New England Climate Summer

This week bicyclers from Students for a Just and Stable Future passed through Springfield on their New England Climate Summer tour.  We got them over to Gardening the Community and hooked them up with the Springfield Institute for a short bike tour of the city's North End.

On Thursday, they gave a presentation on climate change at the Forest Park Library and showed the following short film.  I'm going to watch it several times more until I really understand the feedback mechanisms that are bringing our climate so close to the tipping point.

Hope to see a lot more of these folks next year!

Make seedling pots, grow dishcloths, amaze your friends

Living in New England I've never tried to grow loofahs because they have a fairly long growing season-- about 150 days from planting the seeds till harvest-- but this may be the year I give it a try.  A good, sunny trellis growing against a western or southern-facing should do it.  Garden Guides has some good tips.

A home-grown loofah makes a great gift, but I really want to try making my own dishcloths from loofahs!  Tipnut tells how to prepare a loofah after harvest  to make dish and other cleaning cloths.  Sounds worth it!

But no matter what you'd like to plant this spring, it's time to start making seedling pots out of old newspaper.  Ancient Light actually sells a nifty little tool to make it  really easy,   But you can do it with a regular drinking glass or a jar; and eHOW has a video to shw you how.

You can plant your pot right in the ground and the newspaper will dissolve.  Use only black and white sections of the paper, though, unless you're sure the publisher uses only soy-based inks.

OK, another nice thing....

After I wrote about the rabbit, I went out back of the Arise office and noticed that one of the little ground-level apartments had a 3 by 5 elevated garden spot that had several iris plants surrounded by lots of weeds. I hollered hello through the back screen door, and a man answered.

"Would you like a tomato plant for your little plot?" I asked. "We're giving them away."

"Too late in the season," he said.

"No, we've got them in buckets, pretty big plants, you could leave it right in its container."

"OK," he said, so we went in the office and got one out of the window.

When I went out back a few minutes later, he'd cut down weeds growing in the back lot and was raking up trash.

"The plant looks pretty good, huh?" he said.

I agreed.

Cats, jobs, music, gardens

The cats broke into my room quite early this morning, bringing an end to my plans to sleep in. Maybe it's just as well. I have to finish a grant for Arise this weekend. More than anything, I'd like to be outside working in the garden, but most of that will have to wait for my next unemployment check and a solid block of time.

Last night I went up to the annual May Day event organized by Western Mass. Jobs with Justice which this year took place at the Campus Center Auditorium at UMass. Funny, I've always supported unions but never been in one!-- never any union at the places I've worked.

The speaker this year was long-time community and labor organizer Stewart Acuff. In his speech, he laid the moral and economic foundation for the Employee Free Choice Act, which strengthens the right of workers to unionize.

We gather on this May Day of 2009 at a time of great hope and great promise and a time of great challenge.

How we meet the challenges and opportunities which we face all around us will determine the near term future of our country, the quality of life for our kids and grandkids and possibly even the world.

Though some of us may have been divided in the past, we no longer have the luxury of division.
Workers, trade unionist, advocates and organizers of the poor and immigrants, environmentalists, feminists, LGBT activist, clergy and people of faith, community leaders, seekers of peace and warriors for justice, our individual destiny is bound up in our common destiny.

So we are bound by our common destiny, but we are bound even more tightly by our common values. You see, my brothers and sisters, we believers in justice and progress are bound by the fundamental thread of humanity - as old as the human species and the human spirit.

The Huffington Post has published his entire speech.

As usual, music was a big part of the celebration. Western Mass. is blessed with talent. Tom Neilson, Red Valley Fog, Verne McArthur, Jay Mankita and Jose Ayerve all performed, as well as the WMA contingent of the Raging Grannies.

I'm not on the inside of this, but it seems to be union organizing is ready to make the biggest gains in years.

11 a.m. and a quick glance out the kitchen window: I think my strawberries are flowering and I'm going to go look.

Three proofs: you can solve all the world's problems with greenery

Everything is connected, even if we don't always understand how and why.

1. A recent study held by two Scottish universities showed that even a little bit of greenery near our homes improves our health. Green space reduces health inequities between rich and poor, maybe by encouraging exercise or reducing stress. This is especially true for heart disease and stroke, two conditions much higher among the poor.

A Columbia University study found that asthma rates among four and five year olds fell by 25% for every 343 trees per square kilometer! Given that asthma rates have gone up 50% in the last 20 years, and no one knows why for sure, this astoundingly simple preventative needs to built into urban planning. Again, the researchers aren't sure if the effect is because trees clean the air of pollution, or because trees encourage children to go outside, where they are exposed to the microbes necessary to build their immune system.

2. Not all greenery is created equal, however-- when it comes to the vegetables we eat, your mother's cauliflower is not the same as the cauliflower you eat-- it has 40% less vitamin C than it did in 1975, broccoli has 50% less calcium and watercress has lost 88% of its iron-- and this is as was measured in 2001. You can read about the discovery in the 2001 Le Magazine. And the larger the vegetable, the lower the nutritional value overall. A 2007 Organic Center report shows that

The more a tomato weighs, the lower its concentration of lycopene, a natural anti-cancer chemical that makes tomatoes red. There is also less vitamin C and beta carotene, a nutrient linked to vitamin A.

Milk from high-production dairy cows has lower concentrations of fat, protein and other nutrition-enhancing components than the milk from dairy operations of 20 years ago or more.

Sweet corn, potatoes and whole-wheat bread show double-digit declines in iron, zinc and calcium. The time span of the decline varies depending on the product studied but generally ranges from 20 to 100 years.

Vegetables pumped full of water from fertilizers and then grown in nutritionally depleted soil are nowhere near as good for you as vegetables grown in your backyard in a raised bed filled with your own compost from backyard greenery.

3. Finally, while we are all becoming more familiar with the necessity of greenery for the survival of the planet in terms of global warming, consider the number of wars caused by scarcity of resources, in particular water and food. Geoff Lawton at the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia has been developing permaculture projects across the globe. This short video will give you a sense of what's possible if we are wiling.

Image from Inspired Economies.

You can make this!

Go to Gardens and Crafts for step-by-step instructions.

Coffee in your garden

A friend tipped me off to this: save your coffee grounds-- or even ask Dunkin Donuts or Starbucks if you can have theirs-- and use them in your garden as fertilizer. Check out all the ways you can improve your garden at Sustainable Enterprises. Photo: Joe Lencioni at Flickr

Soil is the skin of the earth

This Sunday my nephew and I are going to be digging in the dirt-- taking the first six inches of soil from my old garden and moving it to my new garden five miles away.

I tried to have a garden in my new place last year, but the end result wasn't great. The soil was sandy and didn't make a fragrant ball in my hand when I squeezed it together-- just ran out between my fingers. I'd forgotten what unenriched backyard soil is like.

For nearly thirty years I gardened in the same spot, the deep back yard of an inner city house. My tools were a garden spade, a shovel, garden shears, a wheelbarrow, a trowel and a claw. I turned the soil myself each spring and in the first years, the thatch grew so thick I'd have to beat the clods against the earth to shake loose the dirt. I bought bags of composted manure for the first years and I started a compost pile. Just about everything went into it: leaves, yard waste, food scraps, used kitty litter (minus the poop). A few times I mixed in a 30 x bag of bone meal to help the pile heat up. My compost pile was very informal, not even fenced in. Once or twice a year I'd turn it by taking from the top layers with my spading fork and moving them to another pile. When I got down to soil, , my shovel would slide into dark, rich, grumbly earth and I'd shovel it (and many earthworms) into the wheelbarrow, cart it over to my garden and mix it in to the soil's top layers. I'd get ten or twelve full wheelbarrows a year. Now multiply that by thirty years over a 40' by 60' plot, add years of grass clipping and other mulch, and you can see why I want my soil! That soil is my true wealth, accumulated through investment and hard work.

I don't exactly know how I came to care so much about earth, seeing as I grew up in the suburbs and the city, but I feel incredibly fortunate to have more than a passing understanding of how plants are born, live, provide food, and enrich the soil at the end of their season.

Last week the Associated Press said that according to a new World Resources Institute report, food production has been cut by about a sixth because of declining soil productivity. One-fifth of the world's cropland has deteriorated to some degree.

Fertilizer is a quick fix to improve crop yields, but the real solution is soil health: crop rotation, addition of organic material, less tilling, cover crops, erosion prevention.

The Nation has a good article on the roots of our food crisis and what can be done about it.

The current global food system, which was designed by US-based agribusiness conglomerates like Cargill, Monsanto and ADM and forced into place by the US government and its allies at the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, has planted the seeds of disaster by pressuring farmers here and abroad to produce cash crops for export and alternative fuels rather than grow healthy food for local consumption and regional stability

Please, grow something-- anything-- this season.

Rice rationing in Springfield?

This morning I was going to write about the sudden surge in rice prices as speculators take advantage of food insecurity (sort of like war profiteering, as far as I'm concerned) but I ran out of time. I'd also saved an article about the potential for rice rationing in the U.S. which I hadn't had time to read thoroughly.

On my way home from work I stopped at the Food Zone on Belmont Ave. for milk and dog food and sure enough! The twenty pound bags of rice were labeled "Limit 2 bags."

A Costco in California is limiting customers' purchases of rice to one bag each. Flour and cooking oil are also being rationed in some parts of the U.S.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that food shortages in the U.S. are imminent (although I could be wrong!) but we have certainly all felt the pinch of increasing prices. We're unlikely to be eating mud next month, as they are in Haiti right now. But what I am saying is that while we look for the larger solutions, we'd better be damn careful on a personal level. Look for food bargains. Don't waste what we buy. Appreciate what we have. And put a little bit aside just in case.

As a young hippy homesteading in Maine, I learned to identify many edible wild plants; I ate many of them-- with relish!-- and still remember most of their names and what they look like. Even though I don't expect to have to eat them for survival any time soon, that knowledge reassures me in some deep way.

Perennials! Got a big back yard or live near a vacant lot? Get half a dozen raspberry canes. In just a few years you'll have so many raspberries you'll have plenty to give away. Asparagus takes a little longer but is indescribably delicious. Remember grandmother's rhubarb patch? Strawberries spread on their own, too.

Of course a lot of people don't have yards-- 50% of Springfield's households are rental-- but just about everyone has the room and the light to grow a patio tomato. In the summer of 2008, we won't need that plant to survive. Yet maybe if we all could start remembering/discovering the taste of a tomato warmed by the sun, we would find ourselves gently guided toward greater control of our own destiny.

Rain barrels make a comeback

Springfield, Massachusetts is blessed with some of the purest and best-tasting water in the country, thanks to the state's largest uncontrolled river, the West Branch Westfield. This river fills the 1,135 acre Cobble Mountain Reservoir in Russell and Blandford; the reservoir then goes on to provide 37 million gallons of water a day to Springfield, Agawam, East Longmeadow, Longmeadow and Ludlow.

Rich in lakes and rivers, no place in New England is more than 400 miles from the ocean, With water so ubiquitous, New Englanders rarely give much thought to its availability..Yet the region experienced a moderately severe drought in 2002 and has had periods of abnormally dry or moderate drought conditions every year since then. Last August was the second driest in 122 years, according to Drought Monitor.

One old water conservation idea that seems to be becoming new again is the rain barrel. The Mass. Department of Environmental Protection has partnered with SkyJuice New England to provide rain barrels to Massachusetts and Maine communities through its Sustainability Grants. Western Mass, Agawam, Easthampton, Greenfield and Lee all applied for and received discount vouchers. Agawam is on its third year of the program, with the goal of reducing per-capita usage from 80 gallons to 65 gallons by 2017. Last year the barrels filled six times in six months.

Kathy Pederson at the Springfield Water and Sewer Commission says Springfield didn't apply for the program last year, but it is under consideration along with other water conservation measures for this year. She says one of the Commission members will be assigned to oversee conservation measures for Springfield within six months. Not only does this program help conserve water, it can save money for residents during our fiscal crunch.

What can you do with rain barrel water? Water your garden, wash your car, give your dog a bath.
If the rain barrel fully returns, maybe the next generation of children will relearn:

O little playmate
come out and play with me,
and bring your follies three,
climb up my apple tree.
Slide down my rain barrel,
slide down my cellar door,
and we'll be jolly friends
for ever more.

O little playmate,
I cannot play with you,
My dolly has the flu,
Boo hoo hoo hoo hoo hoo.
Don't have no rain barrel,
Don't have no cellar door,
But we'll be jolly friends,
Forever more.

The Two Pots

I'm not really a "chicken soup for the soul" kind of person, but the following unattributed tale got to me:

A Water Bearer in China had two pots, each hung on the ends of a pole, which he carries across his back.

One of the pots had a crack in it while the other pot was perfect and always delivered a full portion of water. At the end of the long walk from the stream to the house, the cracked pot always arrived only half-full.

For a full two years, this went on daily, with the bearer delivering only one and a half pots of water to his house. Of course the perfect pot was proud of its accomplishments, for which it was made. But the poor cracked pot was ashamed of its own imperfection, and miserable that it was able to accomplish only half of what it was made to do.

After two years of what it perceived to be bitter failure, it spoke to the water bearer one day by the stream. "I am ashamed of myself, because this crack in my side causes my water to leak out all the way back to your house."

The bearer said to the pot, "Did you notice that there are flowers on your side of the path but none on the other pot's side? I have always known about your flaw, so I planted flower seeds on your side of the path and every day, when we walk back, you water them. Without you being just the way you are, we would not have such beauty."

Correction to yesterday's post

Jerry just had some more back luck. Once he gets a job, as a homeless person, he will receive only $28 a month in food stamps, not the $98 I thought.

Once he is renting a room, and still working, he is eligible for $73 in food stamps-- again, not $98.
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put everything in late
still today I ate
my first cucumber