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 »

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.

In the same way that growing vegetables, planting fruit trees, and harvesting rainwater can seem off-limits for renters, composting too can often seem a bit out-of-reach, especially if you live in an apartment. But don’t dismay, there are several strategies for composting in public spaces, on borrowed land, or even indoors! Here are two:

Community Compost Bins

Even if you do have the space, the amount of bio-mass (foodwaste or otherwise) that a single urban household will usually generate is too small to justify maintaining a large composting setup (i.e. multiple hot piles). By teaming up with neighbors and collecting organic matter from multiple households, a three-bin compost setup can get plenty of input, and the households benefit from the efficiency of a larger system.  Where to put such a thing?  In the commons!

Many residential neighborhoods in cities have grass strips between the sidewalk and the street. Technically a public right-of-way (i.e. the commons), these areas are often under the jurisdiction of the local Department of Transportation, but the onus is placed on the owner of the home or property adjacent to maintain the area in front of it. These strips, often four to six feet wide, are perfectly dimensioned to fit a 3-bin compost setup that can transform food and yardwaste from surrounding houses into fertile soil.

Read the rest of this entry »