Permaculture for Renters :: regenerative design for the landless many || SEO.....

When I think about overarching topics in systems design for eco-tenants, there are four that immediately come to mind: food, water, “waste” (nutrient and materials cycling), and energy (electricity, fuel, etc.).  While I can spout off a diverse range of renter-appropriate solutions for the first three, my repertoire for energy is usually limited to the conservation side of the equation (CFLs, shrink-wrapping windows during winter, etc.).  These ideas for renter-generated power are pretty neat, and hopefully just the tip of the iceberg of more to come…

Via Apartment Therapy’s Re-Nest, here are two photovoltaic solutions for folks who rent:

SolMeter :: In this California program, you sponsor the installation of solar panels somewhere, and you receive a portion of the profits from the electricity that it generates, which you can apply to your own electricity bill, or whatever else you want.

Veranda Solar :: Again, from California (big surpise!).  This startup makes beautiful little panels that you could mount outside of a window with (or without, I suppose) a landlords permission.  According to the website, they’re orders currently exceed production, but you can sign up to be notified when more are available.

Coming Soon: Photovoltaic Curtains

One technology that I’m excited about, but that apparently doesn’t exist quite yet, are photovoltaic window curtains.  They’re such a simple and wonderful idea: when it’s sunny, just close the drapes and generate electricity!

It looks like several companies have them in the works, but they’re not available at this time.  Here’s a link to a CNN article about the concept.  I’ll definitely be blogging about these whenever they hit the market!

Are you aware of other solutions for renters who want to generate there own electricty?  Do tell!

[photo credit:Re-Nest]

Polyculture in a Bucket: Goji berry, kale, onions, strawberry, and foxglove.

Food forestry (a.k.a. forest gardening) is a concept that people seem to become enthralled with when they hear about it: a way of gardening that mimics the diversity and resilience of a healthy forest, and provides an abundance of fruits, nuts, vegetables, flowers, herbs, and more.

You’d have to be a baby-eating robot not the like the sound of that!

But forests are big, and balconies are small.  So how to adapt this wonderful idea to the apartment-scale? All it takes is a basic understanding of how food forests are put together.
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Of any garden I’m currently tending, the one that I’ve had the longest connection with isn’t at the house we rent, and it’s not our next-door farm either.

It’s at my office.

We’ve only been in our current house for 2.5 years, but I’ve had a connection to my current office space for more than 4. In those years, I’ve been able to participate in the evolution of what I call our “sidewalk food forest.” In a 30 inch-wide swath next to the street, and and 18 inch strip next to the building, we grow an incredible variety of food: apples, almonds, asian pears, cherries, italian prunes, grapes, boysenberries, peaches, currants, artichoke, rosemary, potatoes, sunchokes, roses, and an assortment of ornamentals. [see photo]

The satisfaction and experience of this garden, not to mention all the fruit, has been an enormous asset in my life. I get to see it—and snack on it—every day, and it has been a great way for me to have a steady relationship to food growing, no matter how many times I have to leave a home garden behind due to a move.
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Getting this one out a little late today. I generally try to get posts done the night before and scheduled to go up in the middle of the night, but I was up for a while last night putting up the third installment of the greywater series.

Just in time for lunch, a few tasty morsels:

Project Thoreau

In my ongoing (and generally successful) quest to distract myself from the things I really need to get done, I read most of what comes out of the Permaculture Research Institute of Australia’s blog. Over the past year or so, I’ve been enthused by the intermittent updates from a renter permaculturist (I need a single word for that: renterculturist? permarenter? arrgh!) in Australia working on a little thing she’s calling Project Thoreau. The updates, which include birds-eye-view photos of a tiny back patio and yard, show her progress over the last 2+ years of experimentation, and offer an inspiring model for what can be done in minimal space.

[photo: permaculture.org.au]
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(For previous talk about container gardening, check this out.)

I keep having a lot of random thoughts and links that I want to get out to y’all, and not the time to develop each into a post of its own.  So here’s another batch or snacks for your brain…

Links

Life on the Balcony, a beginner container gardener’s wet dream, just finished a blog carnival about edible containers. Lots of good reading there. Check the rest of the site for more container gardening information than you could ever assimilate.

I find a lot of stuff on this site (aesthetically) boring, but it has a huge range of ideas. Check it out if you’re needing inspiration around different materials to make containers out of.

The ever-informative about.com has a section devoted to container gardening that I didn’t come across until just recently. Suprisingly extensive.

Books

I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Fresh Food from Small Spaces by RJ Rupenthal, and Garden Anywhere by Alys Fowler. Both are superb books for tenant farmers, and while container gardening is a core focus of each, they explore other interesting topics as well.

Places to find great containers for the 2010 season:

For a lot of us in the northern hemisphere, right now is the time to be gearing up for planting, which means get your containers ready!  If you need cheap containers to re-purpose or upcycle, check out these places:

• Yardsales
• Estate sales
• Flea markets
• Thriftstores
• End-of-Season sales at nurseries (varies by region, generally November here in the Pacific NW)

There you go for now.  Happy gardening!

-LB

[image source: ...eeek! can't remember]

After briefly mentioning Barrelponics in Tuesday’s roundup, I wanted to take another opportunity to share my love for this humble, DIY aquaponics system. With a footprint of about 20 square feet, this is definitely the kind of thing that you can have on a back porch or patio, making it fair game for lots of rental and dense urban situations.

Here’s one of the better youtube videos of a system:

Does anyone get as excited as I do about these systems?!

The only one that I’ve gotten to poke and prod at in real life belongs to my friend Walker. He’s a pretty sharp guy, and has contributed a couple of his own novel ideas to the system:
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Randomly selected, assorted snacks for your brain:

Liquid Gold

“We all think of human pee as gross and something that ought to be vigorously “cleaned up” or sanitized. However, human urine is actually sterile (unlike faeces, urine is bacteria-free). This liquid by-product of our daily lives can be a rich food source if it gets into the RIGHT part of the right ecosystem.”

(quoted from submersible design)

Recycling urine as fertilizer is one of the easiest ways to participate responsibly in several major nutrient cycles.

For more info, and a lot of renter-appropriate strategies check out the book Liquid Gold: The Lure and Logic of Using Urine to Grow Plants. Author’s website here, Amazon.com listing here.
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(This is the second post in an at least three part series about ways in which renters can reuse greywater. For a definition of greywater, and why it’s a good idea to recycle it, check this out.  For the first post, go here.)

Following up from Monday’s post about greywater re-use using the p-trap disconnect method, here’s one about washing dishes in a water-efficient manner while capturing the washwater for flushing toilets (or irrigation, but that’ll be covered later).
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(This is the first of an at least three part series about ways in which renters can reuse greywater. For a definition of greywater, and why it’s a good idea to recycle it, check this out.)

When I first moved to Portland five and a half years ago, I was really impressed by the ways that I saw folks reusing water, especially from kitchen and bathroom sinks, without the elaborate remediation systems more commonly talked about. Most of the systems involved little to no modification to plumbing, and those that did were to a degree that I personally feel comfortable doing without consulting the landlord (more on this below).

Greywater reuse generally falls into two categories, interior (household) and exterior (landscape). In the first couple of posts in this series, I’ll address interior uses that are feasible for most renters. After those, I’ll follow up with a post about exterior uses.
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