Arte De Timo

Category: Sustainability

This category is for post about general healthful and sustainable living, not just in my house, or in societal terms, but about people living.

  • “A Persistent Drip” – 4 years ago

    From 4 years ago. How time flies, and mountains remain. Zen wisdom is difficult:

    I’ve been in a philosophical mood lately; probably because of the approaching life events, and other big tides, but my trains of thought seem to be manifesting themselves in grand ways.

    What I have been working on in those passing moments is the idea of water dripping on stone. It has come up often here, and its a pretty obvious statement that water is the single most powerful element on earth. It’s our life giver. It is the mountain killer. It is the bearer of news, and conveyor of knowledge. According to zen wisdom, if you want to move mountains, you give it some water, and a little time.

    I have this metaphorical image stuck in my head of a drop of water hitting a stone, and over time the stone melts away. Its a strong image, one that can focus me in an unusual way. It is a direct symbol for changing ones existence. If I am to change anything, I cannot expect it to do so in my favor, all at once. It takes an action at a time to move my course in life. We try to go around, or turn the other way, but there are times when we must face the mountains before us, and work to diminish them a drop at a time.

    I have been extending the metaphor to the state of affairs of humanity, in a way that can provide me, and maybe someone out there, some guidance. We face some big boulders in our path. We all face them together, and they are all linked, because we are all linked. The environment and its degradation is directly tied to our activities, and our invented economies. Our health is tied to the environment, and the products we consume. We live on our collective culture of extracting resources, so how do we become sustainable? How do we beat the beast of shortsightedness, and transient rationale? We see it on the roads when people dart in, and out, burning our spirits, and our fuels, for what? to gain a few seconds and a few extra yards? We see it in the huge footprints we cast, and the competitive and wasteful way in which we live. So how can we expect our whole society to change if our fellow humans can not go through a day without adding to the problems we face. We are all responsible all the way up and down the line. But where do we have he ability to change it?

    The power of a drop.

    There is no one thing we can do, or even a list of things. It takes drop after drop after drop, until there is a torrent of motion against our mountainous problems.

    1. We need political drops: I vote in every election. Obvious. But I try to add some voter power in between too. I am on emailing lists of a few groups that do the political, and legal fighting we need. I belong to the Sierra Club, Union of Concerned Scientists, Environmental Defense, One, and MoveOn, and have participated in petitions by River Watch, the Nature Conservancy, The Earth Day Network and a whole host of others. I also get emails, and have responded to the major Democratic presidential candidates, and party. I add my drop to each on those campaigns that I think will do the most good. Does it do a lot of good? Not a lot, but when I read about a Bush appointee usurping the law or acting as if the country is a corporate playground every day, I know that one of these groups has probably hired a lawyer, and is suing to stop it. I lend them my support in small amounts, but often and for a long time. The point about politics, is that it changes, and its complicated. Looking through this list, you can say I am concerned with people and the planet, which is a good thing, but my political leanings aren’t set in stone. Stones are the obstacle. Remember that!

    2. We need economic drops: I don’t have a lot of dollar votes to work with in this category, but I try to stay informed and do business locally or with companies that are doing things a little better than others. Its not democratic by a long shot to think that how you spend your dollars is enough to guide markets or corporate decisions. I hate the argument that “well if you don’t like the company or the way they act, don’t buy from them.” I posted about it before, but it has always irked me. So what does that mean, that the only people who count are the Gateses, Whinfries, Packards,… and Bushes, because they have more $ votes than most of the rest of us put together? It would be naive to think that even the collective purchases of a huge fraction of people would have much effect on the people who own everything (and I mean the government too.) Boycotting companies, and buying local does make me feel better, though, and more importantly, if I am thinking about every single purchase I am making in terms of health, community, and environment, I am being reminded of my responsibility to the earth, my children, and neighbors, and that goes a long way to getting me to add my drops to the bucket. Plus, 9 times out of 10 when I buy something from the people growing, or making the product I am getting a better product. You want to participate in tinkle down economics, fine, be a dope, but I prefer to be a part of the trickle of economics against the plutocratic mountain.

    3. We need doing drops: It is “we”; that means you do things, and I do things. Hang your close on a line instead of using a machine once in a while. Walk instead of drive. Compost, and reuse. Don’t buy new when you can use what you have, or buy used. All this hurts the economic status quo, but that’s what we want, right? A change. What it means is that you have to learn how to do more things for yourself instead of depending on the cheap shit you get from the marts. Learn how to fix that broken lamp instead of buying a new one. You just may feel a little more satisfied in life when you accomplish something real. It works; you would be surprised. The solutions to our problems won’t come packaged up, won’t be able to buy them somewhere.

    Sorry to say it, but a Prius and CFL’s won’t help us all that much in long term. The government can’t fix things either, in so much as they don’t do the work they legislate. They can, and should stop the old ways, so we don’t die in our own tinkle, but they can’t produce what will replace it. Being interconnected doesn’t mean we have to be interdependent, and thus interned. Interconnection means we have to willingly share our lives on teh planet.

    The last point is that our priorities should be set properly. We have leaned from the Baby Boomers, that “me first” gets us a bitchy, depressing, and boringly unoriginal culture, full of apes more interested in getting $$ and comfort than anything else. So what is important? I think I have written over and over again, that if we put our priorities in order, we won’t be so stressed about competing over everything. Environment, family, health, and education all add to life. However you want to quantify the idols you worship, the alternatives produce better societies, period.

    Go out and imagine the drops of water slowing working away at our problems. The drops of water, that when combined, make a river, and then a sea. And imagine that sea rising, and falling as waves on the shore. They are part of the same. You are part of it all, and it is good, and you are strong, even against the stones that lie in your way.

    For me, today was cloth instead of disposable. You?

  • Vegetarianism – Part 1


    I didn’t think I would have to explain my choice to be a vegetarian living in California, but over the last several months, I have actually been confronted several times about it. And oddly, I had little defense in those moments. I didn’t responded well, partly, because I hadn’t sorted out all my own reasons yet, (which is actually fairly odd for me,) and the questions blindsided me each time they came up.

    In those moments of confrontation, I responded by being polite, and giving easy answers, “I’ve never really liked meat anyway,” and “It’s cheaper not buying meet,” and the good ‘ole, “I just want to see if I can do it.” It all felt pretty lame. Not only was I being questioned and judged by people who should know better, and really shouldn’t be judging me, but I didn’t even put up a fight.

    What I wanted to say when some people asked, “So why are you a vegetarian? Human’s have always eaten meat!” was “BECAUSE IT MAKES ME BETTER THAN YOU!” And they wouldn’t have just been fightin’ words either. Sure, there are people who, for various considerations need to eat meat, and plenty of people who just don’t have the educational or informational resources to make any decisions about it, but for the most part, being a vegetarian makes me better than meat-eaters.

    Let me explain! The reasoning is actually a fairly simple ethical principal. If a person knows what they are doing is wrong, and they continue to do it, they are complicit in the wrong doing. Doing right is better than doing wrong. Furthermore, the judgment of right and wrong needn’t be determined by anyone other than the one doing “it” in the first place. The rights and wrongs don’t need to line up. The argument is about whether a person is trying to do right instead of wrong.

    Setting one’s own boundary and then passing it results from weakness, or some sort of compulsive disorder. I am not passing judgement, these are just the logical consequences. Furthermore, if a disorder is recognized in the self, and nothing is done about it, again, what can I conclude? Anyway, that’s not the point, since all of that lies outside the general argument I am making.

    Going back to food, I claim that it is almost impossible to be a food consumer in this country and not know about the health, social, and environmental problems associated with the contemporary packaged nutrition we call “food.” Let me list some in case you haven’t caught on yet. These products: have too many chemical additives, too much unnatural sugar, modified fats, modified charbs, too many calories, are made with GMO’s, are produced using horrible toxins, take too much energy and water to produce, produced with ultra low wages and unsafe working conditions, are inhumane, are backed by corrupted officials, use ingredients that are unstudied, rely on monopolies and other unethical business practices, decrease biodiversity, are draining the natural fertility of the land, are generating super pests, lead to unhealthy populations, cause cancer in field and packaging workers, are shipped too many miles, spread plant, animal and human diseases, squeeze farmers out of reliable incomes and livelihoods, and are generally just bad for our health, communities, nation, and planet. Those are just a few, but again it doesn’t matter for the argument to work. For my claim to be valid only a small set of problems needs to be accepted.

    What I am getting at is that the modern nutrient system which alludes itself to be food production fails on ethical and moral grounds. It treats people poorly, animals even worse, and the earth like an open pit mine to be exploited for all its worth and then left dead. All the world’s human moral compasses consider those things wrong. It is not loving, accepting, steward-like, or abiding to God’s/god’s/gods’/Gaia’s laws. If you eat food or any food-like product that has been produced immorally, YOU are complicit in that immorality, right?

    At least that is the challenge of human morality. If it is not that clear cut, at least it SHOULD be a struggle. Being “good,” whatever that means, is a struggle, because human nature compels us against our will into what we exactly consider inhuman behavior. Ethics and morality are our inherent traits that allow us to determine who we are. We are not a sum of instincts alone, but choosing beings who can determine which instincts to fulfill. Accepting behaviors because they are in “our nature” isn’t valid, because ethics and morality are also in our nature.

    Our instincts drive us for blood, but when it is wrong, we are obliged to deny those instincts.

    Okay, did you follow any of that? If not, don’t worry, in the next part I’ll take a different tack. I will discuss the meat of the issue, meat in human culture, and our biology. The ethics plays itself out pretty easily when we start to consider actual food.

  • Compost – Part 3

    In part 1 and 2 of my compost series I talked about building a compost pile, and finding a balance in so doing. In part 3, I’ll go over what I get from it, and hopefully transcend ideas of dirt and decomposition.

    Obviously, my compost heap makes soil out of all the organic scraps and bits of matter I add to it, but, like so many other things I do, there is more to it than that. Composting is natures way of recycling everything back into raw materials for use in the garden. The resulting organic matter makes up a part of soil that can’t be created in any other way. But why does it matter? It’s just dirt after all, right?

    Access to dirt is what humans have fought over for millennium, and in many mythologies it is  where we come from, and even return to in death. “Dirt” in the big river deltas enabled civilizations to form and humans to spread around the world. We have come a long way as a species, but we are still tied very closely to the dirt under our feet, and it is important to understand that connection.

    I think most people who have gardened for any length of time know that the top 6 inches of soil is one of the busiest areas in or on a piece of land. It may not be the prettiest or most interesting, but it is the most important. Plants do send roots down further into the earth, some many feet, but the bulk of the fine, nutrient-grabbing roots stay where the action is. Deeper roots mostly do the job of anchoring the plant, drawing up moisture, and tapping into stores of heavier minerals like calcium. The top layers of healthy non-industrial soil literally crawl with life and fertility, even if all you see is dirt.

    In a natural forest environment, it’s more obvious to see the importance of these top layers, and how they form. Layer after layer of leaves, pollen, dead bugs, and droppings all pile up on top of each other decomposing as they get buried. In a natural man-free setting, there isn’t any tilling, or amending going on.  Soil forms, supporting all the life around it in a dynamic system of litter and growth.

    I have come to my own theory about these cycles that is a simple way to envision what is going on in and out of the garden. In the same way that your compost heap needs green and brown material, the soil also has different sources for its constituent parts. Nitrogen, according to most gardening sources is a main nutrient along with phosphorus and potassium. They make up the big three nutrients that scientists decided decades ago were the major building blocks of plant health. Nitrogen and nutrition in general are tricky things, though. Nitrogen is very abundant in the air and all around us, including inside all the various creatures of the earth, but nitrogen doesn’t like to be contained. It leaks out of anything that contains it pretty quickly. In fact, it is part of daily life. Food goes bad. Bodies smell. Dyes fade. Everything jettisons Nitrogen, and very quickly.

    In the garden, we  amend the soil week in and week out in an attempt to keep the nutrients in soil, but it’s expensive and it usually erodes away well before the plants are done with it. Plus, nitrogen is just one part of a very complex puzzle. Despite what we have been convinced of, plant nutrition depends on a whole host of dynamic elements beyond those three numbers on the store bought bag of fertilizer. So, what’s my solution, then?

    Let the bugs hold on to all the Nitrogen and nutrients they want. They will give it back when needed. Trust me! Worms, animals, bugs, and all the little creepy crawlies all are little balls of fertilizer. Animal life, strangely (or to the point, not so strangely,)  is made up of exactly the things that plants need and can’t make on their own. Pretty neat how that works out, huh?

    For example: In the Pacific Northwest, the major source of natural nitrogen that is available in the forests is from the salmon that run up the streams each and every year. Scientists have found through carbon testing, that as the fish move into the forest and die, their nitrogen slowly works its way into the trees through the guts of bears, birds and all the sorts of composting little creatures that live in the forest. Of course there are lots of natural nutrient cycles going on, from floods to atmospheric fixing, but the big cause of ecosystem strength in those forests and their corresponding oceans is this link between the animals, plants, and soil. I love that it is so clear, and such a ringing case for natural fertility. The salmon make the forest rich and full.

    In my home and garden I often catch myself thinking about the fertility I am salvaging by composting my kitchen scraps and yard waste. It’s not a normal thought, sure, but it is a result of seeing how much growth comes from the scraps I am dealing with. Garden specialists I have talked to almost always consider compost as a brown, barren substrate. I find it odd that gardeners think this way, but it makes sense in our human world of doing things. The gardening infrastructure in this country has become so dependent on amendment industries, that gardeners only think in terms of miracle growth products and blank dirt patches. There is so much going on in a well activated garden, I find it almost funny that soil health has only recently become a hot and almost subversive topic in garden circles.

    Most people have come to think that growing food has to do with those brown dirt patches adjacent to freeways all over the west. (If you are wondering why they are brown, and devoid of plants and animals, do some research about the use of bromide in agriculture. ) For me, compost is a literal and symbolic opposite to the system that kills the ground, injects it with petro-nitrogen, and manufactures green, food-like products for people to consume. Compost is about rich, dark, soil that grows, reuses, captures, and creates energy for us to use as food. Composting is about understanding our proper place on the planet.

    Like my rain barrel, my compost pile is an active meditation on what it means to participate in nature. I find it is a pleasant responsibility that alleviates part of my trash-guilt, and gives me a sense of what human maturity would foster.

  • More Perspective

    Sometimes I forget that my perspective has changed over the years, and I forget to check where I am. My son does a great job reminding me to do that.

  • Bike Sharing at De Anza College, Heck Yeah!


    Has anyone seen this? I was out there last Saturday for the flea market, and was walking by. I stopped to tie my shoes, and then looked up to see the sign and yellow bikes. I was a little in shock. I didn’t think there were any progressive schools left in California that had money left to do things like this. I felt a little like I was in Europe or something. They have huge arrays of solar panels too. What a great development for the school.

  • Compost – Part 2

    Here is a video tour of my compost bin (I promised a video). The bin is over a year old now, and hasn’t shown any sign of material or design flaws. It may have dry wood termites in it, but there is enough redwood that it might take a decade before they do any harm or spread anywhere else. Otherwise I think its working pretty well.

    In compost part 1 I talked about reaching a balance. That balance is as much about adding things to the composter as it is about having the right composter for the household. Bins come in many shapes and sizes, so it is important to think carefully about what is needed before the compost piles up.

    I built mine with balance in mind. I wanted something that could take care of all of our food waste, and all of our yard waste, yet wouldn’t take up a ton of space, or time to keep going. Turns out my design was just right, and not only can the composter handle all of our yard and kitchen waste, but it actually needs it to function well. The approximately 40 cubic foot bin was the perfect size to reach a balance for my household. It does take effort, but it isn’t too bad and is comparable to taking out the trash.

    I hinted in part 1 at the idea of brown and green compost materials, so let me explain them a little. Green material is a term used to describe organic material that is high in nitrogen. Brown is something with little nitrogen and high carbon content. As you might guess something like fresh grass clippings would be considered green, while fallen leaves, brown. But why is it important?

    Nitrogen is what I would call the meat, and carbon the roughage and carbs in a compost diet. Most organisms use nitrogen for the complex molecules needed in energy storage and transfer. Some examples are proteins, chlorophyll, and fats. Consequently, those are the things that microbes, bugs, animals and even us humans like to eat, but without the roughage, none of us biological creatures would be energized. I won’t get into the specifics of biological compositional analysis (not that I have a background in it), but think of how you would feel if meat was the only thing you ate.

    The needed ratio of carbon to nitrogen is something like 9 to 1 (Correction: 25 TO 1), but I don’t think its super important as long as you have quite a bit more brown material than green in the composter. If you add kitchen scraps and green grass to your compost heap, and nothing else, you will end up getting a lot of nitrogen-rich molecules floating around. These will take the form of smelly fumes, and will probably spur a lot of unwanted growth like from various slimes, and maggots. In any case, too much nitrogen leads to a lot of foul activity. Sure, the waste will still compost, but you won’t like the experience. Trust me, I know from experience.

    So what kinds of compost materials generate a good balance?

    My bin takes all the leaves (brown) from the various trees we have, along with our kitchen scraps (very green), and anything else considered a natural waste, like fallen fruit (green), weeds (green and brown), or yard trimmings (very brown). Occasionally, I’ll even throw in shredded bills (very brown). This seems to make for a good balance. You would probably be surprised by what else I throw in there, though (like two dead rats I caught in a trap I set out. Gross and very green, plus nutrient rich.)

    What surprises most people is that there really aren’t very many limitations to what will compost. There is a myth that centers on not adding meat or dairy to a compost heap. I challenge that myth. I compost everything from the kitchen except bones (these actually don’t compost well). Meat, dairy, bread, paper, you name it, it all goes in and disappears.

    The only thing that didn’t break down well in my hot heap, surprisingly, were the leftover tortillas from my MFA thesis reception. I had bought them from the “regular” supermarket in bulk, for cheap, and as a result were loaded with preservatives. Those things stayed true to form in my heap for weeks, while everything else from the reception like the paper plates, beans and cheese slipped away into soilness.

    I think the premiss of the myth revolves around the idea that meat takes a while to break down, and in that time becomes foul, drawing in animals. My experience is that with enough compost going on around it (a foot or two of material on all sides) almost anything will rot away before it becomes a problem. The size of the heap is the key factor. Nothing composts well in anything less than 3 or 4 feet of space, so meat would just magnify the problem of a composter that is too small (which I think is often the case.)

    So, after all this what do I get from my composter?

    In part 3 I will talk about what comes out of the heap, and what I think is important to know about your nitrogen in the garden. Didn’t I tell you compost was complex and fun?

  • The Road to Electrification


    This holiday my family spent a lot of time on the road traveling. It gave me a lot of time to think, which was nice, since thinking is one of my favorite things to do. Sitting in a car for all those hours inevitably got me contemplating cars, travel, and our problems with them.

    I wondered why we, as a society, protect the status-quot when it comes to travel. We deny every chance that comes up to go beyond the 150 year old gasoline powered automobile, whether its trains, or electric cars, or higher standards. Cars really are a pain in the butt, even for as much mobility they offer us. They often require multi-year loans to pay off, only last about 10 years, cost thousands of dollars a year to maintain, and even more to fuel up. The internal combustion engine is inefficient, loud, dangerous, large, heavy, and complicated. Why do we bother keeping it around?

    Our culture demands smaller, better, faster and cheaper with everything else, but we seem to be more than happy with our uncomfortable metal bricks on wheels. So maybe we aren’t all that happy, but what options do we have? For our trip we had the options to drive our Prius for 10 hours and $70, or use up 5 hours, our dignity (from the horrible “search” and general treatment we would get in the airport), and $500 flying. There is no train to our destination, so we couldn’t take one even if we wanted to. There has been talk and hopes of a single bullet train in our general area, but that will never get built. There is also the bus route, but that lies somewhere in between driving and flying, and usually only offers the worst of both; high cost, uncomfortable travel, and extremely long travel times.

    After depressing myself with this conclusion about our one practical option to be uncomfortable, inefficient and environmentally dirty, I remembered some sound bite I had heard about this company that was trying to change the map of personal travel. They had the idea that electric cars would work for a population if you got past the cost and limitations of the batteries. Their model is to sell the car along with a lease for the batteries. The lease offers car owners the chance to swap them out as needed at battery swapping stations on long trips, or just for convenience reasons. I like the idea, but their implementation and leasing structure would only work in fresh markets, expensive ones, or very small countries.

    The other thing I remembered was something out of Popular Mechanics. There had been a dream a while back about making cars into platforms for various propulsion and cab options; modular cars if you will. That seemed like a good idea, too, but only amounted to a half-assed pipe-dream from some car makers. So what happens if we combine those ideas?

    As I drove along, it started making a lot of sense to me, and I proved a point to myself. The point being that we lacked vision in our down-turned, feeble, economically driven mindset. This lack of vision is something that we all seemed to acknowledge in our loss of Steve Jobs, but why isn’t it something we try to overturn; investing in, encouraging and supporting those who have some? Why aren’t we all seeking out new ways of seeing our lives? Why aren’t we experimenting and adventuring? Everyone I see in the public eye and milling about in society, just seems to be shelled up in bouts of irresponsibility, fear, and short sightedness. So why can’t we have a new way to travel that provides us more options?

    Here’s what I came up with: The main “hurdle” of electric cars as reported by the media is their range, but like the SUV, this idea is about owning and driving around everything all the time. What if we bought electric cars with a range of 50 miles and an empty front compartment with a 48 volt plug. 50 miles would get us to the vast majority of the places we want to go, and for the other small percentage we just plug in extra power in that empty space. If we need hundreds of miles, then we plug in some rented batteries, or if we need to go off the grid then we plug in a turbine generator. All the parts and infrastructure are already in place. Think about it.

    There is an auto dealership in just about every city in the country, so they could be used for the generator installation and battery swapping. Our roads are already in place, and it seems the US will never fully switch to anything else. And the biggest benefit of this sort of car is that an empty box and a plug will take advantage of what we do best in this country, innovate and compete. With a few standards for plug and power connections, we could see all sorts of plug-in options. I could even see external adapters that allowed for car daisy-chaining or on road recharging. We could have toll roads with overhead power like what we have for electric muni-buses. I can see a different world when I think about it.

    What we need is some societal vision and daring to do things differently. Our problem is how we think about cars, not the electric car technologies. We are trying to make them replace an old limiting technology instead of seeing the immensely liberating opportunities they could bring us. Electric and gasoline power are totally different. Where one is heavy and slow to change, the other is light and adaptable. Our mindset with cars is based on a 150 year history of what they can’t do, instead of all the millions of things they could do if we moved forward.

  • Compost – Part 1

    Compost is a great topic with all sorts of room for discussion and investigation, so I am going to take on the topic in parts.

    It is also a BIG topic. Understanding compost requires a few layers of biology, a layer of agriculture, a layer of physics, and some thrown in construction, environmentalism, gardening, and spirituality. Well OK, its not that complicated of an idea, but it touches on a lot of important issues.

    First and foremost, composting is the rotting of organic material (Not the little green label on food, but things made of molecules that contain carbon) into humus (Not the yummy tan colored food, that’s hummus. Humus is the part of the soil that is organic). Composting happens pretty much everywhere that organic materials occur; forests, oceans, gardens, the dump, behind your refrigerator. You might say that composting is the biological version of entropy; if there is something that can be broken down in nature, it will.

    Once the maintaining properties of life leave an object, the doors are opened to a range of organisms that want to recapture any stored energy from that object. In nature, things just keep on rolling, so any creatures whose biological defenses fail become, quite literally, dirt; and that is a good thing. It can happen fast or slow, and through a whole range of processes. Sometimes there are feathered or furry creatures involved, but at a certain point, almost assuredly, some ants come into play. If there is enough chemical energy left in the object for it to become food, then some ants will find it, and eat it. This goes for a piece chocolate you drop, to a damaged flower seed. Eventually though, in all the dark quiet places of the world the more important processes take over .

    Fungi and bacteria are the heart of the composting process. They are always in a battle to find food, so living things develop strategies to defend against their onslaught. We, humans shed our skin and hair, we have kamikaze immune white blood cells, acidic stomachs, oils, saliva, you name it, all in an attempt to keep fungi and bacteria away from our energy, i.e. cells and tissues. When those things fail, I think we know of some of the things that can happen; infections, stomach problems, and disease. It’s pretty ugly stuff.

    Finally, once things settle down and a little moisture is mixed in, the real work begins; active microbial decomposition. All those brilliant fiber structures, cell membranes, complex molecules, and energetic chemical bonds that make up our beautiful living world are cracked open, broken down over and over again, and become raw materials and energy for a host of microbes.

    In the garden, it is the compost’s job to take advantage of this process and turn all the left over organic material back into something that can be used in the garden. It can be as simple as piling up leaves in the Fall, to carefully layering “brown” material with “green” material to build a hot “heap.” Striking a balance can be tough sometimes, when things like, speed, space, smell, and output are considered.

    When I first started composting, I was living in a townhouse with a small patio, and I didn’t get the balance right in many ways. Space was limited, I didn’t have access to enough “brown” material, and my inputs were too high. I’ll confess, the outcome was not pleasant for anyone within nose-shot. Not only that, I had good humus mixed in with fresh food material, making deployment of the compost impossible. Here’s some pics of the experiment:

    The ideas were sound, but my execution was not so great. The most important thing was that I learned about how a biological composting system functions, and how that sort of composter might work. When building something from scratch, its always good to have some hands-on knowledge to go along with the ideas. I did go on building fortunately, and I now have a good functional 2 yer old system up.

    In Compost – Part 2, I will post about the composter I have now, along with my techniques, and what I gain from the activity. Part 3 will be about the ramifications of composting on several levels, and why I do it. Oh, and I have a video to stick in somewhere, too!

  • The Urban Orchard


    The urban orchard isn’t one of my ideas of course, but it is one of those secret little treasures that people discover when they have a bit of land, and have an interest growing food. Besides the fact that I inherited the beginning (or maybe the end) of an orchard with our house, I have read about it in the different organic gardening books I have. I have also come across the concept in various ways, and under different names when talking to people about their “gardens” and watching videos, or movies about urban sustainability.

    An urban orchard is a group of fruit trees that are crammed into a space that is typically considered too small for even just one tree. If you do an investigation of fruit tree culture, invariably the bulk of info you will find is about trees out in the field with ample space. What most urban gardeners don’t realize is all that info is about optimal growing and harvesting (i.e. farming) conditions. It comes from industrial growing interests, whose job it is to grow lots of fruit for commercial harvest.

    The reality is many older heirloom tree varieties have a wide range of characteristics allowing them to grow in highly variable conditions. Not only that, contemporary trees are grafted onto a choice of rootstocks, which not only are pest hardy, but can be dwarfed. If you stay away from the commercial supermarket varieties, usually you can cram fruit trees into every nook and cranny of a yard and they will be OK. They will produce small amounts of fruit, and maintain a slow and steady growth pattern, which is perfect for the family garden.

    In our back yard, which is only about 2500sf, we have a 40 foot avocado tree that produced several HUNDRED pounds of avocados the year we moved in (they have multi-year cycles, so that was a peak year,) a 15 foot Nispero/Loquat tree, a 15 ft plum tree, orange tree, lemon tree, grapefruit, apple tree, and several hedge Avocados. To that I have added two pear trees, grapes and berries.

    Despite the small size of our yard and presence of all of these trees, we have plenty of space for a large garden, roses, flowers, and grass to run around. Our yard was a big part of why we bought this house, actually. With such a small interior, we wanted a space that could provide us with a wonderful outdoor lifestyle right away.

    Obviously, the yard wasn’t quite right in some ways, but the trees were spot on in their placement and size, and the layout was very good. The shade is great, and the temperature gradients they produce beat any heating/cooling system. Plus, using a phrase from dear relative, the fruit is out of this world.

    So far, the trees haven’t added much “work” to the yard care duties. The greatest effort each year is picking fruit, particularly from the 40 foot avocado tree. Collecting dropped fruit is also a chore, but nothing more than raking leaves, really. We have had issues that are on going, though. The main problem we have run into is pests. The apple tree gets wiped out each year by weevils and codling moths. and the avocado tree is a favorite of the squirrels. We also get opossums and racoons, but I think those are caused by neighborhood-wide fruit tree neglect, and are endemic. I am working on our fruit tree problems, and hopefully with the little bit of extra time I have being out of school I should come to some solutions. Inexpensive, safe and eco-healthy solutions are hard to come by, but I have some ideas.

    The only other expenses so far besides time and water (a complicated issue I’ll touch on as I go along), has been an arborist and fertilizer. The tree trimmer was pretty expensive, but that really is a cost of home ownership, with a little previous neglect thrown in. The bags of Dr. Earth fertilizer aren’t cheap either, but when purchased in bulk, they pay for themselves in added productivity. I think I’ve added 50-100% to the orange crop, just with the application of a few dollars worth of fertilizer.

    Urban fruit trees are fairly common in California, but taking them to that next orchard level is often overlooked, yet very doable. It was quite common in the years of old, and hearkens back to another era when people put a lot of time into food and home life. Now it provokes a lot of questions about maintenance and time requirements; priorities have shifted. So far, for us having an urban orchard is proving to be lost treasures we never knew about, and one we intend to add to.

  • The economics of a rain barrel

    My water company charges $2.99 for a unit of water, which is defined as 100 cubic feet, or 748.5 gallons. This breaks down to just under 4 tenths of one cent per gallon of water that comes through the pipes. So what do we get for that 0.4 cents? We get water from a local well, possibly mixed with some surface water from a nearby reservoir, some chlorine, some dissolved minerals, and a little bit of organic matter.

    A rain barrel is typically about 50-60 gallons, so every time it fills up you are accumulating about 20-23 cents worth of water at the water utility rate. What do you get?

    If a rain barrel costs about $80+ to make or buy you would have to fill it up and empty it 400 times to break even. And, if you get around 20-40 chances a year to fill it up, we are talking 10 to 20 years ROI for a rain barrel. Yikes! That is not a good investment!

    So why do it? Why spend the money and time? Is it that feeling of freedom and independence of “going off the grid?” Maybe a bit of nostalgia for how our farming forefathers and foremothers used to do things? I would say it is a little of all of this, and a little more.

    Setting up a rain barrel has a bit of that DIY feeling that gardening, canning, sewing, etc. have. There is no immediate need to do any of it, but there are enough little good reasons, and enough little pleasures in doing it, that it is worth it. A wine barrel just looks neat around the house, particularly one from France.

    A big part of this sort of project for most people is a sense of connection. Like growing a tomato out in the yard, there is something wonderful about being a part of the whole cycle of providing sustenance for one’s family. I would say the majority of people never get a chance (nor are interested) in seeing how their water gets to them. Turn on the faucet and water comes out. Harvesting some rain water lets us see and feel where our water is coming from. It is a reattachment to the seasons, and to the nature of rain. We are so sheltered from the atmosphere and weather, this sort of project is a way to get us thinking about how the seasons affect us again. Rain harvesting is a lesson on what the rainy season used to mean. Is it a green season, or a white season? Will it have an impact on you this year? How should I plan for the coming months?

    A rain barrel is a sort of slow motion alarm clock that is controlled by nature, and can’t be set by our hands. It will fill according to some other system that we have all too often forgotten and disconnected from. In that relationship, the ROI has already been met.

    I now have 50 gallons of murky water in this thing to use, and return to nature. It sits there to be used before the next rain. It sits there outside waiting for use. It is also waiting in my mind as a reminder that the Green season is approaching, and that the grasses are growing; that the natural cycle still affects us even if we often choose not to see it.