I'm Lighting Candles as Fast as I Can, But It Just Keeps Getting Darker.

You've probably noticed I haven't blogged in awhile. You see, although I have been plenty bored this school year, it was not due to an overabundance of time. Acting on the notion that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness (or at least, go ahead and light the candle while cursing under one's breath), I volunteered at the beginning of the school year to help with the gardening at school. The district still mows the lawns and trims the trees, but anything beyond that is basically being left to go to the weeds, as there is not enough money to pay for groundskeeping time. There are several other people who have said they want to help me, but when it comes right down to it, I am the one who shows up.

The Rose garden

Our previous principal was overly fond of roses. He got a grant to have these planted several years ago. I think it is mightily foolish to have prickle bushes on an elementary school campus, but they are here now- and they do bloom nicely, so long as I deadhead the spent blooms every week.

Natives/Butterfly Garden-
but WHY plant roses in the playground area?!

These native plantings don't require much of me other than weekly weeding, and I prune up the limbs on the young trees in an effort to encourage them into a shade-giving shape. Once the trees are mature, the district will (budgets allowing) take over maintenance, and most of the plants underneath will likely need to be removed due to lack of sunlight. But that is a few years away yet. For now, weed and wait.

This planting area outside the office used to hold palms trees, but the district gardening crew removed them because they thought the trees were cracking the pavement. I successfully grew both lettuce and broccoli there until the crew came back through and planted these flowers (amaryllis relative, can't recall the name). I added the pineapple guava shrub in the middle just to thumb my nose at them, and now I water and weed the bed weekly.

The Kindergarten Vegetable Garden
(Say that ten times fast!)

This was part of my older son's Eagle scout project, and it took a few hundred hours of time from me to help him raise the funds for those barrels. We originally wanted to build raised beds, but we couldn't build anything on campus without paying the carpenter's union for a foreman to come out and supervise. However, they didn't object to planters. These barrels are made in Canada from recycled plastic (I tried to find a USA source and simply could not, but I figured North American sourcing was better than shipping from Asia).

Jillian displays the merchandise.

We raised the money to buy them by collecting Capri Sun bags at lunchtime, cleaning them, sewing them into bags, and selling the bags. And when I say "we", I mean mostly "me". I had a few student helpers at lunchtimes, and Ben did come help with the after-school selling. (He was of course in charge of organizing the installation and planting of the garden.) But it is now the job of parents and kids to weed it- and me to water it every week (for obvious reasons, the school has the kind of spigots that require a special tool.)

These are some of the potted trees on campus. Aside from adding pleasant greenery, these often get used as set dressing when there is an event/concert at the school. Several years ago I salvaged five of these from the trash, where the janitor had put them because they died for lack of watering. I took them home and watered them. They came back to life. I brought them back to the school. I convinced the janitor to start watering them every week. Someone repotted them in cedar barrels. Many years later, the pots are rotting out, and the district no longer has the funds for that janitor. When Ben's fundraiser managed to come up with more money than was needed to finish the kindergarten garden, I started using the money to buy new barrels for the trees. And, of course, I water them.

One of several rows of bungalows on campus

My kids' school was built for about 500 students. Expanding the capacity to 1100 has required that a few dozen portable classrooms be added- not cheap, but cheaper than building new schools. To humanize the asphalt-ringed mazes of buildings, some previous PTA members placed pleasant succulents in cedar barrel planters in front of each building. But, as with the trees, the barrels have started to rot.

When a barrel goes bad.

So, when I finished with all the trees that presently needed new digs, I started on the planters. I have retained many of the succulent plants at home for some rest and recuperation- I remember loving to tear apart the leaves on silver dollar/jade plants when I was little, and apparently that hasn't changed with today's kids. In the meantime, I'm trying various other plants. On the row above are amaranth, tomato, squash, chard, artichoke, and strawberries. And of course, I will be watering them over the summer.

Sweet potatoes in a Barrel planter.

With so many bad things happening in our district (all arising from a lack of funds), I am trying to create a silver lining to the accumulating clouds. I have this grandiose notion that if the kids come back to school with a veggie garden already growing, I can positively influence the culture of the school in a healthy living direction. Also, people behave better when they are in well-tended, vegetation-rich environments. Having a clean, attractive campus is a real benefit to student well-being. I am aware of the possibility that summertime vandals will piss in the plantings and kill them all. I can only try.

This squash is happier here than the
same vine in my garden at home.

There are still 20 more cedar barrels that will need replacing in the next year or two. So I gotta keep making and selling the bags. But that's enough for today. Next time: More Food Action.

Been There, Read That

Over the last few years, several people have asked me why I don't write a book about my adventures in urban homesteading. There are two answers to that question. The first is "I tried, but it wasn't long enough to be a book." The second one is "Because someone else already did." Novella Carpenters "Farm City," written about her efforts at urban farming and livestock production in Oakland, CA, was published more than two years ago. I found it hilarious and informative, but far too profane for most of my friends to truly enjoy. Any treatise on Permaculture would tell you everything I have learned and more, but they are usually just that- long, sometimes tediously academic treatises, expecting the reader to slog through pages of plant guilds and the advantages of biodynamic farming, when all they want to know is how to set up a backyard chicken coop.

Then last week I checked out "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Urban Homesteading." Mildly insulting title notwithstanding, it is a comprehensive beginner's guide to increasing one's independence (in the practical sense) without migrating to the countryside. I don't do everything they discuss, and certainly don't do it in the exact manner they  describe. But if you want to move beyond growing summer tomatoes and try something a little more radical (the root word of which  is the latin "radix", meaning "root", amusingly enough), then this is a quick read and a fine place to start your study.

Come Mista Tally Man

It's banana blooming time again. 

I have learned from past experience that this variety (I don't know the name- the tag was long ago lost in the mulch by the rummaging of kids and chickens) produces far more bananas than I can use for cooking. The kids don't find their slippery ripe texture to their liking for fresh eating, so lunchboxing doesn't help much.

Besides, when the 'nanas start filling out, they get so heavy they threaten to tip the tree. So as soon as the plant has produced a few more hands (the "bunches" that you buy in a grocery store are properly termed hands; a bunch is the entire enormous pseudostem full of as many as a hundred bananas) imma gonna cut off what is left of the flower and see if I can cook it. Anybody have a recipe suggestion?

Live and In Person

I saw a bakfiets yesterday. A real, Dutch bakfiets, on the streets of Long Beach by Whaley park.

"But what on God's green earth is a bakfiets?" I hear you cry. Only the coolest euro-hip kid-carrying cargo bike ever! It looks like this.


The one I saw yesterday was carrying a toddler and a baby, and was ridden by a guy named Michael Wolfgang Bauch. I know this because, after stopping him to ask where he got the awesome wheels, he told me that he was a filmmaker. He recently finished a film called "Riding Bikes with the Dutch", which will soon be screening at LACMA. Here's his website:
http://everydaybike.com/

I told him about my Madsen bucketbike (http://www.madsencycles.com/), and he was kind enough to not scoff at my American wheels, and share my enthusiasm for going car-free for short trips. I think it was the high point of my week. 

I didn't Know Birds Could Do That

I've never seen anything like it. A pair of goldfinches (Michaelson assures me that is what they are) wove a nest on the underside of one of our banana tree leaves. I think it incorporates fibers from the leaf itself in order to support the weight.

It gets bounced around by the breezes an awful lot, but hey, maybe birds like that.

I haven't seen the chicks yet, but I can hear them peeping from across the yard when their parents show up with lunch.

Goldfinches aren't supposed to breed in this area, but nobody told this pair. I hope we get to see the chicks when they fledge, and before they fly away. The father has been a real bright spot in the yard. I don't have a photo, but he looks like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Goldfinch

Spread 'em

I know, it looks like I was trying to make a Transformers birthday theme tree. In reality it is my most recent effort to turn a tree with a relentlessly upright growth habit into a spreading shade tree.

When a tree resists my efforts to prune it into the shape I want, I resort to bending the twig, as it were. Sometimes I tie limbs together, sometimes I bungee cord them to stationary objects. And sometimes I hang things from the branches to weight them down until they conform. K'nex were well suited this time because I needed so many weights, but relatively light ones. Besides, it was easier to pillage the kids' old K'nex bin than drag out a ladder and get down the box of Christmas ornaments. 

Although that would arguably have been prettier.

Calling Our Food by Name

This didn't get published on Our Mother's Keeper, so I think I'll just throw it up here.
Ohp, they did post it! But how did this whole post end up in boldface. Sigh. Really must work on my technical skills. 

My mother’s parents were both school teachers. But they had 6 children (five boys plus my mother) and wanted to teach them the value of good honest manual labor. So they also ran a small dairy farm- the sort of thing where you keep few dozen milk cows on pasture just off the highway that runs from your town to the next town over. That was where the high school was, anyway, so it was fairly convenient to do the milking and feeding morning and afternoon. They sold the milk to the neighbors. They kept a quarter-acre vegetable garden beside their adobe home, and when they wanted chicken for dinner, Grandma caught and killed one from her own coop (while my mother hid in a tree to avoid being asked to help).

By the time I came along, the flock had disappeared, chicken came on a Styrofoam tray from the grocery store, and there were only a few cows left. I got to visit the milking barn as a small child, and I still remember grandpa grabbing a handful of oats from the hopper to snack on while he prepared a cow for milking. (He gave some to the cow, too, of course.) Raised on supermarket 2% milk, I couldn’t stomach the creamy stuff- certainly not when it was still warm from the cow, no matter how enthusiastically my older relatives raved about it! The beef, however, I was more than happy to eat. Old dairy cow isn’t much good for steaks, but pressure canned cuts make for excellent gravy over potatoes or brown bread. We sometimes came home from visits to Grandma and Grandpa with cans of beef, labeled with the year and a name identifying the cow from which the meat had come.

Fast-forward 35 years. I keep half a dozen free-range chickens in my backyard for the eggs, fertilizer, pest control, and general amusement. My children are involved in their care and feeding, making sure they have water during the day and locking them safely in their coop at night. It’s nothing compared to getting up a 5 a.m. to milk a dozen cows, but it’s still a responsibility for the well-being of another living creature, and a connection to their food. Between “the ladies”, our fruit trees, and our vegetable garden, my kids understand better than most of their classmates just how their bellies come to be filled every night.

 We also keep chickens for the psychological salve of knowing that at least we are doing some small thing to avoid complicity in the various horrors of factory farming without giving up animal products. That’s not to say this is a chicken sanctuary: when a hen gets too old to lay reliably, we kill and eat her (mostly in soup or stew; the meat on a three-year-old chicken is remarkably tough.) Yes, I know, vegetarianism is an option for avoiding the blood and sins of industrial farming. But my daughter is decidedly allergic to peanuts, mildly allergic to soy, and politely but firmly declines to consume nearly any other nut. We’re working on expanding our non-animal protein sources (I’ve got sapling almond and macadamia nut trees planted in the hopes of changing her mind), but we’re going to have to keep going with the moderate animal protein consumption for now.

If I could keep a milk cow, I totally would. Ditto for a dairy goat. But I’m in urban/suburban coastal southern California. One of my neighbors got in trouble with the city just for having a pet potbelly pig that got too big for his “pet” designation. Milk is just going to have to come from the store. Urban meat production, on the other hand, we are still trying. If you’re vegetarian or vegan, I totally respect that, and strongly suggest that you not read any further. To the rest of you I say: rabbit tastes just like chicken. Well, dark meat free-range turkey, anyway.

Honestly, my rabbit raising efforts have been a failure so far. My first buck (that’s a male rabbit, we called him Roger) died of heat stroke, before I learned to put soaking wet towels on top of the hutch on hot days for some evaporative cooling. Jane, my first doe, refused to breed despite being given her pick of two different bucks. (The kids got an eyeful watching the bucks try to woo her. I’ll have to get back to you all on whether or not having one’s first glimpse of sexuality be of a doe kicking the butt of the buck attempting to mount her is useful in preventing teenage sexual activity, but I’m thinking it might be.)

This spring I rallied my determination and acquired a new doe. This meant that it was time to cull Jane. I only have so many hutches. She was over two years old, but I’m opposed to wasting flesh as much as I am opposed to cruelty. So my husband gave her one last cuddle- or tried to, she was always crotchety- then quickly dispatched her and skinned the carcass. (I skinned and cleaned Roger’s carcass when he died, but I’m still too lily-livered to personally kill a mammal I knew. I’m working on it.)

Then I got cooking. We got a significant part of four dinners from Jane: rabbit stew, chopped rabbit meat in orange-ginger sauce over rice, rabbit adobo (Filipino marinade), and then finally the broth from boiling the bones went into a tomato-corn soup. Yes, she was a big rabbit, and we eat meat in small portions. During the second dinner, my 13-year-old was having trouble getting the somewhat fibrous meat out of the ladle and onto his plate. He muttered “Jane, stop fighting me and get out!” And then the meat did. And then, he ate it.

We don’t just know where our food came from; we know it by first name. Eat your heart out, Michael Pollan.