No Impact Man Southwest

Wow! I am watching No Impact Man. They just switched off the lights. Good for them. They are doing what I learned to do while living in Panama with the Peace Corps. And what my entire village is still doing. And what most of the world is doing right now while I sit here with two computers on - one playing the movie and one for late night work projects (or blogging in this case) - and a lamp and wood burning in the woodstove, refrigerator running, music playing in Clayton's room, little glowing lights everywhere charging mobile electronics and sucking phantom power, wireless internet blinking in the back room, mini-hot tub keeping itself warm on the porch, irrigation timers running on their batteries to water the garden, solar powered lights lighting the pathway from car to door. So all that energy is coming from the solar tracker in our yard, but still. American ways of living lightly are still on a whole other level than the rest of the world. I have grown soft since my return to the U.S.

I also watched a movie called End of Poverty? earlier tonight. (Getting my documentary fix). It's like Open Veins of Latin America on screen. If everyone in the world lived like Americans it would take 5 planets to support us. Okay, so I have heard that one before. But on the other end of the spectrum - if everyone lived like they do in Burkina Faso, we would need 1/10th of our planet. I hadn't heard that before. Measured by mass, there are more ants on the planet than humans.

I like that they did their No Impact project in phases. We're still eating up the non-local fare leftover in our cupboards and freezer. I have one can of pickled beets, half can of peaches, and a few jars of homemade jelly left in my cupboard from last year's garden harvest. Luckily the farmer's market is picking up and the co-op too. The co-op is trying with the 300 mile radius, but they aren't quite there yet. They're still selling stuff from Mexico. I guess that's better than New Zeland kiwi at WF. The co-op selection is improving with the season - more options in the produce section I should say. My peas actually came up! My tomatoes on the growing rack are looking much better than they did last year. I gave them a boost of fish emulsion recommended by farmer Romero for flats.

I'm having fun with this project. I'm very much looking foward to the summer adundance in the farmer's market. And I find myself still wanting to do more and have more time to do more. Who knows, if they economy keeps plummeting in NM I might have a lot of time on my hands. But learning to do this while working full-time is a great challenge too.

Sunday Dinner

Tonight for our locavore dinner we are eating lion's mane mushrooms ($24 for two large bags), asparagus ($4/bunch), fresh salad greens ($8 big bag), radish sprouts (holy cow they are spicy!) ($3) with overwintered carrots ($4) and goat cheese ($5) - all purchased at the Saturday Santa Fe Farmer's Market. Since we are still cleaning out of fridge and freezer the non-locavore fare included:  puerco adobado made by my friend and neighbor Tanya for a Community College Culinary Arts event last fall. It has been in my freezer since - yikes! Thanks T! Shitake Seseame salad dressing (CA), lemons, and olive oil (CA), balsamic vinegar (CT). The butter came from our raw milk butter supplier from Texas. We'll have the popcorn for desert. So dinner is about 90% local. Hmm...the condiments might be a challenge to find locally.

The lion's mane mushrooms is a gourmet treat grown by Desert Fungi. My husband thinks it taste like crab. I think they taste like gourmet mushrooms. We tried them a number of ways (all sauteed):
1) with olive oil only
2) with olive oil and balsimic vinegar
3) with butter and salt
4) with butter and balsamic
5) sauteed with olive oil then sprinkled with fresh lemon juice after out of the pan
6) with butter only

My favorite was butter and balsamic. My husband liked them with the lemon juice. Whatever you do remember Julia Child's advice when you cook them "don't crowd the mushrooms!"

Buen Provecho!

And So It Begins

And so the desert locavore adventure begins. Today we ate our first asaparagus dish of the season. Straight out of the ground, sauteed lightly in the pan with water only and then straight to the plate. No butter or garlic necessary. Delicious. I've never tasted something so fresh. (Especially after a long winter of wanna-be vegetables). I love spring!

Transplant

This locavore blog seems to be turning into a lot of gardening entries. But bare with me, it is that time of season. Spring! The weather outside is lovely, affording me full days of working outside. Getting my own garden plots going and helping neighbors with their ambitious efforts putting up greenhouses and such have kept me away from the Farmer's Markets and other locavore consumer havens. I'm still waiting for the asparagus to poke its little spikes up so I have an official marker to my locavore endeavor.

My next research project is to decide which local CSA to join. There is also this guy Sam who has a backyard garden operation over by the community college and my neighbor has organized a modified CSA with him as well. Last year we got a few bags of produce from him, it was pretty good. Stay tuned for more on local CSAs.

Both me and my plants are not from here. We are growing slowly accustomed to the desert landscape. But transplants take special care and special measures to make sure they survive and succeed.

A couple weeks ago my husband and I built a seedling growing shelf. They cost anywhere from $500 - $800 new. We built ours for about $120 - lights included - in about three hours. A bunch of 2x2s and screws are all it took really. It is great when you want to increase the amount of seedlings you are growing and don't have a greenhouse, sunroom, or otherwise. We found the design online and added a foot of width to support the size flats we are using. Two weeks later the plants are doing great.

This weekend (5 weeks before last frost date) I transplanted tomato, eggplant, and broccolli seedlings from the flats to small individual plots. The survived and are recovering from the move back on their shelves.

I also planted peas, a strawberry patch, and four bushes including Western Sandcherry, Currant, and a third edible bush I can't remember at the moment. (Too much sun I guess). I'm a little behind as last year I was successful in starting peas the first week of March. These were seeds saved from my 2008 garden. I hope they come up.

Back to the work week...onward.

Reorienting

Being in the nonprofit and activist world these days requires a lot of time on the computer. When I was living in Panama working in agroforestry I had callouses on my hands, a dark sheen on my skin, and plenty of room in my lungs from all the laboring on the land. Not anymore. Now my body is soft and underused. The mind is dominant. Exercise is rare. But yesterday began my reorientation and that of my garden. I dragged out the pick, spade shovel, round shovel and rake and went to work. My body aches today. But it is a good ache.

I wanted to reorient my garden beds to a north-south orientation to see if it makes a difference. I also dug paths down 2 feet rather than having flagstone throughout the garden taking up space. This gives me more access across the beds, and hopefully will encourage me to be more efficient in the growing space. In years past I've always had blotches of empty space left after everything was planted. Going for a more intensive garden in an already intensive space.

Here's the result. This is looking out my front/kitchen door.

Gardening in the Spaces Inbetween

This month I had the pleasure of spending some time in Oakland and San Fran, CA. I can't quite wrap my head around San Francisco. I feel as if I am floating everytime I am there. It definitely has something to do with those tall roads that go straight into the sky.

But Oakland definitely has its feet firmly on the ground. While there I visited People's Grocery's urban agriculture sites. First of all you must know I think PG is just about the coolest organization out there. I love their philosophy, strategy, look, creativity, strident adherence to empowerment. It is an inspiration to all of us at youth organizing types.




They, along with City Slickers on the other side of West Oakland, have taken over a number of small to medium sized plots and begun gardening and farming. Using a small staff and lots of volunteers and youth, they are harvesting upwards of 1500 pounds of produce from sites as small as 2000 square feet. They take this produce and sell it at affordable prices to families in the food desert of the urban inner city. That's the basics of their program, with layers wrapped around it like and onion that address food security, poverty, health issues, economic opportunity, and youth empowerment.




I wasn't able to work it out to be there when to help out with the work, but I did drive around a bit and snapped some pictures of the sites. Very Cool! Thanks People's Grocery and City Slickers for all you do and all those you inspire everywhere.

Check out the slideshow to the right.

My first experience of gardening after leaving home was in Minneapolis where I got myself a plot in a community garden. I was living in a basement apartment on the edge of Uptown (a mostly white middle class neighborhood) and the Phillips (a mostly black poor neighborhood). The garden was also poised at the edge of the two and used by people living in both neighborhoods. An urban bridge builder. It was a large and well established garden near the train tracks in what would have been an other wise abandoned piece of land. We had a shared toolshed, well organized compost piles, and organic regulations. I rode my bike there two or three times a week to plant, weed and harvest my 10x10 plot. I inherited a raspberry bush from the previous renter and enjoyed that luxury. I was vegetarian at the time so the garden provided pretty much all I needed for the summer. I remember being there for hours in between my summer classes and job. Enjoying the calm and peacefulness of the place in the middle of a loud urban environment. I would occassionally be there when other gardeners arrived to tend their own plots and we would trade accolades and tips on the specific varities of vegetables we were growing. That summer remains one of the strongest in my memories. I can still smell the tomato leaves and resulting lasagne.

Seattle where I have also spent a lot of time has an incredible network of community gardens. Immigrant farmers from various parts of Asia take over steep hillsides in between roads and houses and farm like they would were they at home in the steep jungle. Youth groups set up by rivers and in parks. Regular folks take over otherwise abandoned spaces. They call them P-Patches.

For the three years I was in the Peace Corps in Panama the women in the village of Cano Quebrado and I worked together to help each other grow kitchen gardens. We literally dug up the land and planted right next to their outdoor kitchens. We grew herbs, peppers, some vegetables. Whatever delicacies that didn't do well in the "monte" - cultivated plots in the jungle. They like to broadcast tomato seeds in areas that retained water all year round and let them grow like weeds or like the vines they really are. And grow they did. We had no shortage of water there, our struggle was fungus from being too wet. Many of those backyard gardens are still there today and the women still rotate from home to home helping with the work and trading varieties of vegetables and herbs.

Thankfully, Santa Fe now has a burdgeoning community and school garden movement. Although I no longer have a need as my own 2 acres keep me busier than I can handle, I am grateful that others are utlizing this incredible resource. The City has pilot gardens in three parks and will be adding a fourth this summer. Youth Allies have a plot in each garden and merrily grow what they need for their free Food Not Bombs meals served fresh and hot twice a months in City Parks.

Everywhere around the world there is evidence of people gardening in the spaces in between. Inbetween full-time work and home life, inbetween two houses, inbetween rich and poor, black and white, one country and another, jungle and kitchen, desert and rainforest, inbetween languages, cultural barriers, wet and dry, long-term and just starting...but we keep on gardening.

Falling in Love with my Tumbleweed Farm

My farm started as a garden. My garden started as a driveway. A severely compacted gravel ridden urban heat island. We moved into our home 4 years after it was built. The previous tenants were renters, the builder/owner had never lived there. The renter did the best she could with the outdoor space. And she took most of it with her when she left, leaving only a few thorny rose bushes, crowded periwinkle, overbearing mint, and zealous iris bulbs for us to work with. Despite the obvious challenge, my husband and I thought this was the most logical place to put the garden given it is right out our kitchen door, southwest facing and in “Zone 1” – the area you walk by everyday, multiple times a day as long as you leave the house. We dreamed of picking sugar snap peas and cherry tomatoes not yet hardened by the hot New Mexico sun each morning on our way out the door to work.

He was willing to do the digging, so dig he did one weekend while I was away. I came back to a space of about 200 square feet that he soaked, fought with, broke shovels and axes on and finally dug down as far as he could in concrete slab like clay we were calling earth. What happens to earth when you drive ATVs, construction equipment and cars over it for years. He got about 12 inches down and hit what felt like bedrock. We trucked in a thick layer of compost mixed it with the clay and quickly put in our first garden since it was already July when we finally unloaded our boxes at the house that first year. After a slow start after which we did a soil test and added lots of bonemeal for a needed nitrogen fix, we got a bumper crop of zucchini, and that was about it. I’m convinced that in the wild zucchini would be a pioneering species – the first to come in after a fire, volcano, or other such disturbance to repopulate the area. It does well anywhere! Funny enough, we’ve hardly gotten any zucchini out of our garden in the three years since. In fact every year we seems to get one crop that does better than all the rest, but it is never the same thing from year to year.

We did install a drip system that first year. Most of the water soaked down about 12 inches and then ran off like a sheet of rain on that bedrock– still too concrete underneath for it to penetrate. The downhill side of the garden and driveway got most of the watering that year. But over the years it has worked itself out. I am reminded of the Growing Power gardens in Milwaukee where I grew up. One the south side of the City where it is mostly concrete, they just lay topsoil mixed with compost on top of paved parking lots and grow tomatoes in raised beds. After seeing those big, red bright tasty tomatoes that came from the urban gardens, I firmly believe Nature will work with what ever you have if you give her enough attention, love and care.

The next year I just had just given birth to my son in the spring and was lucky enough to spend 6 months off work home with him through the growing season. During every single nap I plotted, planned, dug, planted, weeded, harvested, and enjoyed my summer garden. When he was awake I would sit him in his squishy practice seat in the middle of the garden. He would reach out for the nearest plant and gum basil leaves, corn stalks, and spinach as I picked through the tomato patch. His first experience of solid foods was from those green leaves fresh off the stalk. From the look on his face, he loved it as much as I love the earthy smell of tomato leaves when you brush up against them in the hot sun. YUM! Breathe deeply. My son and I spent most of our first months of his life together out in that garden and continue to every year since. Even in the winter we play in the garden. Protected by a coyote fence to keep the dogs and rabbits out, it is the warmest place in the whole yard in late afternoon. On a warm winter day, it feels like summer, and an exquisite place from which to watch the sunset.

In year two, I expanded the main garden plot adding about 80 square feet and taking over the front flower beds adjacent to the walls of the house for another 150 sq feet. I added a few key flowers and shrubs to the flower gardens to attract beneficial insects and filled in the rest of the space with kitchen herbs. I love the convenience of reaching out my front door for the fresh rosemary and thyme the soup recipe calls for. No more “I forgot the ____!” runs to the grocery store. The herbs last most of the winter too – I just consider them “dried on the vine” in January and harvest them brown.

We also added asparagus trenches, cherry tomato & basil patches, raspberries, fruit trees, rhubarb, and a few choice wild strawberries in our front yard the second year. This April will mark three years since we planted those asparagus. We are still learning what they need. Every year we have added about 2 inches of new compost, but they are still slow in coming and a few have died off. We are trying to stave off the crab grass that is threatening to take over the trenches. The third year is supposed to be the charm with asparagus. Once they pop their crowns up this year it will mark the start of our year as locavores. Asparagus season. I talked to a local farmer recently about having youth help out throughout the season. He said sure, anytime between asparagus season and blackberry season. His way of marking the start and the end of the natural farming cycle in northern New Mexico. I am planting blackberries this year too so we have a marker for the other end of the season.

The cherry tomatoes were the bumper crop that second year. We had so many our neighbors wouldn’t take any more from us. So we learned how to roast them, dry them, add them to every imaginable dish we could think of. We did manage to eat them all up before canning season came. Roasted cherry tomatoes with a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper are irresistible. Once we learned that, we did the tomato patch in pretty quickly. But many did fall to the ground and get squished, only to leave seeds that came up the next year as volunteer plants. They didn’t produce as much the second and third years but they keep doing decently enough.

It seems every year one plant shines above all others, and it is never the same one. The third year of our garden, we only expanded about 20 square feet to add a strawberry patch to the front yard. That year we got a bumper crop of pumpkins. Delicious sweet, round, small sugar pie pumpkins. My favorite. And enough purple green beans to freeze and can and last us into the early winter.

This year we plan to take over another portion of the driveway and turn it into terraced vegetable gardens, making room for more variety and more harvest to last us into the winter with canning and freezing. We will also plan green manures on the southwest side of the house in a fairly flat spot getting it ready for a future grain crop. I also plan to diversify our food forest. Last summer we added four raspberry bushes and 5 egg-laying chickens to the mix in the orchard. This year we will add 4 more chickens to give us enough for all our needs including baking from scratch. Then I’ll expand the wild strawberry patch – which my son treats like a treasure chest of delight!! The berries grow small but they are packed with sweetness. He cherishes them, months after the harvest ended last year he still went out into the yard everyday to check the plant for berries. Plus blackberries, sandcherries, and other native fruit bearing edible shrubs.

I’ve just started my tomato, pepper, eggplant starts two weeks ago. I am working slowly towards my plan of having a 1.5 acre urban farm that can provide us with food year round. We have a 2 acre plot but about .5 of that is too steep to do anything with except nurture it and help it go native again. Maybe plant a windblock on its contours. We will add 3 goats for yogurt and cheese this summer and focus on the food forest. I await the day when I can lie on my little patch of bluegrama grass under the pear tree and pick fresh, juicy fruit while harvesting eggs with my other hand while my son gorges on tamed wild strawberries, and my husband milks the goats. That is when I will have achieved true wealth and abundance in my life.

I’ve been closely observing the land I call mine for four years now. I’ve walked every inch of it, listened and looked closely where the sun falls, how the water flows, where the good dirt is still left, how the wind blows, how it changes over the course of a day. And still I feel as I am just getting a sense of it. The land is responding well. It was so abused, misused, and ignored when I arrived it has been a slow healing process. Working on one eroded, compacted patch at a time. Working on building corridors, stringing together patches that have a bit more vibrancy in hopes that the land in between will respond as well some day and fill in the holes.

I have built a relationship with my land and I love it. I get the sense it loves me too. She appreciates the care, the attention, the patience, the light touch I use. I don’t try too hard to get it to do what I want it to. If it doesn’t want to grow zucchinis one year, I don’t force it. I feed it as much as feels right and as much as I have time for. Every small act of kindness is returned. We have an incredible view of the mountains from my house. When I moved in, I thought that might be as good as it was going to get on that damaged spot. But the land has responded with vigor and vibrancy. There is still a lot more I can do for it. Many more troubled areas being cut open by rivers of water when the rain does fall or the snow melts off, needing to be slowed down and redirected, needing time to soak it in. But we are getting there. Growing together, learning from each other, listening to each others’ needs. I won’t force it to feed me all year long if it is not ready. I won’t put too many animals on it. In this way I believe we will continue to tread lightly but grow deeply together.