalists, since I live in town, hunkering down behind an AK47 in the basement, clinging to my cans of beans and freaking out over a would-be zombie apocalypse is not really an option.

That’s why I prefer the approach of Transition.

In the spirit of the old saying that “My meat is in my brother’s belly,” I’m trying to prepare my household for tough times ahead by working with my neighbors to make my whole town more resilient.

So, I’ve become a local resilience activist through our local Transition group. We’ve hosted talks on Transition issues, including peak oil, climate change and economic chaos. We’ve shown films on everything from bee keeping to starting beer businesses. And we’ve built the largest community garden in our city.

And transitioning others
With all modesty, I’d say that so far, it seems to be paying off. In lots of ways Staunton is a Transition town in the best sense of the concept — interesting people have been attracted to the area who are doing their own things with transitioning, even when that’s with a small “t” and those people aren’t directly part of our group and their work is with some other group in town, whether the Rotary Club or the microloan fund.

These other groups are behind great stuff — time banks, little libraries, mending circles, writing groups, art happenings, bike fix-it days, bike infrastructure groups, eco-swaps, maker spaces. As one friend quoted another Staunton resident recently, “It’s not like being in New York, but it is like living in a New York neighborhood.”

Okay, we’re not Manhattan…or Brooklyn, but I’d put our small city against anyplace in America for resilience cool.

And the longer I live here the more I’m taking Greer’s advice to heart. The weird thing is, collapse sure does feel a lot like the good life!

It’s definitely fun to walk the resilience talk.

Chop wood, carry water
But it’s also serious, preparing us for an economy that’s sure to be much lower-tech in the future as cheap energy runs out. Whether it gets down to what James Howard Kunstler would call a “world made by hand” I’m not sure.

But we should certainly be prepared for big changes in how we get our daily necessities. That’ll mean not just gardening and preserving food, but also mending clothes and making handmade Christmas gifts.

I’ve also recently launched an art project called 31 Days of Urban Agriculture to recognize and celebrate the unique world of food and farming in cities, the way it’s always been done. I’m doing this 31-piece series in linoleum block prints in honor of the Virginia General Assembly declaring October Urban Agriculture Month. Who knows, maybe they’re secretly preparing for collapse, too?

Each hand-cut piece takes me about 15 hours to produce from design to print. I chose this labor-intensive, old-timey medium to reflect the realities in small-scale food and farming — that they’re processes that take time and face risks. Just as harvests can differ from year to year, so hand-made prints can differ from block to block.

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I hope you’ll check out 31 Days of Urban Agriculture. It’s also a project on Kickstarter.com because I want to raise money to display it attractively and show it around the state and beyond. That’ll require putting a complete set of prints in high-quality frames, making a chapbook of essays to go along with the show, and then donating a full set of the prints to the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The project is about using art to get more people excited about growing food in cities, where 80% of Americans live today. And ultimately, that’ll help spread the word on just how inspiring, reviving and hopeful
collapse Transition, can be.

— Lindsay Curren, Transition Voice



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The Activist Rooster

SUBHEAD: We have long since stopped cringing every time Mr. Bernard reads the rooster riot act to the world.

By Alan Wartes on 16 September 2013 for Jailbreak Journals -
(http://jailbreakjournals.blogspot.com/2013/09/the-activist-rooster.html)


Image above: The urban rooster Mr. Bernard. From original article.

Four years ago last Valentine’s Day, my wife and I became backyard chicken wranglers. On a chilly Saturday morning, we acted on faith that spring was actually coming and bought four barely-out-of-the-egg hens at Denver Urban Homesteading’s weekly market. I had grown up helping to tend my family’s small herd of white leghorns, so I knew it didn’t take an advanced degree to succeed—and I had experienced first-hand the payoff we stood to receive in fresh eggs every day.

Never mind that we live in a typical urban neighborhood with ordinances prohibiting backyard “livestock” of any kind. That was not going to stop us. No one will ever know they’re here anyway, we thought, our own silent uprising against Really Dumb Rules. Take that, Monsanto!

There was just one problem (which fellow chicken wranglers have probably caught on to by now, nodding and chuckling): Our little cotton ball herd of baby chicks was only mostly hens. Three out of four isn’t bad, but that last 25 percent was all rooster. So much for stealth mode.

Now, the woman who sold the chicks guaranteed hens, so we could have traded him in. But that just seemed wrong, somehow. Sexist, certainly. Besides, it was a 50-mile round trip to her farm on the prairie—hardly in keeping with our goal of more sustainable, responsible living. And speaking of sustainability, wasn’t a rooster a necessary part of the equation if we wanted continued returns on our investment?

So, our daughter christened him “Mr. Bernard” and we gave him full citizenship. (Let the court records show that he has done his part to contribute several more cotton balls to the community since his reprieve.)

But there is no denying he is a noisy and aggressive little cuss. Once he really found his voice and his machismo, Issa and I expected to be met at the door every morning by S.W.A.T. or a mob of people with pitch forks. We decided to head that off at the pass by taking our most radical action yet: talking to the neighbors and listening to their thoughts. In essence we said, “We’d like to keep this guy around, but if that is intolerable to you then we’ll settle for a potluck BBQ instead. You bring potato salad.”

The vote was unanimous: Thumbs up on Mr. Bernard. Some even said they liked the “ambiance” he provided as it reminded them of their rural childhood. One man threatened to buy a replacement rooster himself if we got rid of the bird. Granted, not all neighbors will be as accommodating as ours, and the experiment might turn out differently on your block.

But I wonder what the outcome might have been here had we erected a stockade of “private property rights” and “you’re-not-the-boss-of-me” defensiveness. It might have cost us a rooster to offer the neighbors a say-so. But what we stood to gain—a small step in the direction of genuine community—was far more valuable. The relatively trivial conversation about roosters planted the seed of an idea in our neck of the woods that will surely come in handy as the current rearrangement of modern life picks up speed: We are in this together.

Here’s the part that’s most important to our collective conversation about the need for a jailbreak and how to go about it: Busting out of the faulty beliefs and habitual thinking that imprison us does not always involve storming the obvious strongholds of power, injustice, inequality and oppression. That’s our goal, sure, and we will get there.

But sometimes the jailbreak is about facing our small fears, escaping the daily ruts that hijack our potential to be free, confronting little pockets of injustice and oppression with courage and grace, building solutions out of whatever is at hand. In fact, true crisis is never “global” even when it gets its own theme music on the nightly news. Real trouble will always present itself right in your time zone and challenge your beliefs—and the structures you’ve built to reinforce them—at point blank range.

Can we just agree from the beginning that there are no small or trivial freedoms? Every declaration of independence from old choices and worn out ways of being is equally powerful and profitable in making a new world.

We have long since stopped cringing every time Mr. Bernard reads the rooster riot act to the world. (By now, the neighbors have all had a taste of fresh eggs.) And this morning we heard a sound in the distance that brought a big smile to our faces: Somebody else in the neighborhood has a new rooster.
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