What’s in the ground:

This part of the season is all about maintenance. The weather is getting temperate, rain is steadier (when hurricanes aren’t hitting the coast) and the transition is being made between crops. So aside from just keeping the bugs away and monitoring the crops, I love to use this time of year to focus on the perimeter of my garden. I know it gets really hard in the height of the season and heat to care about this, but now is a good time to go beyond just scanning your garden for weeds and to really dig up problem areas, look for bigger weed trees that have taken root, and prep the land with wood chips to stop growth. You’ll thank yourself next spring for all the hard work you do right now. Remember, your border is just as important as your beds. Keeping both healthy leads to a healthy garden in whole.

What’s going on in sustainability:

So I know that I missed a week, but it was for good cause. I spent the last week (and plenty of time before that) working on a brand new committee to Green the Philadelphia Folk Fest. I’m not sure how I kind of fell ass backwards into this, but with the support of Rob Berliner, Todd Henkin of the Great Unknown and I worked to bring some great sustainable measures. It wasn’t easy, but in the short time that we flew blind through the process we got almost all of the styrofoam out of the volunteer and artist hospitality, promoted local food, scheduled sustainability workshops, set up composting stations, and brought in the Sustainable Living Road Show (a traveling sustainability carnival from the bay area) to the fest. And it was amazing.

We diverted about fifty trash bags worth of compostable materials from the landfill. We brought a lot of attention to our efforts with our promotion of local foods and workshops, and we were able to make it fun by having the Roadshow there to entertain the campground with a solar stage where Hoots and Hellmouth rocked Friday night and Mason Porter and friends rocked Saturday. But most importantly, we rooted ourselves in the festival and we learned some very key things.

The first lesson was one sorely needed in activist circles: patience. Too often activists are so passionate and worried about the state of the world that they want everything to change yesterday.  At the end of the weekend we ran out of compostables and had to resort to styrofoam. We couldn’t get composting going in the vendors section of the fest and our workshops were not always so well attended. But we accomplished everything we set out to do and we formed the great relationships that will give us the opportunity to keep our committee going into the future and we learned the lessons that will help us be more efficient in the future. Because that’s what real sustainability needs. Not trying to change everything in one event. But to root yourself in that system and make those small incremental changes that will lead to those wider shifts to a more sustainable future.

This is not always easy when dealing with a large bureaucratic organization. Especially an organization like the folk fest that runs more like a county fair than a major concert promoter. At the end of the weekend we received a lot of critiques. Some were by people who advised us to sub contract out our composting, product buying and programming to major sustainable organizations. As much as I believe in the need to create industries out of sustainability, I also feel that we need organizations like the folk fest to promote real and lasting sustainable changes. Sure, some major for profit festivals may be zero waste and may do some really cool things. But what they lose when they pay for all of these services is the amazing power of grassroots organizing that is so essential both to the folk fest and to make those major societal shifts. So although it was very hard to make all of the moving pieces of other committees work together to make things more sustainable, if we root ourselves enough in the culture of the fest and make those small changes then we can create change that comes from the bottom up and is reliant on people putting their energies and their minds together. And to me that’s the best kind of change, and that’s what folk culture is all about.

So here’s to those changes and here’s to another great fest. If you weren’t there, you not only missed many great acts, but you missed one of the best performances I’ve ever seen from Hoots and Hellmouth. I think I have seen them about 30 times, and never got chills up my spine like I did when they finished with the old folk tune, Samson. But hopefully I’ll see you at next years fest. Until then and until our next edition, this is the note from the urban homestead.

-Nic