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

(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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If you’ve never been to San Francisco’s Mission district, it’s a dense neighborhood of mid-rise buildings, many of them rental apartments, with street-level commercial spaces on main streets. It’s pretty impoverished for public green space or greenery of any kind, with the exception of a couple large parks (most notably Dolores Park) and a few community gardens. At a glance, it’s the kind of place that has “food desert” written all over it. But on a recent stay in the Mission (visiting friends for New Year’s), I was inspired by a excellent example of a local/organic foodshed reaching far into a hyper-urban setting.
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Wow! Jumping back into the saddle after months without a murmur here.  Life has been busy with some notable projects, a vision plan for the Pacific University Center for Sustainability Education and a community food garden at Nike’s international headquarters.

There are a few lose threads hanging around here, so I thought I’d immediately jump on one.  As promised back in May (eek!),  here are some resources for highly-aesthetic container gardens, when scrappy-looking ones using random materials just won’t do.  If you’re looking for introductory information, here is a post from a while back with great links.
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Wow, it’s been a little while. Err…no excuses I suppose, except for the one year-old son, running a design business, etc…sob sob sob.

While this isn’t very specific to renters, I’ve had the lucky chance to organize the Portland date on Robyn Francis’ U.S. tour.  Robyn Francis is one of the world’s foremost Permaculture teachers, with an enormous breadth of experience in utilizing permaculture for aid work and community organizing.  Her experience dates almost as far back as the inception of the concept.

For those of you in Portland, please visit this doodle that I’ve created to gauge interest in getting her here.

The date is Monday, August 24th, probably 7-9 PM for a 2-hour talk about utilizing Permaculture principles in community organizing.

Hope there is sufficient interest, and if so, I hope to see you there!

Live in an apartment or condo building with patch of under-utilized grass, ornamental landscape beds, or accessible roof-top? Why not pitch a community garden to the owner or property manager?

You could do what the folks at the MilePost 5 development here in Portland have done and make it a collaborative effort with a SPIN farmer, who installed and manages the garden, with residents volunteering their time in the garden and getting a share of the produce. It’s a win-win-win situation: residents get produce, dirt time, and gardening knowledge; SPIN farmer gets a plot and free labor; property managers/owners rest assured that the garden is professionally managed and won’t become an eyesore (a common objection).

I wrote about this great mobile garden in a previous post.  Thought I’d update folks, as it was still winter at that point, and there wasn’t much life in it.  Now that it’s almost summer, this amazing raised-bed-on-wheels is bursting with scrumptious edibles, and I finally figured out what the hell was going on with the gravity-fed milk jug irrigation system.  It’s pretty clever!

Still waiting for someone to put a bike trailer hitch on one of these….

It feels like I have a new favorite guerilla-planting every week, and this week, it’s this amazing stenciled utility sink planter on the corner of SE 25th and Ivon in Portland. File under f’n awesome.

This one gets major points for the following reasons:

• Displays polycultural planting in a small space, with tomato, beans, lettuce, basil. (That said, it’s probably planted a little too densely, with one tomato and one bean plant too many.)
• Upcycles an old utiliy sink.
• Water that drains out of the sink flows into another planter below the sink planted with lettuces, which thrive in the shady microclimate underneath.
• Great signage (“Respect Our Local Food” & “Niche Repurposing Public Space”)
• Beautiful stenciling.
• Placement directly on the corner demands attention, but it’s still out of the way enough for pedestrians to navigate around.

A reader recently requested a post with more resources for container gardening, specifically, types of containers to use, and where to get them.  I’m going to split it up into two installments: this post will discuss upcycled container ideas when visual aesthetics aren’t so much an issue, and I’ll follow up next week with one looking at containers to use when they’ll be subject to a more discerning eyes. (That follow-up post here.)

Here are some of my favorite things to use for container gardens when a rough, upcycled aesthetic is OK:

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(The following is for folks in temperate areas of the northern hemisphere.  If you’re in the southern hemisphere, read this again in six months.)

I’ve had a lot of folks asking me this month “What’s can I  be propagating right now?”  While the window for woody plants has largely closed until mid-to-late summer (at which time you can do budding and cuttings of many species), right now is a great time to be dividing perennials, especially culinary and medicinal herbs, and canefruit.

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It’s been slow on the posting front, as I’ve gotten addicted to Twitter (follow me!).  I’ve been coming across a lot of great container gardening-related resources, and thought I’d throw up a quick list of a few:

Vegetables

• Great list of specific vegetable varieties well-suited to container growing.
• This page has a good chart (scroll to bottom) showing the minimum container sizes for various vegetables.
• Lifehacker’s post about self-watering tomato planters.

Fruits

• Basic tips for growing fruit in pots.
• An article specifically about apples.
• A pdf all about growing blueberries in containers.
• From the Royal Horticultural Society, a great list of fruit varieties suitable for container growing.

For all troubleshooting related to container gardening, post questions to the forum at GardenWeb.

Finally, if you like the tactile experience of a book, pick up a copy of McGee and Stuckey’s Edible Container, an encyclopedic work on the subject.

Have fun!