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]

Hope this Wednesday finds everyone doing quite well…

City Farmer News served up the first two links in this roundup:

Hungry, Hungry Manhattan

Here’s a great video about what it would take to grow all Manhattan’s food on Manhattan Island. It’s a thought-provoking piece, although there are a number of other questions that it doesn’t address but leaves me curious about. Namely, I think a more useful question would be “What would it take to grow food for all Manhattanites within X miles of Manhattan Island?” Where X is less than, say, 500 miles.

At best, I think this video serves as a reminder that urban ag isn’t a silver bullet for our food system woes. But there’s also a way in which it sounds to like “Urban agriculture doesn’t work because you could never produce all of a city’s food in the city.” No one that I’m aware of, in the Urban Agriculture movement is arguing that any large city could ever be 100% food self-sufficient.  Anywho…

[photo: see those tiny little green roofs? not gonna cut it... credit: gonycbybus]

Garden in a Bag

Here’s a bit of inspiration for modular/mobile gardening using large plastic totes, the type used in the shipping of some produce and bulk materials. Think of it as a raised bed that you don’t have to build, just unfold!

[photo credit: designboom]

Strawberries

Maria Finn at CityDirt penned this nice how-to on Strawberry Windowboxes. For those interested in starting strawberries from seed, now is a good time of year for many regions in the US.  Check out varieties such as ‘Italian Alpine‘ and ‘Pineapple Crush‘ (the latter a white strawberry variety!!!).

Workshops for Tenant Farmers in Flatbush

Unless Google Analytics is lying to me, a fair number of you are from NYC. So I thought I’d throw out this event that Sustainable Flatbush is putting on this weekend. Lots of neat demonstrations for renter-farmer types: vermicomposting, sprouting, seed starting, etc. (Thanks to Robin at Urban Gardens for the heads-up on this one.)

[photo credit: sustainable flatbush]

Have fun out there!

A few years ago, my friend Laura Altvater (of Mostly Medicinals) put together this great edible container handout for Portland Nursery.  It has some really imaginative themed combinations, as well as a container idea for a shady situation, and one for hot and dry.

I’ve had this lying around for a while, not wanting to toss it, but not knowing quite what to do with it either.  So yesterday I decided to scan it and put it out as an inspirational morsel for folks who are gearing up for Spring planting.  Click the images below, or download it as a .pdf (1.5 mb) here.  Check out another great post about mixed containers here.

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I missed both last Tuesday’s and last weekend’s roundup, so I figured I’d have a huge backlog of links to throw at you….but…nada. Nothing has caught my attention in the last 10 days or so.

I’m currently following 35-or-so blogs, around half of them permaculture- and urban homesteading-related, but I am looking for more great blogs, and I know there out there!

Who are you following in the permaculture/urban homesteading/eco-groovy corner of the blogosphere, and what posts have rocked your world lately?

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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I briefly mentioned this technique in another post, but I wanted to throw up a picture for visual-learner types (like me!). This is a great way not to waste money on those silly little plastic plant labels that you buy at nurseries:

Take a 1 quart plastic yogurt container and make vertical cuts about 3/4″ apart all the way to the bottom. [pictured below]

Then make a cut all around the base of the container, snipping off each tab.  You can cut them to whatever size is appropriate for the pot they’re going into, and they’re easy to write on with a permanent marker, or better yet a grease pen or crayon (more UV and rain resistant).

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Goats are the New Chickens

City Farmer News posted this story about the growing urban goat-keeping trend. The article features this great quote:

“In our society, we have pets we love and we have factory farm animals that we treat dismally,” [...] “I want to return to a world where animals are both, like in Africa and Greece where they treat animals very well and then eat them. I think that is a much better model.”

I second that!

And for a little more background on keeping urban goats, check out this page from Seattle’s Goat Justice League.

Does Your Garden Save You Money?

I get really excited when people track how much money is saved by growing their own food, and who better to write about it than a personal finance blogger! J.D. at Get Rich Slowly pens this (somewhat) regular update on the financial benefits of vegetable gardening.

YardSharing and Sharing the Harvest

Liz at Hyperlocavore compiled her top 20 Tips for Yardsharing Groups. These are great points to ponder for any renter who wants to garden on someone else’s land.

Also, Robin at the Urban Gardens blog just mentioned this great produce sharing site. It’s a place to match up folks looking for produce with others who have a surplus they want to give away or sell. You’ll find listings such as this one from Oakland, CA:

I have a large orange tree loaded with fruit. I would be willing to share it with someone who is willing to help me pick and load it.

Yum…

The site seems a little hit-or-miss depending on where you live, but if there isn’t already a post for your locale, put one up and that will make it more likely that someone else in your area visiting the site will decide to use it.

Have a great weekend!

LB

Here in Portland, we always seem to get a window of Spring-like weather in the middle of February. It’s traditionally the time to direct sow peas, onions, and radishes, and to start tomatoes and peppers indoors. Even though the gods of climate generally plunge us back into the dark and rainy for another month, the opportunity to get the garden going is like a life-line from the future: a reminder that—even though we haven’t seen the sun for two weeks—Spring really does exist.

But this year’s Spring-tease has come early: It’s only January 28th, we haven’t had a hard freeze in a month, and it’s been in the upper 40s and low 50s for over two weeks. The tulips are up, buds are swelling on the cherry trees, and I’m faced with an exciting dilemma: Do I risk some the peas I saved last year and hope the mercury doesn’t dip far below freezing again?

Of course!

Get Growing Early

Here in Oregon, even though we can grow many vegetables almost year-round, lots of folks don’t start thinking about planting until April or May, a full 2-3 months after many seeds could have already been in the ground. These gardeners not only miss out on some of the best time for cold season crops (radish, arugula, spinach, etc.), but they also miss out on a lot of productivity. While it varies by species and climate, planting sooner generally means that plants reach maturity faster, and thus, yield more.
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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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