From my Santa Cruz Indymedia post:

The weather is warming and this years summer crops at the Beach Flats Community Garden are coming up. It’s been over a year since the Garden was first threatened with closure by the overburdened and resource-strapped Community Center which oversees it. Since, members of the community have banded together not only that once, but again last December, to make sure the garden stays open, the second time in the face of city budget cuts. Despite the threats, gardeners continue to plant, tend and harvest.

Calabasa a la jardin de la comunidad de la playa en Santa Cruz

But why are we still in a situation where the rich get to decide the best uses for land, while hard working, intelligent, compassionate, humble workers just do what we’re told?

The “Slow Money” principles (obviously drawing it’s name from the Slow Food movement) is attempting to address this issue. It feels like it’s in infancy stage, but there could be some excited ideas here. I’m personally convinced there is something to banding people together to buy back farmland for our collective good. Maybe collective purchase of land is our next step together in taking back our food system.

My friend David and his girlfriend have been turning turkey eggs for the past several weeks in an incubator at their house. Finally, the turkeys have arrived! The turkeys will be going back to live on the farm soon after their incubation and hatching in Santa Cruz. Click on the picture to get a close up view. They are so cute!

Silence! The units are a little different, but the concept is very familiar. Observe:

P(Rain) = Q(Uncovered Wood)/Q(All Wood) U “Oh, it’s not going to rain this week.”

This formula illustrates the probability of rain as being equal to the percentage of vulnerable wood you left exposed after saying, “Oh, it’s not going to rain this week.”

But we are not done yet. Notwithstanding the above:

P(Rain)=0 if TankRefill () = False

This states that no matter what, it will not rain if you don’t refill the water tank.

Awesome.

(Sorry this is just an image still from the video, but click on the still to get to the video. Darn wordpress.com! No embed for Kaltura videos!)

Unsafe water and lack of basic sanitation cause 80% of all sickness and disease, and kill more people every year than all forms of violence, including war. Many people in the developing world, usually women and children, walk more than three hours every day to fetch water that is likely to make them sick. Those hours are crucial, preventing many from working or attending school. Additionally, collecting water puts them at greater risk of sexual harassment and assault. Children are especially vulnerable to the consequences of unsafe water. Of the 42,000 deaths that occur every week from unsafe water and a lack of basic sanitation, 90% are children under 5 years old.

I found this video because it’s part of a contest for the NTEN conference, a gathering of techies in the non-profit sector, which I am attending in San Francisco this year. Yes, I’m a non-profit techie. Isn’t it amazing what a little nerd plus new media can do!?!

If you’re in the Bay Area, Santa Cruz-based Happy Girl Kitchen is doing Fermenting and canning workshops which you can attend for a small fee. The day is complete with local organic lunch! Fermenting and canning your own food is a great way to use up the excess harvest from the garden and is good for the planet since there are no food miles from your plate to your backyard.

Red and Golden Beets from Route One Farm

Also introducing “Foodie” category!

Andrea's Plot Plan

Andrea, the author, went to a permaculture course in her hometown of Vancouver, BC, and learned a simple method of charting out the plan in a grid:

I find this a great way to quickly see if I’ve got any obvious empty spots in a bed. In one bed, for example, I just had carrots and tomatoes, which left big blank spots in the “Harvest” row for spring, and in the “Plant” row for fall. By adding an overwintering vegetable such as leeks or Brussels sprouts to that bed, I could plant in fall and be harvesting the next spring – getting that much more action out of a single bed.

From, Planning for a year-round harvest (or How I went from slacker to Serious Planner). Check it out!

If agriculture is indeed the building blocks of modern civilization, a concept I first understood from reading Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, then Family Farms Pulled Us Out of the Great Depression by Jay Greathouse, definitely makes sense. Greathouse discusses parities for food prices which enable farmers to price their crops at or above the actual costs of the raw materials, a concept long gone during these days of globalized agri-business.

Our recovery started in 1942, the year the Steagall Amendment to the War Stabilization Act mandated farm parity, but the war got the credit. We then had ten years of economic stability until 1952 when the Steagall Amendment was allowed to expire.

In 1952 “export-oriented pricing” replaced the New Deal policy that had put farm prices in balance, or parity, with other prices. That New Deal policy worked effectively with farmer-approved “supply management” that cost far less than today’s subsidies to Agri-business.

Farm parity laws that created a fair price floor for all raw materials was the main agent for moving the United States out of the Great Depression of the 1930s. This support of prices allowed farmers to afford to stay on the farm and rebuild the United States economy literally from the ground up.

…

True democracy requires an agriculture of numerous family farms, owned by farmers rooted in their communities, not by corporate landlords. Agri-business is the work of corporate landlords.

Our exporting of grain at “globally competitive” prices injures Third World farmers and results from our failure to keep commodity prices at parity (balance) with other goods and services. The U.S. farm community has seen a 50% fall in the number of farmers during a 30-year period of “export-oriented” agriculture.

What do you think?

Strawberries. Right after taking the shot, I ate them!

I’m by no means an expert gardener. In fact, this is really only the third season I’ve been growing food. But I have to say this is my favorite batch of plants yet. I dug up a patch of the lawn outside my apartment and took care to only carve out enough space that I could manage on my own. The first round of plants included four tomatoes (two in pots), two zucchini, four butter lettuce, a row of baby spinach, a row of spring mix, three broccoli, one green bell pepper, an eggplant, several basil plants, cilantro, parsley and a couple strawberries. I was worried when the lettuce started disappearing due to a hungry gopher, but fortunately for me, the neighbor cats took care of him before he did too much damage. However, I soon discovered the cats love to sleep and dig in the garden. A tomato and a zucchini start suffered broken stems due to cat nap. They have since recovered and since the cats saved me from doing the dirty gopher removal work, I am happy to have them nearby. (Though I do think they dug around newly planted seeds where I haven’t seen one sprout in over two weeks.)

Black Crim Ripening

Zucchini, zucchini, zucchini

The passionflower is going off! A few fruits are appearing and the monarch butterflies can't get enough.