Yesterday I gave another Organic Vegetable Gardening Class at the Community Garden. As we are beginning to transition the beds to the new growing season (cool season, in our year round growing rotation), the topic was “Soil Preparation.”
We began with a reminder of the adage:
Feed your soil. Your soil feeds your plants, and your plants feed you.
On Sept 14, the Environmental Change-Makers showed the movie “The End of Suburbia,” followed by a community discussion of the impacts of peak oil (the end of cheap oil) and what we can do about it.
We concluded our evening with the “post-it” exercise suggested by Rob Hopkins on p. 155 of his Transition Handbook. Participants in our evening discussion were given 3 Post-it notes, and instructed to write on these the answers to three questions.
On Sept 20, the Environmental Change-Makers held a full-day event in Los Angeles called “Life After Oil: Designing the Transition.” In this event, we explored the Transition concept originated by Rob Hopkins in response to the twin crises of peak oil and climate change. Read more about our “Life After Oil” series here.
The following is the “What worked, What didn’t work” analysis the group did at the end of the event.
This week it’s time for another garden class at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity. One of our regular participants requested the topic “seed saving.” I scheduled the topic for now, September, when some of the first seeds from summer vegetables are coming ripe in our Southern California gardens.
I gave an organic vegetable gardening class at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity on “Vegetable Rotations.” The eventual goal of the class was to explain how, when I did the initial design for the Community Garden, I’d integrated vegetable rotations into the design. The garden team is getting ready to plan their cool season plantings.
Recall the old jingle: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” Power Down is the kind of Reduce that no one today likes to think about: reducing our energy consumption. It’s the ultimate global warming solution. And it’s our very real future.
As mainstream media begins to pick up the story of global warming, we’re becoming aware that somehow we’ll magically have to reduce that intangible, distant, amorphous concept called “greenhouse gas emissions.” But what does lower carbon emissions really mean? As in, how is it going to affect my life?
An excerpt from our forthcoming book: Environmental Change-Making …
In the end, self-limitation is the only answer that counts, but that is the answer that no one wants to hear.
–Richard Heinberg, PowerDown
In keeping with our present-day love for the pat jingle, environmental educators crafted the familiar Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. National environmental groups now offer “Ten Things You Can Do,” “Twelve Things You Can Do.” The number keeps changing. Yet our journey toward the future won’t be accomplished with a specific number of simple things. You can’t put the next century of transformation into a neat sound bite.
Last night we held a “Greener House Cleaning” meeting at the Environmental Change-Makers. I’d read about Green Cleaning Parties through Women’s Voices for the Earth. I contemplated signing up for one of those, but after reviewing their materials I decided I could do better, and reach further, by simply sharing my own experiences.
My journey to Greener House Cleaning began when my son was a baby. As I watched him crawl across carpets we’d previously bug-bombed for the cat’s fleas, and teethe on tables I’d “cleaned” with Endust, I worried about the chemicals he might be ingesting. I knew there had to be a better way. Of I went to the local healthy foods store (appropriately named Mothers) to get “greener” house cleaning bottled sprays and products. But are these really greener?
For years I’ve followed the “Transition Towns” movement in the U.K. via the blog of its founder, Rob Hopkins. Now, finally, I feel it is time to try out some of these ideas here in Los Angeles.
If I’ve been a bit sporadic in my posts here, there are a few reasons why. Here’s one:
The Community Garden
The little church in my neighborhood where we hold our Environmental Change-Makers meetings decided last fall to rip out their side yard and convert it into an edible landscape. Guess who jumped in to design the garden layout? The construction effort took most of the spring as we ripped out 1,250 square foot of lawn and replaced it with artistically shaped raised beds (Peter had seen a photo of the gardens at Villandry). I designed a garden rotation and tried to lay out the vegetables in a symmetrical, aesthetically-pleasing fashion.
The Community Garden at Holy Nativity serves a charitable and social justice purpose in that most of the produce will go to feed the hungry through the local food pantry and similar distribution organizations.
Additionally, this garden serves tremendous environmental purpose. In the midst of a neighborhood of manicured chem-lawns and ornamental yards, this garden proclaims that front yard vegetables can be beautiful. Its corner location places the issue of local food sources right out in public view. It represents a return to functionality for city land which had been nonfunctional for several decades. Through our workdays (and a series of gardening classes) we are helping to educate people about what it really means to “work the soil” plus the basics of organic and edibles gardening. Future additions such as rainwater collection barrels will highlight other environmental solutions. And the garden creates a focus around which to rally a community, when healthy and vital communities are such an important part of our journey toward Sustainability.
Plus, we’re having a lot of fun!
Yesterday, we went to the garden and participated in the first major harvest. It seemed like a “light” harvest, in that many of the plants are just coming into their first produce. But when we began to weigh it, boy, did the numbers add up. We harvested 35 pounds of food!
You can read more about the garden on the Community Garden blog here.