a farmer's work is never did
Garden Growings
Well, it's been a helluva growing season here in Hazelwood, though - to be exact - things are still growing and being harvested. A row of Hazelwood's signature hazelnut trees are planted at the Pittsburgh Food Forests' first permaculture site on Second Avenue near Hazelwood Avenue. Fig trees - originally from ones Sam Strati brought from Italy - are now at my garden near his on Langhorn, and at restauranteur/urban farming activist Alex Bodnar's home. They are still needing covered up for the winter. I suppose they still long for the warmer Calabria southern Italy of their ancestors. Alex says his "were really kicking out" this year, Sam's did well, and mine (despite my impatiently jumping the gun and uncovering them too early this spring so they got damaged by a later frost) did well too. We're going to be transplanting some babies from Sam's to the Hazelwood Food Forest and Hazelwood Urban Gardens Flowers Avenue Garden one of these cool fall
days. A good number of fruit and nut trees have been planted at the Hazelwood Food Forest, along with edible berries and perennial plants both medicinal and culinary. Chuck Christen, a couple of American Legion vets from a rural area, and many others worked together to build good strong sheds at both the food forest and the Flowers Ave garden. Jerusalem artichoke, also known as sunchoke, did very well at Ladora and Lytle, so we're spreading it to Flowers and the Food Forest. It's a daisy-like flower (actually in the sunflower family) which gives kind of a crinkly potato like root which is said to be good for regularizing blood sugar level and fetches $5.99/lb on the organic food market. People are still asking the question about the HUG garden at the corner of West Elizabeth and Lytle Streets: Who gets the produce that we grow there? And the answer is always, "Everybody. This is everybody's garden." In fact I've nominated that garden to be call Everybody's Garden. Of course we can always use more help growing as well as harvesting...
The YMCA's urban farming efforts are progressing well also. Their greenhouse is up. There are three compost bins built from forklift pallets and a tool shed. The garden there did wonderfully this year, with staff and children both bubbling with excitement at their new skills. There is a planting of the native Pawpaw fruit tree, an expanded garden area being prepared for next year,and berry bushes. They are building a playpump there, to take rainwater fourteen feet up from the roof. The children will be working by playing. They seesaw back and forth on the seesaw, and the water goes to the garden. Neat, huh? This is an appropriate technology invention originally conceived for parts of the world in which there is little of the infrastructure most of us in the United States expect. Appropriate tech can be high or low tech.
For next spring we're planting lots of garlic, as that is one thing that has proven so popular it's been difficult to keep it from being picked before it's full grown...We have two kinds of garlic planted - The kind you buy in the store, donated by Stan's Market in the strip, and a variety Sam Strati grows which he says keeps better after it's harvested. Don't pick the garlic until it's ready, about June. Ladora Way Urban Farm, Hazelwood's first community food garden, is producing almost unnoticed except for a few neighbors. There are permanent plantings of some herb and food plants there, the soil is good and getting better as compost and manure are added, and each year has new surprises. This last spring, neighborhood kids and adults were startled at a strawberry crop so ornery it produced a bumper crop with no care whatsoever. People went down the alley with empty plastic bags and came back with bags of first strawberry as they came into season, then greens...and beans, and onions and radishes and tomatoes and endive and escarole and...well, the potato crop at Lytle didn't do so good; after all, we had only had time to add manure to sand (it was an empty lot from an apt building torn down in which the basement was filled with bricks and then sand) and a little compost. But St. Stephen's is donating leaves, neighbors are donating leaves and grass clippings and kitchen scraps, so next year the potato area will have better soil. And we're using the bricks for garden borders and pathway. And we built a barbecue pit at Lytle with some of the bricks.
We need a paradigm shift in our neighborhood (actually we need it all over the world). We need what some call "buy-in from the community" in regards to locally grown food. As long as you phrase it right for each particular person, everybody is on board with community food gardens. But few give it enough priority to actually do some serious work at it. Unfortunately, I'm afraid the economic and environmental changes coming will - in no uncertain terms - deliver enough suffering to allow many more people to see that we can't continue to rely on big agriculture to feed us. We need an educational quantum leap to learn how to grow our own food in a big way. The drastic food price increases, the contaminated food incidents, and the loss of our neighborhood's last grocery store are ominous warnings that we need to change our priorities.
Feedback from my last month's article's "I love the bugs, so leave them the hell alone": Mick says you can get rid of the spiders in your basement with monkeyballs because they don't like the smell of them. And Ted's mom remarked that "hell" is a cuss word.
Every day is dramatic for me, even if I don't leave the neighborhood. I watch, read and think about the implications of things going on in the world for my little patch of Earth. Russia turned back their export ships full of wheat because their heat wave made it so they no longer had a surplus to sell. If you can grow quality food, do so. It's bound to pay off as there are going to be ever more abrupt climate change shifts such as this last summer's heat coming. Asia got it's highest temp since they started recording - 129 degrees Fahrenheit. Downtown Los Angeles got to 113 one day last summer, and my brother Mike says a a couple of years ago it got to 115 in his L.A. neighborhood. We need the best of low and high tech appropriate technology to get through the societal changes coming now. If we can see our way clear to working together, old and new appropriate technologies (including the absolutely amazing progress in communications tech
evidenced by such things as cell phones equipped with internet) can save the day. And, like locally grown food, a food co-op - a cooperatively owned and run community grocery store - is a no-brainer, obviously both needed and possible here. Let's do it.
Well, it's been a helluva growing season here in Hazelwood, though - to be exact - things are still growing and being harvested. A row of Hazelwood's signature hazelnut trees are planted at the Pittsburgh Food Forests' first permaculture site on Second Avenue near Hazelwood Avenue. Fig trees - originally from ones Sam Strati brought from Italy - are now at my garden near his on Langhorn, and at restauranteur/urban farming activist Alex Bodnar's home. They are still needing covered up for the winter. I suppose they still long for the warmer Calabria southern Italy of their ancestors. Alex says his "were really kicking out" this year, Sam's did well, and mine (despite my impatiently jumping the gun and uncovering them too early this spring so they got damaged by a later frost) did well too. We're going to be transplanting some babies from Sam's to the Hazelwood Food Forest and Hazelwood Urban Gardens Flowers Avenue Garden one of these cool fall
days. A good number of fruit and nut trees have been planted at the Hazelwood Food Forest, along with edible berries and perennial plants both medicinal and culinary. Chuck Christen, a couple of American Legion vets from a rural area, and many others worked together to build good strong sheds at both the food forest and the Flowers Ave garden. Jerusalem artichoke, also known as sunchoke, did very well at Ladora and Lytle, so we're spreading it to Flowers and the Food Forest. It's a daisy-like flower (actually in the sunflower family) which gives kind of a crinkly potato like root which is said to be good for regularizing blood sugar level and fetches $5.99/lb on the organic food market. People are still asking the question about the HUG garden at the corner of West Elizabeth and Lytle Streets: Who gets the produce that we grow there? And the answer is always, "Everybody. This is everybody's garden." In fact I've nominated that garden to be call Everybody's Garden. Of course we can always use more help growing as well as harvesting...
The YMCA's urban farming efforts are progressing well also. Their greenhouse is up. There are three compost bins built from forklift pallets and a tool shed. The garden there did wonderfully this year, with staff and children both bubbling with excitement at their new skills. There is a planting of the native Pawpaw fruit tree, an expanded garden area being prepared for next year,and berry bushes. They are building a playpump there, to take rainwater fourteen feet up from the roof. The children will be working by playing. They seesaw back and forth on the seesaw, and the water goes to the garden. Neat, huh? This is an appropriate technology invention originally conceived for parts of the world in which there is little of the infrastructure most of us in the United States expect. Appropriate tech can be high or low tech.
For next spring we're planting lots of garlic, as that is one thing that has proven so popular it's been difficult to keep it from being picked before it's full grown...We have two kinds of garlic planted - The kind you buy in the store, donated by Stan's Market in the strip, and a variety Sam Strati grows which he says keeps better after it's harvested. Don't pick the garlic until it's ready, about June. Ladora Way Urban Farm, Hazelwood's first community food garden, is producing almost unnoticed except for a few neighbors. There are permanent plantings of some herb and food plants there, the soil is good and getting better as compost and manure are added, and each year has new surprises. This last spring, neighborhood kids and adults were startled at a strawberry crop so ornery it produced a bumper crop with no care whatsoever. People went down the alley with empty plastic bags and came back with bags of first strawberry as they came into season, then greens...and beans, and onions and radishes and tomatoes and endive and escarole and...well, the potato crop at Lytle didn't do so good; after all, we had only had time to add manure to sand (it was an empty lot from an apt building torn down in which the basement was filled with bricks and then sand) and a little compost. But St. Stephen's is donating leaves, neighbors are donating leaves and grass clippings and kitchen scraps, so next year the potato area will have better soil. And we're using the bricks for garden borders and pathway. And we built a barbecue pit at Lytle with some of the bricks.
We need a paradigm shift in our neighborhood (actually we need it all over the world). We need what some call "buy-in from the community" in regards to locally grown food. As long as you phrase it right for each particular person, everybody is on board with community food gardens. But few give it enough priority to actually do some serious work at it. Unfortunately, I'm afraid the economic and environmental changes coming will - in no uncertain terms - deliver enough suffering to allow many more people to see that we can't continue to rely on big agriculture to feed us. We need an educational quantum leap to learn how to grow our own food in a big way. The drastic food price increases, the contaminated food incidents, and the loss of our neighborhood's last grocery store are ominous warnings that we need to change our priorities.
Feedback from my last month's article's "I love the bugs, so leave them the hell alone": Mick says you can get rid of the spiders in your basement with monkeyballs because they don't like the smell of them. And Ted's mom remarked that "hell" is a cuss word.
Every day is dramatic for me, even if I don't leave the neighborhood. I watch, read and think about the implications of things going on in the world for my little patch of Earth. Russia turned back their export ships full of wheat because their heat wave made it so they no longer had a surplus to sell. If you can grow quality food, do so. It's bound to pay off as there are going to be ever more abrupt climate change shifts such as this last summer's heat coming. Asia got it's highest temp since they started recording - 129 degrees Fahrenheit. Downtown Los Angeles got to 113 one day last summer, and my brother Mike says a a couple of years ago it got to 115 in his L.A. neighborhood. We need the best of low and high tech appropriate technology to get through the societal changes coming now. If we can see our way clear to working together, old and new appropriate technologies (including the absolutely amazing progress in communications tech
evidenced by such things as cell phones equipped with internet) can save the day. And, like locally grown food, a food co-op - a cooperatively owned and run community grocery store - is a no-brainer, obviously both needed and possible here. Let's do it.
posted by St. Jim the Composter at 12:02 PM
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