#Sustainable Community Gardens

[not-available-for-comment]

So. Storytime for guerilla gardeners and solarpunk enthusiasts. This story comes to me 3rd hand but I believe the basic shape of it is true, even if details may be off.

So there’s this guy who lives in my parents’ town. Wanted to have a pocket farm but lives on an urban lot in a small city instead because y’know jobs and stuff. He could definitely get a few raised beds in the backyard but nothing all that impressive and the front yard is on a very busy road with the expectation that it’ll look reasonably traditional (plus planting food by busy roads isn’t always a good idea).

However

After he’s lived there for a while, he realizes his neighbors are all older people who maybe have more challenges taking care of their yards than they used to. So he goes to his next door neighbor and offers a deal: I’ll mow and maintain your front yard for free if you let me knock down the fences between our backyards and plant them both with food. And you’ll get a cut of the produce.

Presumably the neighbor already knew and trusted this guy because he said yes. So he starts mowing and maintaining his and his neighbor’s front yards and planting food in their now-shared backyards. After a season or two this goes well enough that the next neighbor down the street asks if he can be in on this too.

So now there’s 3 front yards to mow and three backyards full of produce. And it keeps going from there. Dude gets a rider lawnmower and does everyone’s front yards, and meanwhile he’s maintaining an entire block’s worth of produce in the back. His yields got so high that he was able to start offering boxes of produce outside of the block’s residents too. This is how I heard of him: my parents’ next door neighbors were picking up a regular box of produce from him.

I love a couple of things about this story:

Offering to maintain people’s front yards for them allows baby boomers to feed their thirst for keeping up appearances while still getting food production into the neighborhood

As homeowners age offering services like this is legitimately good community building

BLOCK-LONG POCKET FARM

These exact circumstances might not be replicable everywhere, but I love thinking about how these principles could be applied.

[bumblebeeappletree]

Every once in a while I’ll see some posts about everyone should become vegan in order to help the environment. And that… sounds kinda rude. I’m sure they don’t mean to come off that way but like, humans are omnivores. Yes there are people who won’t have any animal products be it meat or otherwise either due to personal beliefs or because their body physically cannot handle it, and that’s okay! You don’t have to change your diet to include those products if you don’t want to or you physically can’t.

But there’s indigenous communities that hunt and farm animals sustainably and have been doing so for generations. And these animals are a primary source of food for them. Look to the bison of North America. The settlers nearly caused an extinction as a part of a genocide. Because once the Bison were gone it caused an even sharper decline of the indigenous population. Now thankfully Bison did not go extinct and are actively being shared with other groups across America.

Now if we look outside of indigenous communities we have people who are doing sustainable farming as well as hunting. We have hunting seasons for a reason, mostly because we killed a lot of the predators. As any hunter and they will tell you how bad the deer population can get. (Also America has this whole thing about bird feathers and bird hunting, like it was bad until they laid down some laws. People went absolutely nuts on having feathers be a part of fashion like holy cow.)

We’re slowly getting better with having gardens and vertical farms within cities, and there’s some laws on being able to have a chicken or two at your house or what-have-you in the city for some eggs. (Or maybe some quails since they’re smaller than chickens it’s something that you’d might have to check in your area.) Maybe you would be able to raise some honey bees or rent them out because each honey tastes different from different plants. But ultimately when it comes to meat or cheese? Go to your local farmers. Go to farmers markets, meet with the people there, become friends, go actively check out their farm. See how the animal lives are and if the farmer is willing, talk to them about sustainable agriculture. See what they can change if they’re willing. Support indigenous communities and buy their food and products, especially if you’re close enough that the food won’t spoil on its way to you. (Like imagine living in Texas and you want whale meat from Alaska and you buy it from an indigenous community. I would imagine that would be pretty hard to get.)

Either way everything dies in the end. Do we shame scavengers for eating corpses they found before it could rot and spread disease? Do we shame the animals that hunt other animals to survive? Yes factory farming should no longer exist. So let’s give the animals the best life we can give them. If there’s babies born that the farmer doesn’t want, give them away to someone who wants them as a pet. Or someone who wants to raise them for something else. Not everyone can raise animals for their meat. I know I can’t I would get to emotionally attached. I’d only be able to raise them for their eggs and milk.

Yeah this was pretty much thrown together, and I just wanted to say my thoughts and throw them into the void. If you have some examples of sustainable farming/agriculture, please share them because while I got some stuff I posted from YouTube, I’m still interested to see what stuff I might’ve missed!

[notbecauseofvictories]

also, just as a coda to that last post---if you think "spend a week making a needlessly complicated dessert" has fixed me, I was searching for ways to use up the extra heavy cream and milk....and discovered recipes for making cheese. So this inexplicable, needlessly elaborate train can just go on rolling!

[letialia]

Urban oasis 🌱

This place just makes me happy 🍎🍅🥦

[solarpunkpresentspodcast]

Solarpunks, we’re on YouTube!

Well… sort of. We have our two latest episodes up, and we’re going to make a concerted effort to get older episodes uploaded over the next couple of months, so that you can listen to us in video form, if you so choose!

Like, subscribe, comment, ring the bell, follow …. (Whatever it is that YouTube influencers say. We’re sort of new to this…)

-Ariel

[ultimate-healing-blog]

How Tea Bags Can Boost Plant Growth

The Secret Life of Tea Bags: Nature’s Nourisher (It works good.) Once upon a time in a small, vibrant garden, lived a passionate gardener named Bob. He adored plants and had a special fondness for experimenting with innovative gardening techniques. One sunny afternoon, while sipping his favorite cup of chamomile tea, a thought struck him: What if he could use the tea bags to benefit his beloved…

[the-eccentric-eclectic]

The future isn't electric cars, it's public transportation. As dr. Gupta says, lithium batteries are still very polluting, and don't exist in a large enough quantity to supply the world with enough electric cars to get everybody driving one.

The path forward that I see has well arranged public transportation in a spiderweb form rather than a wordweb. All areas connected to each other rather than all transport going to the city center. It is publicly funded through taxes so you don't have to pay every time you use the train or take a bus.

For the elderly and the disabled there are special taxis upon request. You can rent a car or a van when you really need one, electric ofc. But you have to specify the reason and if it's something dumb like 'going to the gym by car' it can get denied.

If you need a car for your job because you work in emergency services such as GP, cop, etc. you drive one from your work, which you park at your workplace at the end of your workday, after which you take public transport home. You need a special dispensation to drive a car. Your workplace needs a special dispensation to own and let you drive a car.

And imagine all the things we can do with the space that is freed up. First of all, cars actively discourage community, so neighbourhoods become a lot more social. All the extra lanes on highways that are suddenly no longer needed can be turned into strips of forests which work noise reducing. If all cars are electric and the amount driven falls by like 85% (I am pulling this statistic out of my ass, this is by no means based on any actual data) there will be significantly less noise anyway.

We can take parking spaces and turn them into pollinator gardens, community gardens, sensory gardens for children.

We can get on roads again without fear of being hit by some loser with a god complex and a tin can murder machine. We can walk, bike, convene, live.

[sundevours]

My week was chaos incarnate, but today had such good energy!!

Although a psychic at the market told me that my life was going to get much more chaotic up until November, so I'll just hang out with that prophecy I guess

[son-of-wasps]

How to turn your Neighborhood into a Village

Americans have been deprived of our human, village-dwelling nature - but the good news is - we aren't powerless - we can make a change. Turn your neighborhood into a village.

[planet4546b]

always so torn with how to show the mar because horrible confusing bright colors and abstract shapes is so fun but i have to be honest. i love just drawing caves.

[trilliumtriffid]

[attheideality]

50 Zero Waste Tips Passed Down By Your Grandparents

[letialia]

Last tomatoes of the season 😢

The last left tomatoes that aren’t mature and are not gonna get any more mature than this. But don’t worry we always know how to not waste anything and make best use of all the food available to us. So we’ve made a delicious tomatoes chutney 😋 that can be preserved for months on the shelves. Perfect for the winter at-home-aperitives 🍷

[fannibalmusical]

Landscape in Portland Photo of a mid-sized drought-tolerant and partial sun front yard stone landscaping.