May is Afoot, What do I do in the Garden?

Here is an awesome link from Vegetable Gardens 101 that talks about the chores to do in May in your garden. I'd reprint it here, but the author expressly asked that we get her permission prior to publishing her material, so why not just click the link and read all about it?

Follow up on Earth Day how to guides

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the booth on Saturday. We had a great turnout and really were impressed by all of the enthusiasm.

I had quite a few people ask me for some further information or possibly a guide on how to make the recycled water bottle self watering planters we were demonstrating. I considered making a quick guide with some steps and some photographs, and came across some other guides that are just as good as anything I would make, so I'll just link to the following guide:

Instructables.com - Self watering recycled plant pot for growing herbs.

Stay tuned, as we have alot in the works right now with announcements coming soon.

Earth Day

We're going to be making our first foray into booth jockeying at green events: Saturday, from 11-4, we'll be at White Park in Riverside for the Earth Day festival. Its hosted by Habitat for Humanity of Riverside, and will feature all kinds of exciting booths and workshops.

We'll be bringing our tabletop gardens, to show the kids what they can do at home with a minimum of time and money invested. We'll also be showing how to grow using different reused cups, bowls, and pitchers, as well as newspaper pots and more painting and crafting activities.

So Saturday, if you're in the I.E. come by our booth and say hi. We'd love to see you, and we'll probably be going back to the property afterwards for some lemonade.

Community Garden!

Nova shows us his squash

Well, there have been some pretty exciting developments at the Growcology Learning Garden. Our first family plot is up and running, with our friend Twelve and his adorable children coming by and planting their tomatoes, squash, carrots, and other veggies this past weekend.

Twelve and his kids get plantin'

We've also been fortunate to have a soil scientist and landscape designer working with us. We met Sean Roulan at Oscar Clarke's house at the UCR botanic gardens, far from Sean's home on the coast of Massachusetts. He has been helping us in the garden for the past few weeks, sharing his knowledge about propagation and site design and getting dirt under his fingernails. We've been so blessed here at Growcology to have so many wonderful volunteers, our projects are really gaining momentum.

Sean spreads fresh compost in the herb garden

Now seems like a good time to introduce the Growcology team. We've written about some of our friends and volunteers, but I don't think we've written about our core founders. Here is me:

My nickname on the farm is the PoopSmythe. Can you guess why?

I'm Nick, the Chief Composting Officer for Growcology. My focus around the garden is making sure all the 'waste' stays put and the nutrients continue to cycle through our ecosystem (instead of sending them to the dump). I've been writing most of the posts on our blog so far, but hopefully the rest of the crew will be contributing their words in the coming weeks and months. My background is in Disaster Relief and food distribution. These days I'm trying to get as many people into gardening as possible, for lots of reasons.

Another one of our founders is Chief Money Officer and secretary Sarah.

Sarah has been designing websites for years, and we're lucky to have her attention to detail and impeccable editing skills. She's also a graphic artist and fire performer, and you can spot her in the garden by her fiery orange hair. She's also an excellent chef, and makes sure that all the delicious pot-herbs in the garden make it into our bellies.

Our Chief Buildin' Officer and resident carpenter and percussionist is Spencer.

Spencer fashions a fence around the community garden

Spencer spent many of the formative years of his life remodeling and building homes with his dad, a general contractor from Alabama. He's also a sound engineer, as well as an avid gardener and drummer. He and Sarah recently relocated from downtown LA to our garden in Riverside so they can stay on top of all the food we've got growing.

Our last founder, but certainly not least, is Chief Inspiration Officer Bianca.

Here Bianca chomps down on a stalk of Swiss Chard thats taller than she is!

When Bianca isn't chasing the chickens down so that she can hug them, you can find her tending the seedlings or pruning the orchard. She comes from a family of farmers and herbalists in New Mexico, and has studied and grown Ayurvedic, Chinese, and Native American herbs. She also is the founder of an inspirational media company, Words for the Many, and organizes motivational speaking engagements and backcountry retreats.

So thats our Growcology crew! We're few, but passionate, and we're lucky to have dozens of amazing volunteers helping us out. We've already profiled a few of them, and we'll continue to as the food keeps growing and experts and newbies find their way to our farm. We hope to see you there soon...

Permaculture in LA

This weekend the whole Growcology team is traveling out to downtown LA to learn from Larry Santoyo and Scott Pittman of the Permaculture Institute. Larry's company, Earthflow, is teaching their Permaculture Design Course at Project Butterfly, an awesome workshop space in the warehouse district.

So far, we've learned alot about the design principles and ethics that make permaculture such a versatile approach to problem solving. Both the instructors have great senses of humor, and they were keen on conveying to the students not to go out and preach before they've implemented aspects of the class into their lives. The last thing the environmental movement needs is half-informed, in-experienced, yet still preachy hippies.

Personally, I really respect it when people are opinionated, but not dogmatic. Larry Santoyo has been presenting the information in a very accessible way, but doesn't insist that we do things like he does. He and Scott Pittman both backed up their ideas with stories from their combined 50 or so years of experience, but they refused to give any "one size fits all" solutions. I can't wait until we implement permaculture design principles at our workshop location, and hope that we're able to bring these instructors out to teach a full certification course in the fall...