Hello Friends,

We hope you’re enjoying these long, (moderately) hot, summer nights as much as we are. We’re making the most of this abundance of sun to make adjustments to our summer gardens and gather with friends and family to enjoy harvested, healthy meals together outdoors. Its not too late to plant some early maturing tomatoes or squashes to harvest in autumn or build a cob oven for backyard baking. Now is the time to get out of the house and take a hike through one of the many natural areas in and around San Francisco. There are many open spaces to enjoy native flora and fauna that you can walk to right from your front door. If you’re on the west side of San Francisco, the Presidio to the north and Fort Funston to the south offer easy hikes rippled with native plants that are great additions to your ecological garden. If you’re on the east side of the city, Crissy Field to the north and Heron’s Head Park to the south offer pleasing walks through native landscapes. If you want to cross a bridge and experience a less disturbed (and thus more abundant) native area, the Marin Headlands offers the best in viewing natives like Sticky Monkeyflower, Lupines, Purple and Black Sages, Yarrows, Chaparral Peas and more right along the Miwok Trail, one of our favorites. If you make it in the next couple of weeks you’ll probably be lucky enough to snack on a few Huckleberries and Thimbleberries that should be ripening right about now. If you have any information or recommendations of favorite trails that you would like to share with others, we’d love to add it to the website.

Plant of the Month - Lupine

Deep ecological understanding depends on a close relationship with the various players in an ecosystem. It can be intimidating for us to get to know hundreds of living organisms in an area along with the multitude of environmental factors like climate, elevation, and soil type, but if we start slow and keeping adding on, we can be local ecological experts in a flash. That is why we are rolling out our Plant of the Month segment in which we will introduce a new native, edible, medicinal, or otherwise useful plant to further you along the path of deep ecological awareness. We will include taxonomic classification, distribution, characteristics, local habitat, and when possible any indigenous use or lore. Also included will be tips on how this species will enhance your ecological garden.

Our first plant of the month is appropriately a pioneer species that can grow on the harsh coastal dunes of California. The genus Lupinus in the Fabaceae family has over 200 species that range throughout Western N. and S. America as well as the Eastern U.S. and the Mediterranean Basin. In California, native Lupines are found in every county but there are a few main local species: L. albifrons, L. vericolor, L. bicolor, L. arboreus, and L. chamissonis. L. arboreus (Yellow Bush Lupine or Tree Lupine) is a perennial shrub less than 2m high with compound leaves and abundant 6-12″ inflorescences (flower stalks) that are usually yellow but can also be lilac to purple in more northern habitats. It occurs on the coastal bluffs, dunes, or more inland at elevations less than 100m from Santa Barbara all they way up to the Oregon border. L. chamissonis (Silver Dune Lupine) has similar characteristics but with silvery leaves an a light violet to blue inflorescence. It can be found along the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Click here for a photo from our website.

Both of these varieties of Lupine bloom April to June and can be seen at most of our local dune and coastal scrub habitats: Fort Funston, Lands End, or any other Golden Gate National Recreation Area. They also make great additions to your garden as nitrogen fixers, insectaries, and just pretty flowers. Nitrogen fixing, a trait found in all legumes is the ability to change atmospheric nitrogen into a plant soluble form of nitrates with the help of a symbiotic relationship with mychorrizal fungus. Having nitrogen fixers in your garden organically fertilizes your soil just by growing. Lupines require excellent drainage and moderate sun and they can be invasive due to their pioneering spirit but they are easy to remove if they get out of hand. Most native nurseries carry lupines but another way to grow them is to collect seeds (respectfully) from your local coastal dunes and sow them after the first rains in the fall. Now that you’ve been acquainted we hope you and Lupine can get to know each other better. For more information you can consult the online Jepson Manual at: http://www.ucjeps.berkeley.edu/interchange.html

ECOSF on AIR

Keep your minds and ears open this Saturday morning at 10am for an exclusive radio interview with Davin and Sam on the I Heart Organic show on KUSF, 90.3 FM. They will be discussing permaculture, sustainable living, cooperative community building and more. Don’t miss this chance to hear ECOSF on our local airwaves, getting the word out. As always, Don’t Panic It’s Organic! The following week, Tori and Saba Malik will be discussing The Big One, a community convergence happening in 2008 to bring all of our ideas, inspirations, innovations, and actions together to create a better community for us all!

4th Bay Area Regional Permaculture Convergence

A little bit of thoughtful observation of our ecology, economy, and culture will show that big changes are upon us. However you choose to look at it, we’re on the edge of something big. What better way to address these times than to get together with some forward thinking minds in the Bay Area to not only discuss but decide what the future could look like? Many have pursued Permaculture as a means of bringing hope and providing a solutions oriented perspective to the situations we face. Come and find out how others are optimizing their niche in this dynamic society. See others projects, inspirations and evolution of permaculture philosophy and how it applies to your life. We can see this time of convergence as an opportunity on the brink of transformation to ease the flow of human and natural systems integration. The future is in our hands, let’s get together and shape it!

This Sunday, July 8th, we will gather with other co-creators of a better community at Merritt College, nestled in the Oakland hills where we will co-envision and create the many mutual benefits emerging from this very literal edge of human and natural ecology. Don’t miss out on this great opportunity to connect the nodes of sustainability branching throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Davin will be presenting some past and future projects for ECOSF, with discussions of how little changes in your home and garden can create positive impacts for our community. Tori along with Saba Malik will be presenting The Big One. For more details about the Permaculture Convergence this weekend please go to http://www.urbanpermacultureguild.org/convergence/

Geoff Lawton Greens the Desert

What is permaculture? If you’re not familiar with the term coined by Bill Mollison, he defines it as follows: the conscious design and maintenance of agriculturally productive ecosystems which have the diversity, stability, and resilience of natural ecosystems. It is the harmonious integration of landscape and people providing their food, energy, shelter, and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.

Last month, Davin had the opportunity to attend an Advanced Permaculture Workshop with Geoff Lawton at the Regenerative Design Institute in Bolinas, CA. Besides enjoying and enriching his permaculture knowledge at RDI’s 17 Commonweal Garden’s, while living on a 5 gallon a day water budget (accomplished by the use of composting toilets, greywater systems, and solar showers) he was also introduced to the Permaculture Research Institutes’s Geoff Lawton and his incredible work “Greening The Desert”. Over a 3 year period, Geoff and company, established a date palm food forest on 10 acres in Jordan, 400 meters below sea level, in a region with an incredibly high salt content and just 1/5 the amount of irrigation typically used to farm in that region. Though local agricultural scientists said it was impossible to grow figs with that much soil salinity and so little water, Geoff was able to not only have figs growing on 4 foot tall trees in 6 months time, he also was growing dates, guavas, mulberries and citrus. To learn more about this incredible work, check out his website with a 5 minute flash video on “Greening the Desert” . To learn more about permaculture, read our excerpt from Toby Hemingway’s book Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture below and on our website, or borrow this book and others like it from our lending library.

Become a Garden Coordinator for an SF School through the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center

Tori Jacobs will be attending a School Garden Teacher Training course in August and you can too! The five-day intensive residential training at OAEC’s 80 acre site offers hands-on skills and theoretical approaches to create and sustain school garden programs. The course includes sessions on integrating the garden into curricula and state standards, as well as nutrition, recycling and vermiculture, composting, project-based learning, art, team building and fund raising. Tori hopes to use the knowledge learned to bridge the gap between foundations and the schools and non-profits that are looking for funding. For more information about this program go to: http://www.oaec.org/school-garden/school-garden-teacher-training-august

Book of the Month - an excerpt from Toby Hemingway’s Gaia’s Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture

The Many Roles of a Tree

As I’ve said, when we look at a plant, we often see it as doing one thing. Take the hypothetical white oak I referred to above. Some homeowner placed that tree in the backyard to create a shady spot. But even this single tree, isolated in a lawn, is giving a rich performance, not simply acting as a leafy umbrella. Let’s watch this oak tree to see what it’s doing.

It’s dawn. The first rays of the sunlight strike the canopy of the oak but most of the energy in these beams is consumed in evaporating dew on the leaves. Only after the leaves are dry does the sunlight warm the air within the tree. Above the oak, however, the air has begun to hear, and a cloud of just awakened insects swirls here. Below the canopy, it’s still too chilly for insects to venture. The insects roil in a narrow band, sharply defining the layer of warm air above the tree. Together the sun and the oak have created insect habitat, and with it, a place for birds, who quickly swoop to feast on the swarm of bugs. In the cool shade of this tree, snow remains late into the spring, long after unprotected snow has melted. Soil near the tree stays moist, watering both the oak and nearby plantings, and helping to keep a nearby creek flowing (early miners in the West frequently reported creeks disappearing once they’d cut nearby forests for mine timbers). Soon the sun warms the humid, night-chilled air within the tree. The entrapped air dries, its moisture escaping to the sky to help form clouds. This lost moisture is quickly replaced by the transpiring leaves, which pump water up from the roots and exhale it through puffy-lipped pores in the leaves called stomata. Groundwater, whether polluted or clean, is filtered by the tree and exits through the leaves as pure water. So trees are excellent water purifiers, and active ones. A full-grown tree can transpire 2,000 gallons of water on a hot, dry day. But this moisture doesn’t just go away – it soon returns as rain: Up to half of the rainfall over forested land comes from the trees themselves (the rest arrives as evaporation from bodies of water). Cut the trees, the rain disappears.

Sun striking the leaves ignites the engines of photosynthesis, and from these green factories, oxygen streams into the air. But more benefits exist. To build sugars and the other carbon-based molecules that provide fuel and structure for the tree, the leaves remove carbon dioxide from the air. This is how trees help reduce the level of greenhouse gases. As the leaves absorb sunlight and warm the air within the tree, this hot, moist air rises and mixes with the drier, cool air above. Convection currents begin to churn, and morning breezes begin. So trees help create cooling winds. But closer to the ground, trees block the wind. The oak’s upper branches toss in the morning breeze, while down below the air is still. The tree has captured the energetic movement of the air and converted it into its own motion. Where does this energy go? Some scientists think that captured wind energy is converted into the woody tissue o the tree, helping to build tough but flexible cells. Trees make excellent windbreaks. A tree placed on the windward side of a house can substantially reduce heating bills. The morning breeze carries dust from the plowed fields of nearby farmland, which collects on the oak leaves. A single tree may have 10 to 30 acres of leaf surface, all able to draw dust and pollutants from the air. Air passing through the tree is thus purified, and humidified as well. As air passes through the tree, it picks up moisture exhaled from the leaves, a light burden of pollen grains, a fine mist of small molecules produced by the tree, some bacteria, and fungal spores. Some of those spores have landed below the tree, spawning several species of fungus that grow symbiotically amid the roots, secreting nutrients and antibiotics that feed and protect the tree. A vole has tunneled into the soft earth beneath the tree in search of some of this fungus. Later this vole will leave manure pellets near other oaks, inoculating them with the beneficial fungus. That is, if the owl who regularly frequents this oak doesn’t snatch up the vole first.

The tree’s ancestors provided Native Americans with flour made from acorns, though most suburbanites wouldn’t consider this use. Now, blue jays and squirrels frolic in the oak, snatching acorns and hiding them around this and neighboring yards. Some of these acorns, forgotten, will sprout and grow into new trees. Meanwhile, the animals’ diggings and droppings will aid the soil. Other birds probe the bark for insects, and yet others depend on the inconspicuous flowers for food. Later in the day, clouds (half of them created by trees, remember) begin to build. Rain droplets readily form around the bacteria, pollen, and other microscopic debris lofted from the oak. These small particles provide the nucleation sites that raindrops need to form. Thus, trees act as “cloud-seeders” to bring rain. As the rain falls, the droplets smack against the oak leaves and spread out in the a fine film, coating the entire tree (all 10 to 30 acres of leaves, plus the branches and trunk) before a single drop strikes the ground. This thin film begins to evaporate even as the rain falls, further delaying any through-fall. Mosses and lichens on this old oak soak up even more of the rain. We’ve all seen dry patches beneath trees after a rain: A mature tree can absorb over ¼ inch of rain before any reaches the earth; even more if the air is dry and the rain is light. To read the full excerpt, please go to http://www.eco-sf.org/index.php/lending-library/

This excerpt has been published with permission by Chelsea Green Publishing. You can purchase the book from them by going to http://www.chelseagreen.com/2001/items/gaiasgarden

As always, if anyone has any projects, ideas, or contributions, we’d love to hear from you. Look forward to seeing you soon, on the trail, in the garden, or converging on the edge!

Have a Blissful July!

Ecology Center of San Francisco