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

(This post was authored by bay-area landscape designer Emily Lubahn.  She’s the first of our new guest contributors who will be developing articles for the site, and you can check out some of her work here.)

Do you walk on a sidewalk to get to your front door? Do enjoy plants more than concrete? If you answered “yes” to both of these questions, you are one step closer to becoming a proud sidewalk gardener.

More and more people are removing excess pavement and replacing it with vegetable, pollinator, and native plant gardens. These guerilla-type gardens perform more than aesthetic or edible functions for your enjoyment; they are contributing hidden services as well. Stormwater management, pollinator habitat, and cooling and cleaning of the air are just a few of the hot ecosystem services you will be adding to your streetscape. It is a bit of work to get started, but cities are making it easier for residents to bust out the hardscape (concrete, asphalt, etc.) for softscape (plants, mulch, etc.). Read the rest of this entry »

Have you tried googling “fire escape garden”?! There are a bajillion articles about container gardening on fire escapes.  Who knew?!

Anyhow, most of them absolutely suck (WHY did TLC, eHow, and Emeril have to jump on the urban farming bandwagon?!), so I’ve saved you some disappointment by picking out a few of the highlights.  Unsurprisingly, Manhattan and Brooklyn are leading the way…

• A packed 2′x3′ fire escape garden in NYC, complete with self-watering containers and upcycled soda bottle planters.
• Interesting conjecture about the legality of fire escape gardening, with an interesting tip to keep pigeons and squirrels out of your veggies.
• Not a post, but it’s notable that there is a EFFING STORE IN SAN FRANCISCO CALLED FIRE ESCAPE FARMS!!!  What?!  They sell lots of unecessarily-expensive-but-very-amusing stuff for the urban gardener.
• For some beautiful photos of fire escape gardening (but relatively little text), check out thefireescapegarden.com’s 2009 archive (apparently, in 2010 they moved the burbs…)

(Photo credit: Flickr user Kristine Paulus.)

(This is the first of several forthcoming posts to help get you pumped up about the year ahead.  It’s also the first real content in almost two years!)

Every year, around this time in late January, I start to get fidgety.  It’s usually around this time that we Portlanders get fooled by a little warm spell.  The buds on some of the early blooming trees start to swell, and the crocuses get confused and start to poke up through the soil.  I call it the spring tease, and it’s when we garden nerds start obsessively pouring over our seed collections and catalogs, counting down the days until planting can begin.

In the meantime, it’s nice to remember that winter is a great time for observation, planning, and preparing.  In that vein, here are some things to do to keep you sane until things warm up a bit… Read the rest of this entry »

As the astute among you will have noticed, this site has not seen a new post (besides this one) in almost two years. So in an effort to resuscitate things, I’m putting out this Call for Contributors who are interested in creating new content for the website.  Please see below and please forward widely to groups/individuals who you think might be interested.

The Site

I launched the site in early 2009 and continued to blog regularly until February 2010, when other ventures pulled my attention away.  Amazingly, even after I stopped adding new content, website traffic has held steady at between 1000-1500 unique visitors per month, sometimes more.  In the last month alone, there have been visitors from 66 countries, from the US to Croatia, Sri Lanka to Trinidad.  And this is after almost two years without a new post!

The Opportunity

Contributing to the website is a great opportunity for established and newer teachers/practitioners alike to reach a worldwide audience, hone their writing and communication skills, and learn or develop new skills in internet marketing, social media, etc.  If you have an existing blog or website, regular guest contributing is a great way of directing new traffic to your site and build your readership. Read the rest of this entry »

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!
Read the rest of this entry »

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… Read the rest of this entry »

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.

front

back

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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]

Read the rest of this entry »