From a food perspective, this time of year is definitely the high point. Due to the funky weather we’re just getting tomatoes now, but I’ve also got tons of summer squash, basil, peppers, onions, kale, chard, chamomile, calendula and herbs. The giant growth winner is clearly the mullein, now two years old that tops out at about 9′ tall. This is a good thing, as my allergies are kicking in big time and I’ve needed to make several batches of mullein-goldenrod-sage-chamomile tea, which is quite nice with honey.

I whipped up a Claremont Salad yesterday with cabbage, onions, pepper, cucumber, carrot and parsley all home grown. Then today I made a spur of the moment green salsa with extremely local tomatillos, cayenne, garlic, onion and coriander seeds.

Meanwhile I keep re-potting seedlings and putting in new seed. I cleared one of the raised beds last weekend and have stuff sprouting already. I put in soy beans, parsnips, several kinds of lettuce, cress, onion and I forget what else- dill maybe. This polyculture mix has worked well for me over the last two years. I re-potted a bunch of wild flowers the children started, as well as larspur, asters and my new prize, black mulberry.

Couple of weeks ago I discovered a black mulberry down by the old railroad bed and brought a couple ripe fruit home to try and start. Kai and I were talking about how you don’t see a bunch of seedlings under mulberry trees, but I’ve since discovered the reason for this. I frequently walk along the Canal Path east from Pittsford village, and down where Mitchell Road crosses the canal there’s an old mulberry. One day I watched a herd of chipmunks scrounging the fallen berries. Another day it was ducks. So very few berries escape notice long enough to take root. However, the berries I collected and planted sprouted easily and are now growing vigorously. I put 12 into larger pots and I’m looking forward to seeing if I can get them through the winter.

I finally set up my first rain barrel, a birthday present from my dad last year. Just need to run the gutter downspout to the top, drill a hole and put in some screen to keep the detritus out.

I should probably strap the barrel to the side of the house. Haven’t filled it up yet to see how the tires handle the weight. The elevation is needed to be able to get enough pressure out to the garden beds.

I was going to try to live-blog the NOFA-NY Conference last weekend, here in Rochester, but I couldn’t get a good, free Wi-fi connection, and then I’ve been ill all week, so I’m just now getting to it.

I missed the first session Saturday morning, so wandered around the tradeshow and found Mark Dunau talking to the tractor guys. In another life Mark was a playwright, and we got talking about irony and a remark he’d made back in November that I’d thought about since. We were talking about bio-char and he’d said the irony was that so much of the northeast had been de-forested to make charcoal. Later I started thinking that it was the playwright saying that. I started noodling on the connection between a sense of irony (or lack of it) as a connection to some kind of humility, to a connection to landscape in some way. I haven’t got this fully worked out yet, but it was important to think of sustainability as both a science and an art. In fact, art became quite a theme for the day.

Saw Jan MacDonald of Rochester Roots, who we were sharing a booth with, and she introduced me to James Allen, who’d put on a sustainability conference at U of R a couple of years ago. We talked about walnuts and berries among other things.

The next session I attended was on Apples. Lou Lego from Elderberry Pond Farm near Auburn had used a SARE grant to do some real analysis of heirloom and new apple varieties: which were the best for eating, baking, pies, juicing, cider, and drying. Some of the winners included Northern Spy, Pink Pearl, Cameo (best storing apple), Caville Blanc (best baking), Pristine (best eating, best early), Enterprise, Jona Free and the overarching winner Spitzenberg. This one had a story-Thomas Jefferson claimed it was one of his favorite apples, and the descendants of Jefferson’s apple are quite hard to come by. As a novice orchardist, I appreciated the detail of which varieties to look for.

For lunch, Jan and I went out to John’s Tex Mex in the South Wedge and talked about various projects, grants and art. Jan’s a former artist, and used to have studio space in the Searle Building years ago. We talked a fair bit about the creative work involved in gardening and sustainability efforts. When we got back we were both at a lunch discussion hosted by the CSL. Deb Denome, recent winner of the Canandaigua Athena award was there, but didn’t get too much opportunity to talk with her. Met Steve Melcher who runs Odonata Sanctuary just a few miles away in Mendon.

As I was wandering out of the lunch hall in search of better coffee (organic, free trade is nice, but I needed a good chocolatey French Roast) I ran into Maria Grimaldi, sitting at a table with Mike Kimball of Essex Farm. The topic was raw milk products and Mike’s ingenious way of churning butter using a milk can and a trampoline. I picked out a couple of “edges” running between groups at the conference. There was the age differentiator (”kids today”) and there was the meat / veggie divide. The livestock people were certainly very vocal.

Next up was a session from a Cornell post-doc who’d modelled New York’s ability (or not) to feed its population. The concept of a “foodshed” was put out there, and it turns out that Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse are well-positioned to feed ourselves, and of these Rochester had the best relocalization potential for food. New York City, as you may guess, is somewhat less apt to feed itself from nearby land. In all it was estimated that the State could sustainably feed about 5 million, a quarter of our current population.

The results of the Foodshed map are available at http://www.cals.cornell.edu/cals/css/extension/foodshed-mapping.cfm

Finally I ran into Lisa Wujnovich, who’d presented a poetry session earlier. She said that her MFA program was going well and was feeling more and more connected to the writing. Generally, I think she and Mark were happy for the PDC we ran at Mountain Dell and were even perhaps serious about pursuing some of the students’ ideas about labor housing.

Good bread makes me happy, especially good rosemary bread, especially if I baked it myself. This is super-tasty with brie, BTW. This is loaf number 10, about, and I feel like I’m finally getting it (hat tip to Russ!). The [corrected] recipe for basic bread is here. The whole house smelled good after baking this, not burnt like after the first few hockey puck loaves.

I’m digging the ability to start stuff from seed. One of the things I’ve learned from Andrew is to transplant seedlings to a richer mix before going directly into the garden. So I broke down and bought some -gulp- MiracleGro potting mix! I’m mixing this one third to one third of this really chunky cheap potting mix, and one third ProMix. I feel like these are my babies. There are roma tomato, lemon and middle east cukes, fennel, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, rhubarb and golden chard, sunflowers and purple bell peppers.

This morning I finished sheet mulching the central hex garden. The path, as you can see, forms a spiral with keyholes radiating out from it. This is very efficient in terms of garden to path ratio, and I also like the design aspect. I can reach any spot (basically) from a path so I never have to walk on the beds themselves. Eventually the paths will be laid in gray stone like that you can see in the foreground.

The apples I planted last summer are producing. This one is called Liberty. I didn’t expect fruit for a couple of years, so this is a very nice surprise. Apples, pears and tomatoes are some of the things that most improve, in my estimation, when I don’t get them at a store.

I haven’t had much luck with iris over the years, but this year seems to have been a good year all over for them. I can’t claim to have done anything to improve these, other than to leave them alone. Next spring I think it will be time to separate them into several clumps. These could go around the base of the pears or apples, or around the drip line, to help keep the grass down.

Finally, we bought a trellis arbor to anchor the back of the garden and provide a gateway to the more open side-back yard. The swale on either side is now planted to forsythia and perennial sunflowers, which I come to find out are nearly invasive in that they re-seed like crazy. I was back behind the Pittsford Village maintenance buildings last Friday and they’re all over back there. Ultimately I want to grow the hardy kiwi on this trellis, and maybe hibiscus. That’s variegated dogwood in the foreground.

The stuff we are talking about- home, urban and communitiy gardening, food, pattern, integrated landscapes, victory gardens, ecology, edge, small farming, relocalization- is suddenly mainstream. Allison Arieff blogs on these and other topics on the front page of the New York Times website.

As part of my Permaculture Certification training, I’ve started doing a little research into WWII Victory Gardens. How this came up is that one of the other students was asking about apple varieties, and I was relaying the story in Masters of the Victory Garden about the man in Virginia who’d collected 1800 varieties of fruits in his half-acre suburban plot. Andrew caught the words “Victory Garden” and asked me to explain what a Victory Garden was. All I knew was that Victory Gardens were planted in the US and England during WWII. Andrew “suggested” this would be a good research project- find out more about Victory Gardens.

So this week I’ve done a little web research and found a number of sites (K-12 resources, Victory Seeds, Pennsylvania VGs, Canadian story), documents and photos. Victory Gardens, or war gardens, started in WWI, so there was a history of the activity when the US went to war in 1941. Many gardens appear to have sprung up spontaneously but a conference of the Civilian Defense and USDA held in 1941 added organizational and communications power to the movement. Commercial enterprises like Beechnut and International Harvester also joined. By 1942 there were 6 million Victory Gardens planted. In 1943, this number shot up to 20 million, and the home gardener was supplying around 40% of the nation’s total vegetable production. This number is huge when you consider that we were also supplying troops and Allies’ food needs. In 1946, after the end of the war, few gardens were planted and the US suffered significant food shortages.

Victory Gardens graced Boston Common and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Schools, government buildings, vacant lots and many back yards were used. At least one Victory Garden, located in Boston’s Fenway, still exists.

Victory Gardening was driven by real needs- rationing, food shortages, tin shortages, and limits to transportation. A large part of the program was aimed at preserving food as well as growing it. Preserving techniques were centered around canning, but also included drying, cold storage and the brand-new idea of refrigeration. Pressure cooker sales went from 50,000 in 1942 up to over 300,000 in 1943.

The government and industry assisted by promoting the program and publishing guides and pamphlets that gave very basic training in vegetable gardening. The explicit assumption was that the average suburban gardener would have little, if any, gardening experience. Alongside the quaint references to insect pests as “Japanazis,” these guides include very practical tips such as using straw mulch between rows and preparing soil with animal manure. They also include garden plans and planting schedules.

Victory Garden Committees were set up to support gardeners, give advice and coordinate work and distribution of produce. In Pennsylvania, 1500 committees supported over 1.5 million gardens, a ratio of about 1 committee to 1000 gardens.

I found that the Canadian Government was much less proactive about home gardening. Two urban gardeners from Victoria, B.C. pestered the government so much though, by way of their MP, that eventually in 1943 the Canadians joined the movement. The story seems to show that a concerted and organized effort coupled with real need and grass roots organizing led to near food self-sufficiency within a couple of years. This gives me great hope that when the chips are down we can do it again if needed.

I just completed the first of five, weekend long modules at Hancock Permaculture with Andrew Leslie Phillips. If you are also attending the course, I mentioned the Placement Randomizer Tool, which takes a little digging to find here. Here’s a link to Peak Moment TV- lots of great interviews with Peak Oil as well as Permaculture and other cultural creatives. Also I’ve got a link here to Greeening the Desert.

I’d like to offer this as a place for us to work together virtually, in between and after the training sessions. If anyone is interested in contributing, send me an e-mail and I’ll create an account for you, and give you a little run through on how to write a post.

Finally I want to say a big Thank You to all of you for coming and inspiring me and eachother to move forward with Permaculture. I was looking at an old list of things I would do if I had unlimited time and resources and this training is on the list. Special thanks for the great food, coffee, pie, smoked fish, cheese, and Little Debbie cakes! See you next month.

Just read an article in the Independent by a journalist who visits the Utopia Experiment in self-sufficiency for a month. The site is located just outside Inverness, Scotland. The good news is that people learn quickly, especially when the food is at stake. The less good news is that they haven’t gone a winter yet, with no water or electricity, or faced the “hungry gap” in March.

They must be aware that there’s a similar experiment just 20 miles east of there that’s been running successfully for nearly forty years. I had the good luck to visit Findhorn in my college years, if only for a month. My experience with the learning I can echo, as within a day or two I had adopted what I can only call the rhythm of the place. The pace there seemed much slower, and people rarely blinked. They kept their eyes open. And so did I, once I let go to this energy and let it carry me.

It was there on the Moray Firth that I, too, learned to cook: something for which I can never be sufficiently grateful. I learned about working in a bindery, about meditation, about demolition work, about pine trees and the connection between natural resources, sustainability and peace. George Galloway recently had a video piece with David Strahan (hat tip TOD)looking specifically at the recent wars and their connection to resources.