Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Growing plants, particularly for food, and particularly in community, is a big part of the Transition experience and ethos. Many people in transition are active permaculturists. At the very least, most of us want to eat plants grown organically from good seed.
I’ve been advancing my guerilla gardening efforts recently, with a significant new raised bed now beautifying my nature strip, as seen in the featured picture. I thought in this post I could provide a brief overview of how to build a cheap raised bed, either for use on your nature strip or in your front or backyards. This overview might seem a bit basic for the handy builders among you, so I direct this post to those who are beginning their journey into guerilla gardening and urban agriculture.
As soon as we begin using the word “farming” again, all of the implicit associations with farming begin to reemerge in our shared thoughts and language
Sandor Katz lives a couple hours across Tennessee from us, so on a delightful April weekend we decided to spend four days attending his Wild Fermentation Intensive. Sandor is quite the celebrity these days — after profiles in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Michael Pollan’s new book, Cooked, Sandor’s own encyclopedia, The Art of Fermentation, still in hardcover, has galloped through several printings for Chelsea Green. Readers of Resilience will find scores of references to Sandor over the past few years, as sustainability bloggers have come to recognize the importance of fermentation to sustainability.
"The only good aphid is a dead aphid" used to be my mantra. I would walk up and down rows of plotted trees, spraying the plants with Metasystox, oblivious to the risks to my own health. I didn’t bother with rubber gloves, a mask, or even rubber boots, leaving my skin exposed to this toxic pesticide. With the lid to the pesticide sprayer not properly sealed, Metasystox leaked down my back. Dizzy with nausea, I passed out. This was my harsh introduction to pesticides. It was also the last time I ever used anything toxic on my crops.
From Chapter 4 (Energy) of the latest Resilience guide, ‘Rebuilding the Foodshed’. This is a heck of a chapter…If you eat food, grow food, use energy, create energy, or make waste, you’ll find yourself fascinated.
There is little disagreement that urban farming translates into increased access to local, sustainable, and healthy food, and that this is a very good thing. But how is it done? What are the success stories of urban farming? And what exactly is a “foodshed?”
If you could boil our global problems down to seven words, they might be these: we don’t see where stuff comes from.
For years people and organizations from Frances Moore Lappé to Slow Food have sought to repair and restore our broken food system, making noticeable but still negligible progress. Surely more people today are aware that there’s a problem, and admitting that is the first step, as they say.
In Extraenvironmentalist #58 our correspondent Kevin joins us to cover permaculture approaches to our global challenges.
Too often, the same people who work our fields during the day, planting and harvesting fresh produce, spend their evenings in line at the local food bank. As large, centralized corporate companies increasingly mechanize their production and conceal it behind closed doors, what actually happens in our food system is hidden from us. With each generation, our communities continue to be stripped of our farm land, cultural heritage, and know-how. In a dystopic future we can imagine an agricultural landscape that is forbidden from ordinary humans; merely because of their anthropogenic pollution. Will it all be fenced off and mechanized?
How a group of farmers, high school students, and community volunteers are launching a little ship with a big message.
