ThinkLady

Good news for urban homesteaders

Happily resources for learning how to live a more sustainable and resilient lifestyle seem to multiply daily. Just discovered this one last week while on a vacation jaunt to Santa Fe -- Urban Farm magazine.

With the tagline “sustainable city living at your fingertips” I’m thoroughly enticed. The magazine debuted this year and will publish four issues in 2010 before moving to a bi-monthly in 2011. The fall 2010 issue is on the stands and features scads of interesting info. I haven’t subscribed yet but did sign up for their “Farmer in the City” newsletters to get a better understanding of what they’re all about. 

A sampling of article topics in the most recent issue provides an inkling of the territory they’re plowing into:

• vertical farming
• step-by-step beer brewing
• growing micro greens indoors
• cohousing
• seasonal crop rotation

I applaud the idea of the magazine and hope it will prove to be a useful resource. Beyond that I see it as encouraging that its publishers (who also publish two other Hobby Farms magazines) apparently see urban farming and homesteading as a niche that’s prolific enough to warrant a magazine to serve it. My guess is they have market research and data to back that up.

Other magazines such as Mother Earth News (I’m a long-time fan and subscriber) have partially filled this niche, but Urban Farm appears to be poised to speak directly to the particular set of issues and challenges that billions of city dwellers are facing in transitioning to living more resilient and sustainable lifestyles in their cities.

Urban Farm’s website, www.urbanfarmonline.com has even more useful features organized into six primary categories:

• Urban livestock
• Sustainable living
• Gardening
• Community
• Videos
• Books & magazines

As the City Mayors Society noted in 2007:

In 2008, the world reaches an invisible but momentous milestone: For the first time in history, more than half its human population, 3.3 billion people, will be living in urban areas. By 2030, this is expected to swell to almost five billion. Many of the new urbanites will be poor. Their future, the future of cities in developing countries, the future of humanity itself, all depend very much on decisions made now in preparation for this growth.

So from billions of us urban dwellers, welcome Urban Farm magazine. Your debut couldn’t be more timely.

A gardening tool that could grow on you

I love sitting in my garden watching butterflies, bees and dragonflies swirl and dive, discovering toads, preying mantis and shy lady bugs hiding in the shade. I love eating fat, juicy, just harvested tomatoes, roasted okra and eggplant, fresh green beans steamed and lightly salted, crisp chard and spinach sautéed in olive oil with a sprinkle of feta. But despite all this garden big love, I’m also a pretty lazy gardener and always looking for new ways to make this earthy obsession of mine less time consuming.

Yesterday a tool from Mother Earth News showed up in my email inbox that may help further this quest for lazy gardening nirvana. It’s an online Vegetable Garden Planner – granted not a very sexy name -- and using only the word “vegetable” in the title is kind of misleading because fruits are included in this little gizmo (Mother Earth might wanna address that in the future). But other than that all the standard fruit and vegetable garden plants are here, and then some, and if you wanna get even more diverse, you can add plants and varieties and include info on when to plant, spacing and so on. For an info, data and organization hound – and I am one -- I found this feature not only fun, but educational and even inspiring – I learned a few things about plants I’ve never tried growing before and now will consider adding to my garden (if I can find room). And how nice to have all this info all in one place ready to be accessed over and over again.

The tool also provides help with garden design, plant placement, planting times, crop rotations. And you can try it free for 30 days. After that it’s an annual subscription of $25 a year or $40 for two years.

One of the most useful features allows you to save your plan for each season with notes, so you have an archive of what you’ve planted where and when. If you prefer a paper record, there’s an option to print. And then when you begin the next season, it uses information from your previous season’s plan to help with rotation information. Now that’s quite cool. Up until now I’ve been doing this on graph paper with lots of messy notes, which is fine too, this just gets it all into a digital format. Pros and cons to that too. Like Captain Picard on “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” I have an affinity for real paper and real books and am not so sure digitizing every last aspect of our life is a good idea. I would hate to store up years of garden plans and then lose them when the servers fry. Then again it may be more likely that my paper plans will get lost or torn or thrown away. Like I said, pros and cons.

The planner also helps out with a plant list mode (see image below) and by sending reminders about when to plant, frost dates and so on and with my way too busy life I can use that, but I also found that in design mode the program can be a little buggy at times.

That’s not so cool. However since another obsession of mine is maps, drawing maps, looking at maps, and I love playing at that, despite the program’s occasional buggy-ness, laying out my garden turned out to be really fun. All in all I like the design functionality and I found the info on all the plants, spacing, etc. very useful, and I put together a design of my current garden in no time at all, but I’m reserving judgment for now on whether this tool is worth an annual subscription fee. Happy there’s a trial period to check it all out.

So I’m in wait-and-see mode for now. Maybe this little tool will grow on me.

Taking the future into your hands

“We basically have three choices: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering. We’re going to do some of each. The question is what the mix is going to be. The more mitigation we do, the less adaptation will be required and the less suffering there will be.” – John Holdren, President’s Science advisor, Harvard University

Last Sunday in “We’re Gonna Be Sorry,” New York Times op-ed columnist, Tom Friedman, quoted from the July newsletter of hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who tells investors “global warming is a classic tragedy of the commons” and asks why we are even arguing the issue anymore. Grantham writes:

“ … the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

And there’s the nut of the issue. This is the future of our children and grandchildren we’re talking about. A child born today will be 40 years old in 2050, in the prime of their life, and unless we change drastically, they’ll be living on a planet that’s crowded and hot and most likely short on a wide range of resources we now take for granted – including the basics such as food and potable water. It could be literally hell on earth. 

A few weeks ago I wrote about climate change in “Welcome to the new usual,” and promised to address mitigation and adaption strategies. The first strategy is simple – take responsibility for your future and that of those you love. Take the future into your hands as though it is a soft mass of moldable clay (and it is) and educate yourself pronto on how to shape it for yourself and for the common good because if you don’t understand the problem, you won’t be able to address what needs to be done in your own home, much less anywhere else. Once you understand what’s happening, then you can begin to act. 

I submit three simple places to start.

1. “The Transition Handbook: from oil dependency to local resilience,” by Rob Hopkins. Rooted in his Permaculture background (Permaculture is a design system for creating sustainable human settlements), Rob takes a measured look at the daunting issues of climate change, declining supplies of cheap, easily produced energy, and economic instability and applies sensible creativity and practical mojo. A lot of books on these topics bog down in buzz words, jargon, dense analysis or academic punditry, and in the process they often shortchange readers on solutions. The Transition Handbook bypasses those pitfalls with accessible language, and then spends as much time on a framework for solutions as it does on explaining the issues, envisioning a nourishing and abundant future without fossil fuel dependency. And you just can’t beat the enthusiastic, “yes we can” attitude that pervades the book.

2. Rob’s blog, transitionculture.org, continues the work of “Transition Handbook” in real time. Stay connected with what’s being done around the world and to pertinent news and information useful in a personal or community journey.

3. Katharine Hayhoe’s slide show. Hayhoe is a highly respected expert on climate change, and a reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She knows her stuff! The full slide show is the best I’ve seen at quickly explaining what climate change is, the challenges it poses, and she also manages to debunk every silly denier myth out there. In short, she rocks.

Next strategy: Be a sensible hero. Coming soon.

The Tao of Jane

I read a lot of blogs. I love the creative merging of words, photos, videos, nuances of distinctive personalities, ideas swirling around in the digital universe.

Some blogs make me happy just about every time I read them, even when their subjects are serious, provocative, or fun and silly, and those are the ones I gravitate to on a regular basis. One of those blogs is Jane Fonda’s.

Jane, I use her first name because I think from reading her blog she would want that, is an astute blogger, courageous in sharing her wisdom, her failings, the controversy that still occasionally dogs her life, her journey. She writes about her life with a sense of humor, touching on her professional work and work she does for the common good with eloquence and enthusiasm.

I think Jane is probably a seeker. I see her exploring new ideas with palpable passion, lifting up women and those around her up on a regular basis, regardless of whether they are long-time friends or someone she just met on the street, and while she lives a lifestyle that most will only dream of, she comes across as gracious, inclusive and egalitarian, sharing photos of her life as well as fun times with many celebrities in a way that shows us, her readers, just how human she and her colleagues are. She explores spirituality that in a way that’s rare in the blogging world – she’s non-judgmental, respectful, open, listening – bringing her own learning to bear while at the same time sharing the wisdom of others with unfailing fairness. There’s a twinkle in her voice about herself, an humbleness that given her accomplishments, is refreshing.

I once talked with a writer who’d met and hung out with a lot of celebrities. Because the nature of being a celebrity in our society is challenging, he said some become insulated, wrapped in a removed world where they are the center of their universe, and in some ways this can make them less interesting, less engaging, i.e. there’s little reciprocity in carrying on a conversation that’s only about them.

To be fair I don’t think this is a condition germane to celebrities, but one all of us in one way or another face. We exist in two worlds – our interior and exterior worlds. There’s a tendency, exacerbated by the notion that celebrity status is something desirable along with the ease of sharing our thoughts via the online world and social media, to believe every thought we have in our interior dialogue is significant, luminous, worth sharing. It’s easy then for our world to quickly become all about us, how many followers we have on a blog or on Twitter, how many friends we have on Facebook, how long visitors to our website or blog stay and explore. And then, if we’re not careful, we can become a cult of our own personality, gravitating to the reality of our choosing, constructing a world that reinforces our own beliefs.

It may be safer for fragile human egos and certainly understandable to live in our cocoons this way, but I believe there’s a terrible danger in doing so. When we make our world all about us, our minds start to close and we lose creativity, lose insight into what might make our own lives more joyful or meaningful, lose diversity of thought, become less adaptable and flexible. Once we do that, it’s easy to wake up calcified, judging, uncompassionate, in a dark, disconnected place.

Unless you’re an exceptionally enlightened person – I’m not – I think it’s very hard to stay open to the Universe, to find a balance rooted in thoughtful confidence, compassion and love. And that’s why I enjoy reading Jane, because with all that’s happened to her in her life, she’s models a continual striving for awareness and enlightenment, for balance and openness in a modest, joyful way, and that inspires me to do the same. Thank you Jane.

Garden architecture