What’s in the ground:

So it’s the first day of September and the second day of a five day heat wave. It’s a good testament to this season. But I’ve not let that stop me from getting some lettuce mix and spinach in the soil. I admit I sowed it when it was still 70 degrees outside, but I’m hoping that the soil temperature will allow germination and by the time the seedlings pop up, they will be enjoying some cooler temperatures. But I just couldn’t wait any longer, so the lettuce is in, spinach will be next week.

What’s going on in sustainability:

On Sept. 19th at the Programs Employing People Center in South Philadelphia, a great group of people will be hosting a dinner called STAKE. The dinner is modeled after the Brooklyn dinner called FEAST and their mission is for a stake in the Philadelphia community, a  stake in the arts and in creative thought, a  stake in local organic food, and a stake in local economy.

So when I was approached to help coordinate the local produce buying for the dinner, that mission statement was enough to get me to donate my time. The way it works is that organizations can submit proposals to the organization. A dinner is then organized and all of the proceeds from people paying for plates will go to the organization that is voted on by the people in attendance.

I love this model for a few reasons. The first is that it really empowers people to learn to vote and speak with their wallets and purses. Too often in this country people confuse complaining about where tax money goes with trying to eradicate tax money in general; this is why libertarians piss me off. Sure, some organizations can support themselves without grant money. But a group that teaches orphans to read can’t ask those orphans to foot the bill for the lesson. That’s why we as a community needs to pick up our less fortunate neighbors and give them a hand.

As I always say, you take your talents, divide them by your good fortune and use the remainder to help those in need. And that’s what this dinner will do. The second reason I love it is because it brings the arts and sustainability together. All people should be incorporating sustainable practices into their lives, from the mechanic who goes the extra mile to dispose of her oil properly, to the contractor who wants to use natural building materials. This dinner will bring a diaspora of cool projects under one roof and hopefully reward one group with some funds.

But that doesn’t mean the other groups won’t benefit. This is a great chance to expose many people to their projects. Plus, I’ll get to showcase all of the amazing produce being grown by the City Harvest Growers Alliance, who will be supplying a good portion of the food. So please, save the date and if you have any more questions, please comment on this blog.

Until next week, this is the note from the urban homestead.

As most of you are probably aware, local, organic and sustainable agriculture is near and dear to our hearts.  Last fall we took our road show to some regional farms to celebrate the Harvest season, and we had a blast.  So we’re doing it again!  That’s right, folks…it’s time for our SECOND ANNUAL HARVEST TOUR!

This year, in addition to the mouth-watering, belly-filling, community-prepared pot luck dinners and performances by little ol’ us, we are working with the Philly Opry folks to provide even more music from our friends plus stories, decorations, raffles and general wackiness to build on the good times we had last year.

These Harvest gatherings are open to the public but since we’re dealing with small, working, community-supported farms, space (parking in particuar) is somewhat limited.  So, if you wanna come out, you’ll need to RSVP (click here for more info).

Here are the dates and general locations:

9/25/10 - Loysville, PA
9/27/10 - Berkeley Springs, WV
10/1/10 - Phoenixville, PA
10/2/10 - Carlisle, PA
10/2/10 - Glen Rock, PA
10/10/10 - Little Washington, VA (about an hour outside of DC)

These spots fill up fast, so let us know early if you’re interested.

We’ll reap what we’ve sewn…

HnHM

What’s in the ground:

I couldn’t believe that my first idea for this week was to start talking about shutting the season down. But don’t despair, I’ll hold off the talk of cover cropping for another month or so, there’s still so much much more food to grow. So, if you’ve reached that point where you’ve taken that last eggplant, or your tomatoes are just too burnt from the heat, try planting some beans or peas or any other legume in their place. It will fix the nitrogen like a cover crop will, but you’ll also be able to eat them. It’s important to put nitrogen producing plants back in the ground, especially after any night shade like tomato, eggplant or pepper, which take so much out.

What’s going on in sustainability:

I hope you all enjoyed the last few entries by Mr. Hoots. I loved everything he came back with and was really inspired by how much he learned and the whole mission of the trip in general. What’s so great about the earthship model is that it’s based purely on experimentation, the hands on kind, not the kind that’s done in some laboratory and then shipped to you in a box. It’s the whole point of this blog and homesteading and sustainability in general. If there’s ever a message I want to give people, it’s that making a mistake is the first step towards getting in right when it comes to this way of life. So hopefully the earthship and Sean Hoots has given you the motivation to keep on trying with those little homesteading projects. If it didn’t, well here’s a story to get you along.

Yesterday was the first day I noticed that my elderberry plant had produced. So I went to the side of my house, stripped off the ripe ones, stained my hands pink and walked into the house with sites on a few jars of jam. So I followed the instructions as I read them (don’t ever be ashamed to look up directions on the internet, not all of us have grandmother’s who can), put the berries in sugar and vinegar and roll to a boil, constantly stirring for a half hour. Easy enough. Well, the bane of having an electric stove is that you can’t get those perfect temperatures.  So as I stirred, and smelled the sugar burning, I pressed on, creating goops of gel that was drying faster than crazy glue to my sink. Being stubborn, I kept on, sterilizing jars, scalding my hand as I got the syrup in the jars, and even pressurized them.

What I was left with was a jar full of elderberry candy, so hard, all I could do was throw the jars away. Sure, I was pissed that I spent a perfectly good afternoon failing so miserably, not to mention losing those beautiful, medicinal berries. But as I said before, I had to fail that miserably so that the next time I’ll know better.

Until then, this is the note from the urban homestead.

Well, hello there. I’ve got one more installation in this series on Earthship design ideas.  This time we’re talking water. Same disclaimer as last week: this is a very simplistic description of some pretty ingenious engineering. I present it here as an idea starter…some inspiration for you in your quest to live more sustainably. For more details and (very helpful) pictures, go to Earthship.com and poke around. You’ll be amazed.

So, water. Modern housing is designed to keep water off you and your stuff, and this is a good thing. But rather than protecting yourself from a problem, why not encounter it? Why not see how you can use the situation to your advantage? The truth is, the water your roof is dispelling could be doing you a lot more good in your home than around it.

Rather than merely sheltering from the rain, the Earthship roof is designed to collect it, sloping down the back of the house and draining into buried cisterns. The water then enters the house through what they call a “water organizing module” (WOM). A series of filters, a pump and pressurization sends the purified water to faucets for drinking and washing.

The WOM then recycles this “gray” wastewater from faucets/drains through several more levels of usage in the house – showers, interior irrigation (greenhouse), toilet and outdoor landscaping. Through every step of the process, the water’s purpose is renewed in your house. Because of this efficiency, you only need 6 inches of rainfall in a given year to provide for all of your water needs. 6 inches! That covers most of y’all out there, I’d wager.

And think of the ramifications! If your house can capture and utilize enough water from the sky to sustain you, there wouldn’t be a need to tap other bodies of water. Lakes and rivers wouldn’t be drying up as they are in a growing number of regions around the US right now (droughts don’t need no help!). Dams would be ripe for the busting, restoring waterflow to so many parched ecosystems.

Living sustainably is nothing more than mindfulness of and responsibility for the way we live. Your home plays a very central role in that and, as such, could be considered an extension of yourself. Be aware of these footprints we all leave behind. Certainly, there’s a lot wrong with the way we try to do things right, but that shouldn’t stop us from trying. I hope that these Earthship blogs will encourage you to keep it up.

What’s in the ground:
So if you’ve transplanted your fall crops into the ground, it’s going to take another three of four weeks for them to begin to mature. While you are waiting, it’s a great time to intercrop some beet seed within your rows. As the beets mature, they will inhibit weeds, and the tender leaves will keep the small leaves of your greens safe from the harlequin beetles that are still probably hanging around.

And now another installment from the Earthship…

Hey, everybody. Sean here again. I wanted to follow up last week’s brief nutshelling of the Earthship experience with a slightly more detailed look at the way these houses work. Certainly I have no formal training or education with respect to this stuff, and as such, I encourage you to check in at Earthship.com for more technical details. However, the principles upon which the designs are based are fairly simple, and I lay them out here to hopefully encourage you, friend, to consider how you could adapt these ideas in your own life.

Earthships, as stated last week, are entirely self-sufficient, providing everything a person could need to exist within the structure. No ties are required to any grid of any kind. This is accomplished through the integration of structural design and a couple systems that operate in the house, of the house and for the house. Let’s start with heating and cooling.

Also mentioned last week, “tire bricks” constitute the basic building blocks for the construction of the walls of the house. By packing them tightly with dirt and then stacking them, they become an effective wall of thermal mass around the back of the structure. The front of the house, south-facing, is a greenhouse, so it’s primarily windowed. Dirt is mounded over the back of the tire wall, essentially burrowing the house into the earth.

Since heat always moves toward a cooler medium, the thermal mass of the tire wall, buried under cooling earth, stores heat in the summer from the sun coming in through the greenhouse. In the winter, when the house cools down, that heat is then released back into the rooms. Additionally, a tightly tuned and insulated room can be heated by some surprising sources – a laptop, a body, a lamp.

The Earthship folks have employed this model in just about every climate on the face of the earth, and apparently it always works…no additional space heaters or fireplaces necessary. Amazing to imagine such a simple concept at work in extreme climates, but they’re developing these ideas in the desert of New Mexico where their summers are sweltering and their winters are cold and snowy. A perfect test kitchen, to be sure.

So there’s heating and cooling, and you didn’t have to do anything but situate yourself facing south and shovel some dirt. Next week I’ll elaborate on the water system for the house – capturing, filtering and recycling. Man’s gotta drink, right? Till then!

What’s in the ground:

I can’t believe this is our first August installment. The season’s flying. Traditionally, August is the hottest month in these parts, but from what I heard, it may be the coolest of the summer. So, I think it’s possible to get a jump on your lettuce season by starting some seeds now, and transplanting into a bed with row cover on top. By doing them inside, you can regulate the germination temperature and then protect the transplants from getting scorched with the row cover. Give it a shot.

What’s going on in sustainability:

It’s great to write for such a talented and sustainably minded band. Thanks to Sean Hoots’ curiosity from PASA, he and his partner took a great trip out to New Mexico for Earthship building classes. Please enjoy what he learned.

The Earthship Get Down

Earlier this Summer, the lady and I took a trip out to the desert of New Mexico to explore a funky concept, Earthship Biotecture. It’s a revolutionary new approach to designing, building and living in homes that are both sustainably built and entirely self-sufficient. Over the course of that weekend we sat in on lectures, toured the various structures on-site and got sweaty with some hands-on labor.

Upon our return, we were bombarded with questions about our experience out west, so we decided to throw a little shindig at our place and give a presentation of sorts to curious friends all in one fell swoop. Since the themes involved dovetail nicely with the m.o. of our Urban Homesteader’s blog here, Nic asked me to recount the essential points of our evening for you, dear readers.

While I regret that we can’t somehow transmit the experience of our tasty beet bites or creamy homemade hummus, I’m more than happy to give you the nutshell version of our presentation…

Simply put, Earthships are domiciles as living organisms. The concept is that your house should provide for your every basic living need because it is an extension of you. In building an earthship, you are building around yourself, utilizing materials from your environment, in harmony with that environment.

So, let’s think about your environment. The obvious “trees and rocks” come to mind as suitably stable construction materials, but to use them, we have to extract them, effectively working at odds with the harmony we are seeking to create around us.

Expanding the notion of environment, think about all the trash that fills it. Garbage has been with us for so long, it’s become a substantial part of our surroundings. Why not reconsider the notion of garbage…instead of accumulating it in worthless piles that only serve to clutter and destroy our world, why not put it to good use?

Tires. Rubber automobile tires. If you ram dirt into a tire with a sledgehammer, you eventually end up with a 300 pound brick with which you can build an entire house, no foundation, earthquake resistant. Seriously. It sounds overly simplistic, but it truly works.

Similarly, bottles and cans are suitable materials for finer work such as garden walls and archways. These materials are all surrounded with what is essentially adobe (dirt + water + straw), giving it all a very fluid, clean aesthetic. The look and feel is elegant.

Integrated into the construction of the building are the various systems that provide the household with electricity, heating/ac, water filtration, plumbing/sewage and food. Yes, there’s even a greenhouse built into the design of every Earthship. It’s tied in with the filtration and heating systems. Then again, everything is tied in with everything in this house. It’s an incredibly efficient machine.

Over the next couple installments of the Urban Homesteader I’ll detail each of the house’s systems and how they all work together. In the meantime, please check out Earthship.com for more details and info. They have lots of great pictures there to give you a better idea of what’s going on, too.

Hello Friends,

Over the past five years, Hoots and Hellmouth has operated as a trio at its core primarily, but in the next coming months, if you attend a show, you will notice personnel change.  Sadly, I am announcing the end of my touring days with Hoots and Hellmouth in order to pursue other life goals.  However, I am excited to see the band grow in my absence.  Sean and Rob are grouping some killer musicians and expanding the stage sound, which will only yield a top notch musical experience for all to witness, and I will happily stand in the front row- rooting for them all along the way.  Trust me.  It’s gonna be killer.

I would personally like to thank everyone who has housed me, fed me, and inspired me throughout my tenure with Hoots and Hellmouth.  To say the least, I feel infinitely grateful for the friends I have made, and the experiences I have had as part of the Hoots and Hellmouth family.

Although I am excited for this next phase of my life, which may lead me back to the classroom as an English teacher, I will miss all of you dearly.  Please know that the decision to leave was not an easy one to make, but don’t worry- the show will go on!

Thank you all again for everything.  Without supporters like you, none of this would be possible.

Humbly,

Andrew Gray

What’s in the ground:

Now is the time to start seeding your fall crops if you don’t plan on buying or bartering for transplants. Hopefully you saved some of that seed from the broccoli that flowered in June. You may even want to let your current Kale and Collards bolt so you can harvest their seed. You basically just need to stop picking and let the plant flower. You can then get one last harvest, cut off the pods, dry and replant into small containers to get ready for the fall season.

What’s going on in sustainability:

The other day at a work day at Walnut Hill, my garden partner Erica said that if she got paid for every time she used the phrase, “It’s hard in July,” she’d be able to fund the garden herself. But it’s true, especially with this July and the month long heat wave we’ve endured. As I said last summer, everyone starts off with the best intentions in the spring and early summer planting those tomatoes so close that their vines start growing off into the paths of the garden. But then when the heat of the city drives us down the shore or up to the mountains, we just leave a lot of produce that’s going to rot on the vine.

I said this too late last year, so I’m going to get a jump on it this year. If you’re going away, or your garden plot neighbor is, then it’s your duty as the sustainably minded person to not let your produce rot on the vine, smelling up the garden and putting all of your fellow gardeners in that precarious position of to pick or not to pick.

Set up a garden gleaning program. This can be as simple as a garden email, where you tell all of your gardeners what will be ready to harvest and how much they can take. To feel even better, you can even set up a donation at a food shelter or to a community center.

I know this advice may seem easy enough, but I’m always surprised by how people overlook this when they set up a watering schedule, if they even think to do that. Now, I’m not some garden elitist who thinks all gardeners should be putting in a full season at 20 hours per week. I’m happy if people just put one veggie in the ground. But this lifestyle is a bit of a commitment.  It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy your summer, that’s the point of gardening. So keep those veggies growing and feed a few friends when you’re on vacation in August. Because as even Erica will admit, August is harder than July.

So enjoy. Until August, this is the note from the urban homestead.

What’s in the ground:

So I’m experimenting with the idea of letting my garbanzo beans dry on the plant as opposed to trying to harvest fresh and then dry. This is a technique that can be used on many varieties of legumes such as black eyed peas, garbanzos, black beans. Basically you just let the plant brown and die with the pods on the stem and harvest the whole plant. This will reduce yield, but it’s easier than trying to gauge exactly when the beans are ready.

What’s going on in sustainability:

For the past week, I and some very passionate farmers have been using the forum we’ve created through the Philadelphia Urban Farming Network to advocate for the creation of Manatawna Farms in Fairmount Park. In a perfect world, this project is amazing. Ten half acre plots deep in the park where participants can experiment with growing technique, cooperative selling and tool sharing, and trying to make a profit solely from farming, without the help of educational grants.

But as exciting as this all sounds, it has not won over the surrounding neighbors who have started their own advocacy group and who have convinced a councilman to draft a bill that would outlaw commercial farming on the site.

In a meeting we had last week, after explaining the neighbors’ position, two issues came up. The first was that they didn’t want commercial agriculture on their land. The picture they painted was of large combines cutting down corn and being shipped out. It brought up the point that commercial is too often confused with industrial because people still believe that the industrial system is the only way to make money and that sustainable practices are just relegated to theory.

The second issue was land conservation. Right now it’s a hay field with little bio diversity. I made the point that an organic farmer, when using integrated pest management techniques like planting beneficial plants that attract beneficial insects and birds, is in fact a conservationist. We use plant habitats to attract wildlife that helps us grow vegetables.

After these explanations, we thought that we made some headway, but the battle is raging on. We’re basically facing people who don’t want this in their backyard. And aside from not seeing organic farmers as conservationists or more conscious business people than Agri-business, we need to show them that locally produced vegetables are not just some curiosity or theory. They are a viable  solution to a world strained by over consumption of fossil fuels and food insecurity. But as we are finding out, these pragmatic solutions to real problems are just looked at as idealism when faced with a lobby that just wants to have their way. It’s the age old adage of politics. Well, hopefully that ends now , this project gets going and we prove to Philadelphia that sustainable agriculture is possible and practical. Please help out in this movement anyway you can. If you are looking for some inspiration, please come out to the Rotunda on Thursday July 22 at 6:30 pm for Mariposa Coop’s showing of “The Future of Food.” I’ll be speaking afterward.

Until then, this is the note from the Urban Homestead.

What’s in the ground:

This should really be titled what’s out of the ground. After the heat wave of last week and the rains that have came, our spring crops should be on their way to bolting. If you our still putting up with the bitterness of arugula, or the yellow flowers of your broccoli has choked out any remaining florets, it’s time to clear the way for something else.

What’s going on in sustainability:

So I’m happy that my day got too busy and I didn’t post this until now, because if I had, I would not be writing with the energy I’ve gained from attending Vandana Shiva’s lecture at the Academy of Natural Sciences. The renowned seed saver, physicist and environmental advocate gave an amazing lecture of the monoculture of the mind, our western predisposition to approach problems with one track of thinking and narrow solutions rather than taking the whole system into consideration and finding innovative ways to make better, more utilitarian systems.

Although her talk was mainly about the theories of paradigm shifts, her main focus of work and the message she gave was taking back economic systems and the land by the simplest measure, saving a seed. She told horrific stories of companies like Monsanto infiltrating small farming communities, setting up deals with local governments to supply seeds that are patented, and forbidding the farmers by law to not use the seed again, or genetically engineering seed not to reproduce. Companies like Monsanto also have created dependency for farmers to use industrial and chemical fertilizers and pesticides, thereby stripping them of the knowledge of natural farm systems. And in the end, over 200,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide by drinking the very same poison that they were forced into debt to buy by these multinational companies.

Therefore, as I left open ended in the first section of this blog, don’t just rip those bolted plants out of the ground and throw them in the compost. First, collect the seed packs. Once you do, you can bind them with string, find a cool, dry place, and hang the green pods to dry into brown, and then save the seed. When saving any nightshade seed (pepper, tomato and eggplant) make sure you dry the seed out thoroughly in an open aired container. Anything with a lid will get them moldy. And be careful with hybrid seeds, because since they are hybrids, the gene may make the reproductive seed different from the plant they came from.

But as Dr. Shiva has so eloquently shown, this is one of the most important tasks humans can take. Our species thrives in cooperation, it’s what made us come out of the woods and trees and build cities and thrive. When one entity controls not only all of the money to buy food, but the means to grow it, then we’ve lost that cooperative system that has made us so successful. And when any species loses their evolutionary technique that makes them successful, the next step is extinction. So when you save those seeds, you are really saving so much more.

Good luck, until next week, this is the note from the urban homestead.