That’s an Ohlone greeting that means ‘In breath, as it is in Spirit’ or ‘Life for all living things’. Wouldn’t those be wonderful thoughts to share with other people than just the customary hello? The word actually comes from Mutsun, one of eight Ohlone dialects spoken along the central coast of California. While many of us may be familiar with the local tribes of the Bay Area including the Coast Miwok (now known as the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria), the Ohlone (named the Coastanoan people by the Spanish), the Yokuts, and the Pomo (which were actually made up of 21 different groups), most standard historical accounts barely scratch the surface of cultural diversity present in California before the arrival of Spanish explorers in 1542. When the Padres of the Franciscan Order established their first mission, San Diego de Alcala, in 1769 there were about 100 unique tribes or nations inhabiting California’s rich and diverse landscape. Between these tribes and nations, more than 120 dialects were spoken and many of them as unintelligible to one another as Chinese is to English and vice versa. Linguistics researchers state that some of these languages are endemic to California (meaning they are unassociated with any other languages spoken around the world).
While some anthropologists estimate the population of native people living west of the Sierra crest in 1769 run as high as 2 million, the most commonly accepted figure by academics is around 300,000. By the time the Mission system of domination, exploitation, conversion to Christianity, acculturation, and outright genocide ended in the early 1800s, over 75% of the native people between San Diego and San Francisco had been wiped out and their cultural traditions nearly destroyed. Most early explorers, scientists, and anthropologists, crudely defined California’s indigenous population as a primitive people, even compared to other native tribes and nations across the United States, because they did very little ‘agriculture’ (specifically the use of irrigation to grow rows of crops for sustenance), wore little to no clothing, and did not have an elaborate written language. John Muir, and other ‘conservationists,’ were awestruck by the beauty and abundance of California’s oak woodlands, valley grasslands and prairies, and coastal ecosystems describing them as a new ‘Eden,’ and ‘park like’ in their openness, and apparent usefulness in their appearance, yet they claimed the native people had very little involvement in the landscape, and more often than not, resorted to an assumption that most native people of California took extra care to ‘barely break a branch or twig’. After decades of more thorough research, archeology, and oral tradition, we have come to understand that the native people of California were highly involved in the care and tending of the landscape to create the park like settings of majestic oaks that rained down acorns, and the incredibly abundant prairies and grasslands that were purposefully burned to promote new growth, recharge the soil’s fertility, reduce pest populations, and encourage genetic biodiversity. Cultivation of many useful plants was a common practice, and the methods used to promote enhanced growth and diversity included weeding around specific beds of wild crops, careful pruning and coppicing of shrubs and trees, spreading wildflower and wild grain seeds, loosening the soil with digging sticks, and fire to reduce fuel loads and the above mentioned benefits. The sustainable harvest of plants and animals that was able to sustain robust populations of people for over 10,000 years were based on six key variables: season, frequency, appropriate tool, pattern, scale, and intensity. These practices, known today as Tradition Ecological Knowledge or TEK, was passed down from generation to generation of families by word of mouth and practical experience.
The belief many of these tribes share is that the role humans play in the landscape is not something they choose to do for their benefit, but it is something they must do to properly care for the land, the plants and animals they rely on for food, medicine, shelter, and cultural expression. When humans do not touch the earth with these intentions, they say the plants and animals will go away. In the last 200 years, we have lost over 90% of coastal wetlands, and over 95% of inland wetlands, and not surprisingly, about 25% of plants and 55% of animals designated as threatened or endangered species live in wetland habitats. Coastal forests of Redwood and Douglas fir record some of the fastest growth rates of any forests in the world, any while they once extended from Monterey, CA to Alaska, what remains are fragmented state and national parks - only 5% of the once 2 million acres of old-growth forests that take thousands of years to evolve, and can support thousands more species per individual tree than those found in second and third growth stands. Much of the grassland and prairies that made up 1/4 of the state before 1542 have been converted to overgrazed ranch and pasture, salinated and toxic farmland and feedlots, and increasing human development and infrastructure filled with invasive annual plants that prevent more ecological perennial natives from remaining established. Anyone living in California for over a year know we have tremendously damaging fires that rage through much of the remaining grass lands and pasture throughout the state every year. The intentional burning practiced by the native tribes of California reduced fuel loads and the risk of out of control blazes that burn landscapes beyond their ability to heal themselves. Sadly, while some of the native groups that barely cling to existence in our state have some of their own land, many tribes are still not federally recognized, do not have their own reservations or rights to their native lands, and nearly all treaties made with them in the past were never ratified. We haven’t even mentioned the desecration and overt disrespect of native burial grounds and remains (Ikea of Emeryville’s ‘Shellmound St.’ address comes to mind).
While this all may sound like a dismal and sobering account of our state’s legacy, optimism can be found in the facts that we know what activities brought about these disasters and outcomes, and that we still have much of the Traditional Ecological Knowledge granted us by the strong survivors of native California culture. We know how to do things differently - better at that, we just need to cooperate and coordinate our efforts to make it happen. Many native-led groups and other scholarly efforts are underway to make the necessary changes towards harnessing TEK for ecological and social gains, as well as work towards reparation and recognition for descendants of native tribes and nations. Some of the native-run non-profit doing this meaningful work include: The Cultural Conservancy, “dedicated to the preservation and revitalization of indigenous cultures and their ancestral lands,” the Indigenous Environmental Network, “A network of Indigenous Peoples empowering Indigenous Nations and communities towards sustainable livelihoods, demanding environmental justice and maintaining the Sacred Fire of our traditions”, and the Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival created “to foster the restoration and revival of indigenous California language so that they may be retained as a permanent part of the living cultures of native California.” They each have different volunteer opportunities for those interested. Some restoration work is going on in San Francisco, for example Ohlone Pocket Park. For more general informaion, Karen Strom has compiled a lot of links and resources here.
RECENT ECOSF EVENTS
We recently attended the Focus the Nation event at San Francisco State University. Much of the discussion there was around large national campaigns for clean, renewable energy, green jobs, and green business. We brought a local, personal perspective and shared the benefits and simplicity of building a solar oven for heating and cooking out of cardboard, aluminum foil, and a piece of scrap glass that we learned from Joseph Radabaugh’s book Heavens Flame, and informative selection from our Lending Library. We brought a brand new Sun Oven, which you can buy on average for about $250, and quite easily gets up to 350 degrees Fahrenheit (yes, even in San Francisco), and a homemade solar oven, Radabaugh style, which can’t get quite as hot, or as quickly, but its practically free, and it heats water, and preheats food with not problem. Joe says if they’re made well, they can cook anything you want. You can even start a small bakery if you really know what you’re doing.
We also stopped by a Jefferson Elementary School garden work day organized by Gerry, one of the parents at Jefferson, and helped them plant dozens of veggie starts donated by a wholesale nursery. While we were there, we added a third coat of boiled linseed oil to the cob fish to help make the finish more water resistant. We have a few other linseed oil applications to do around the city, so if you’d like to learn more and perhaps volunteer an hour or so to help, please let us know.
The last garden work day at Monroe Elementary School in January brought us to about the completion of the cob phase, now ready to be plastered with an earthen mix of clay and straw mostly for a rough coat. We’ll be working on that this Friday, click here for more details. We also harvested some of the Broccoli and Cauliflower from the garden and served it to the students for lunch (with a little Ranch dressing in case they were to shy to eat it plain and raw).
Perhaps the most exciting thing we did last month was hosting the Pottery Workshop at Baker’s Alley on Sat. January 17th. We were blessed to have the expertise, patience, and skill of Beatrice Bloom to instruct participants on what kind of clay to get for making beautiful and practical dishware, how to wedge clay to prepare it for working, and the simplicity and craft of the pinch, coil, and slab hand build methods. The Peaceniks were on hand to play some rebellious, thought provoking, folk songs, and Annie, who will be showing how to knit hats and scarves and other things, brought some of her wares. For complete details and photos, check out our Baker’s Alley page, and be sure to come to our next event, a Guerrilla Fruit Tree Grafting, Pruning, and Knitting Workshop with Nik Dyer and Annie Katz.
UPCOMING ECOSF EVENTS
Feb. 13th - Friday - 1:30pm-4:30pm : Monroe Elementary School Garden Work Day -
- Cob Bench building : You should see it now! Cob building in inclement weather is a blast and all the better with friends and family and the goal of completing the student’s outdoor classroom. If you haven’t made it out to a cob event, perhaps this one is the one!
- Enjoy a potluck of local, homegrown, and homemade foods, including solar oven baking if the sun is out! Bring something to share!
- Salad bar gardening : We’ll be adding to our salad bar bed we have been planting over t he last several months. Learn about crop rotation, succession, and fertilizing for maximum yields and quality.
- Location : 260 Madrid St between Excelsior and Avalon in the Excelsior district.
Feb. 22nd - Sunday- 10am-4pm : Baker’s Alley: Guerilla Grafting, Fruit Tree Pruning, and Knitting Workshop -
- Guerilla Grafting : With guest ecological designer and farmer Nik Dyer, learn how to graft delicious fruit on city street trees as well as general grafting and pruning techniques for your urban orchard.
- Knitting Workshop in the Living Room: Knitting extraordinaire Annie Katz is offering to teach her knitting skills on how to make your own scarves, hats, and more from natural fibers.
- Community baking : As always, the oven is fired and available for all your baking needs. Bring something to bake and share, or just a potluck dish and a smile.
- Location : 1390 31st Ave between Judah and Irving in the Sunset district.
IN THE GARDEN THIS MONTH
The weather has been quite unusual this time around. Hot days, cold days, windy days, rainy days. We have several native plants that are quite confused, and fruit trees that are still putting out new leaves since the December. A recent SF Gate article suggests its not just around here, but all over the world. Many plants are confused and not sure if they should put all their energy into growing roots or shoots. One thing is for sure, if you are looking to enhance your garden with any perennial fruit bearing trees and shrubs, now is the time to do so. Most nurseries in and around San Francisco have bareroot fruit trees eager to be planted in your urban homestead. Recent specialized grafting techniques provide 6 on 1 apple trees already trained for espalier, or multi graft plums, pears, and even fruit cocktails (peach, plum, nectarine, and apricot). These are all great options for diversity in a small urban lot. If you have even less space, you might want to consider a genetic dwarf, which don’t grow higher than 6 feet, and are great for containers. This is also the time for your blueberries, raspberries, blackberries (and all their hybridizations), currants, grapes, kiwis, figs, persimmons, and more - all which can do well in the right microclimate. If you have trees already in the ground, now is the time to prune them for structure or fruit set if you haven’t done so already. If you don’t know what you’re doing, consult a good book, call the local Cooperative Extension, or come to our Guerrilla Grafting and Pruning workshop this month at Baker’s Alley. If you’re not feeling quite so ambitions to plant or prune trees, brassica’s like kale, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, and mustards do great being planted right now, as well as lettuce, Asian greens, spinach, and direct seeded root crops like carrots, beets, turnips, and radishes. Primrose is a wonderful edible flower that is full of life and color right now and Borage is beginning to burst with edible flowers for you and the bees if it re-sprouted from last year’s seeds. For detailed information on grafting if you can’t make it to the workshop, click here.
Whatever you do this month, make it personal, make it local, and make it happen. Maybe something in this newsletter sparked your interest, or presented something you don’t agree with. Let us know your thoughts! We always appreciate feedback, suggestions, and comments so email them to info@eco-sf.org.
Suururu-me,
(thank you - in Mutsun) Davin, Sam, and Tori
Ecology Center of San Francisco
With another year sealed in history and a new year upon us, January is always a unique time for reflection on the seasons past and preparation for the seasons to come. Some of us do so with open arms, some with hope for change, and some with uncertainty of the path ahead. Recent political shifts may lift our spirits while escalating geo-political conflicts may deflate them, one thing remains constant – change that is real, that you can see, feel, and breath, starts at home, and generally comes from within. The word ecology, coined by German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in 1873 as ‘okologie’, comes from the Greek word ‘oikos’ which translates to mean “house, dwelling place, habitation”. Economics, likewise is derived from oikos and while it has come to be defined by Webster’s as ‘a social science concerned chiefly with description and analysis of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services’, perhaps it is better understood and acted upon as it was defined in c. 1530 as ‘household management’.
Household management may be considered by some the organization and execution of chores, household inventory, family activities and the like, traditionally relegated to the domain of the ‘homemaker’ but another perspective might be to consider economics, or household management, to mean the ‘managing’ of ideas and actions that create a stable, nurturing, and sustainable household. If we widen our perspective to consider our community, and our goal is to have a sustainable community then it would have to be made up of sustainable households. Further widening our perspective, if we wanted to have a sustainable global community, it would have to be made up of sustainable communities. Which eventually brings us back home. How can we create a sustainable household?
While there are countless cultural paths and perspectives to consider, the American roots of a sustainable household are most epitomized and perhaps easily lifted from that of the ‘homesteader’. Who or what is a homesteader you may ask? Well, by Webster’s definition, a homesteader is someone who acquires a tract of land from the United States by filing a record and living on and cultivating that tract. Unfortunately that option is not in the cards for most of us, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be a ‘citysteader’, a term we heard from our friends Sorrel and Yeast, creators of Source – a quarterly zine for the Bay Area – and the subject of their 3rd issue. That issue is filled with details on how city dwellers like ourselves can save money, reduce waste, and reclaim beautiful, gratifying skills by making their own yogurt, butter, cheese, bread, sauerkraut, kombucha, mead, jams and by raising chickens, ducks, and bees. For more information check out their website bayareasource.googlepages.com. Certainly ‘citysteading’ goes beyond food and their 4th issue will be addressing greywater reuse, rainwater harvesting, solar ovens, and bike powered machines – all components of a sustainable household.
So what changes are we looking for in this new year? What changes and sacrifices are we willing to make for that to happen? Maybe some of us will pack up and run to the country because we’re convinced the city can’t be sustainable, while others will dig their heels in and explore every facet of making their existence in an urban center as sustainable as possible. Maybe some of us think sustainable is not enough and that we need a culture change that will bring us to a new level of thinking about our place in the ecosystem we rely on for our needs now and in the future. Whichever river you follow, it will lead to a sea of opportunities. You may consider raising your own chickens because of the healthier eggs, incredible fertilizer, pest control, and deeper connection to nature, but if that’s too much right now, perhaps you can make a commitment simply to not buy eggs from places that cage hens, cut off their beaks, and don’t leave them any room or place to enjoy a natural life. We recently added to our pair of ducks, Emma and Mr. Dottie, three chickens, Frida, Nina, and Joni, because we wanted to experience what it was like to raise chickens in the city, so that we could more accurately advocate for others to do the same. After watching them act out their natural behaviors and desires like hoping and flying around, scratching, and most incredibly – taking a dust bath (which entails lying on their side, stretching their legs out, and throwing soil all over themselves), we feel like we can’t eat eggs from any store (or diner for that matter) that doesn’t offer the hens a natural, peaceful existence.
When you consider that most places we shop for eggs: Safeway, Trader Joe’s, Costco, convenience stores, even Whole Foods, only offer eggs from hens that have their beaks clipped to prevent cannibalism (a hen phenomena found only in confined chicken raising), it becomes clear that while businesses can package their products with words like “organic, free range, cage free,” and the like, you ultimately decide whether that is good enough for you to purchase their product, or boycott their practices. For more information on local eggs, click here. We hope this doesn’t come across as a rant against the evils of our corpratocracy, but rather an example of the necessity for each of us to consider what harm, if any, we are willing to do to our earth’s cultures and creatures, and what steps we will take in our own lives and to encourage those around us to take towards a more livable future. While many of us are taking steps by making ‘New Years Resolutions’, here are some to consider:
1. Go Local! Buy only food grown and raised in an ecological manner within 150 miles from your mouth. If that is a bit daunting, try it for just a week, then a month, then a year. If that is too challenging, try foods from just California, or at least no produce from outside the country. Email us for suggestions!
2. Go vegetarian, or vegan, and if not, eat much less meat and fish – here’s why.
3. Send nothing to the landfill – reduce, reuse, recycle, and REFUSE anything that comes in a package that can’t be recycled or composted, and if you’re already there, only acquire things that can be reused or composted as recycling is still energy intensive and serves mainly to create new products to consume. Buy in bulk, or from the farmer’s market, and if you must buy something wrapped in landfill waste, at least buy it from a local producer or from a mom and pop shop when possible.
4. Grow yer own! Ramp up your household and community garden food production. If you’re a novice, maybe you want to collectively cultivate a patch of lettuce or kale with a friend who’s learning as well. If you’re an accomplished urban gardener, go out and teach others, share your skills, your seeds, and the fruits of your labor so that others may see the benefits.
5. Start a ‘citysteading’ activity and keep it up throughout the year. Making your own yogurt is as simple as mixing milk heated to 90-100 degrees Fahrenheit with a little existing yogurt and keeping it at that temperature for at least 8 hours. There are many creative ways of doing so and you’re just a step away from making cheese. In that way, you can reuse glass jars, and provide yourself or your family with healthy, fresh, and active probiotics.
You may not see the world change as quickly as you would like, but taking some of these steps and making ethical convictions of your, own not only brings about the obvious health, nutritional, ecological, and economical benefits but also manifests the intentions of cooperative living in a Western cultural worldview that looks at life and nature as resources to be produced, logged, extracted, manipulated, dammed, bottled, synthesized, genetically altered, confined, slaughtered, packaged, shipped, marketed, sold, and eventually dumped. The moral decisions you make and the actions you take towards a more green, organic, sustainable, ecological, or whatever you want to call it, way of life are not going to come from mass media, politicians, or influential speakers. They are going to come from the same place humans have learned to live sustainably on this planet for the last 200,000 years – enthusiastic and practical observation of nature. Nearly every culture or society that continues to exist today without a dominator paradigm does so without destroying the ecosystem that supports it. They have been able to do so by observing their place as a facilitator and conditional element of their ecosystem, not as a manager or separate entity. There is abundance available to those who seek it. Tom Brown Jr., the naturalist, tracker, and survivalist, says a world beyond your imagination can be viewed in the cracks in the sidewalk; all you have to do is look. Another great reference for ‘citysteading’ is the book The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen.
WHATS NEW WITH ECOSF
As you may have concluded, we have been exploring the many virtues and lessons learned from urban homesteading over the last several months. Our three chickens, Frida (Kahlo) a Plymouth Barred Rock, Nina (Simone) a Silver-Laced Wyandotte, and Joni (Mitchell) an Ameraucana, are housed in a mostly slip-straw chicken coop made almost entirely with reused materials costing less than $100 to build. Like ducks, chickens provide so many benefits and very few drawbacks as well as life long lessons for children and adults alike to be around wild nature, domesticated as they are. In San Francisco, you are allowed to keep up to 4 birds, provided you follow these rules.
If you would like to learn more about raising ducks or hens in the city, and schedule a visit to check out our urban flock, please email or call us.
In keeping with our mission to empower citizens to create cooperative communities, one of our latest projects, Baker’s Alley, seeks to do just that. With the help of the community, we built an earth oven of clay, sand, straw, with an urbanite (sidewalk concrete) base to fire up once a month as a community oven to bring people together for workshops, gatherings, skill sharing, and potluck. This will be a place for us to outreach to the community, open our lending library to the public, and offer our seedlings and other homemade goods and crafts. The first event was to build the oven, the second was a workshop taught by professional baker Tracy Wolfe, and our upcoming event on January 17th, will be a workshop on handmade pottery made with local clay and fired in a sawdust kiln with professional potter and teacher, Bea Bloom. As always, the oven will be filled with breads, cookies, muffins, scones, and more made by the community for the community. We hope to see you there! Check out this article about Baker’s Alley. If you have any ideas for events at Baker’s Alley or have any comments or feedback, please let us know.
A recent workshop on food preservation taught by Davin and Tori at Other Avenues sent participants home with kimchi, strawberry jam, and a kombucha mother. We want to share these skills in hopes of demystifying them and spreading a culture of culturing for the nutritional and health benefits, to preserve and prolong your harvest, and to provide an outlet for expression of local flavors made with local yeasts and local people. Did you know there is a species of lactic acid, the power behind sourdough bread, scientifically known as Lactobacillus sanfranciscensis? If you would like to learn more about fermentation or would like to host a workshop on fermented and cultured foods, please let us know.
UPCOMING EVENTS
Jan. 10th - Saturday - 11am-4pm : Monroe Elementary School Garden Work Day -
- Cob Bench building : You should see it now! Cob building in inclement weather is a blast and all the better with friends and family and the goal of completing the student’s outdoor classroom. If you haven’t made it out to a cob event, perhaps this one is the one!
- Enjoy a potluck of local, homegrown, and homemade foods, including solar oven baking if the sun is out! Bring something to share!
- Salad bar gardening : We’ll be adding to our salad bar bed we have been planting over t he last several months. Learn about crop rotation, succession, and fertilizing for maximum yields and quality.
Jan. 17th - Saturday - 10am-4pm : Baker’s Alley Handmade Pottery Workshop -
- Hand made pottery : With guest potter and teacher Bea Bloom, learn how to make simple, practical, and beautiful pottery from local clays.
- Saw dust kiln firing : Once you have bisque ware you’re ready for firing and if you don’t have money for a big expensive kiln, a simple sawdust kiln for one time, or multiple firings can do the trick for low fired pottery.
- The Guild - Bringing together professionals, educators, designers, consultants, and activists around the common thread of Permaculture for a village renaissance in the urban pulse of the city of San Francisco
- The Meeting Place - Gazebo at the California Pacific Medical Center’s (CPMC) Davies campus. The driveway entrance is in the middle of Castro Street between 14th and Duboce Streets.
- The event includes grafting wood and cuttings for rooting, a grafting demonstration at 1 pm, and low-cost pamphlets about growing uncommon fruits and vegetables. $3 donation requested to help defray costs; most plant materials are free.
- For directions and more information, click here.
Jan. 21st-24th – Multiple Days and Hours : 29th Annual Eco-Farm Conference
- Put on by the Ecological Farming Association, an organization dedicated to the development of ecological farming practices domestically and around the world.
- This event brings together some of the best minds and practices to bring about a food system we can all sink our teeth into.
In many places winter is a time for rest and rumination; the myriad living things of the world hibernate and gather energy for the upcoming rebirth in spring. Although this cycle of change is indeed unfolding in our own environment there is also an unmistakable bursting of life brought on by the saturation of winter rains that pour down upon our hillsides this time of year. The sprouting grasses blanket those precious few unpaved surfaces and in the urban forests, along the coast and in the parks, there are beautiful fruits emerging and ripening like peaches in the middle of July. Fruits, in January?
These magnificent and mysterious winter fruits we speak of are… mushrooms of course! What we call mushrooms are really the fruiting bodies of Fungi that can come in
many diverse forms such as Gilled Mushrooms (our familiar friends), Boletes, Puffballs, Earth Stars, Stinkhorns, Bird’s Nest Fungi, Jelly Fungi, Bracket or Shelf Fungi, Rusts and Smuts. Each of these groups of Fungi have bizarre and beautiful growth forms to match their interesting names. The mushrooms we know and love are mostly the Gilled Mushrooms and Boletes and while there are only 14 species cultivated for food, and just 6 varieties of mushrooms cultivated on an industrial scale (Enoki, Shitake, Padi Straw, Oyster, and two types of our little tasteless favorites, the standard “Button”), there are many varieties of wild mushrooms that are considered culinary delicacies worldwide, and some of them are springing up right here under our noses.
One of the highly treasured local culinary caps is Boletus edulis, commonly referred to as the King Bolete or Queen Bolete, Cepes in French and Porcini (meaning piglet) in Italian. All Boletes are easily distinguished from Gilled Mushrooms (whose spores are arranged along the gills) due to the presence of vertically arranged tubes that house the spores underneath the cap. The ability to remove the entire layer of tubes from the soft, quickly decaying, putrescent fruiting body is also a way to distinguish the Boletes from the Polypore (Shelf Fungi), which also have vertical tube structures using spores. Our local B. edulis varieties are usually white with the cap browning, or reddening, with age but Boletes can range from black to brown to red, yellow, and white. Most species of Bolete are edible but there are some poisonous varieties, so careful and complete identification is always necessary when foraging for wild mushrooms (a wise Fungi philosopher once said, “All mushrooms are edible at least once”). Some key features for I.D. are body color, spore color, arrangement of pores, cap surface features, and color when bruised; remember, a good field guide for wild mushrooms is essential.
Picture this. A heavy rainstorm cruised through last week and the sun has been shining a little bit and you find yourself hanging out with nothing in particular to do. You remember the fine fruits of winter that are poking up all around the city and you get geared up, grab a basket and a field guide and off you go to say… Lands End. But where do you start looking for the queens of the forest floor?
If you’re up on your ecological relationships you know that most of the Boletes, and definitely Porcinis, are ectomycorrhizal (EM), which means they form a type of mutualistic relationship with trees and plants. There are over 2000 EM species in North America and nearly all agricultural, horticultural, and ornamental plants are associated with endomycorrhizal mycelium (also called VAM). The difference between the two types (EM and VAM) is basically that EM mycelium form a mat around the root tip and grow in the intercellular spaces between the root cells and VAM mycelium do not form an outer mat but instead make vesicular arbuscular nodules (get it, VAM), penetrate the root tips and actually grow inside the root cells. In both mycorrhizal associations the fungus uses its vast network of mycelium to absorb, and share, water and nutrients like nitrogen, potassium and phosphorous with the plant. In return the plant gives the fungus carbohydrates, amino acids and vitamins created during photosynthesis. Some studies have even shown one fungus connected to several trees and through careful experimentation photosynthates from one tree were shown to have been shared with the other tree via the mycelium. These complex ecological connections between fungi and plants, which have recently been illuminated, are creating a whole new paradigm of ecosystem relationships that places fungi in a foundational role as the vital network of water, nutrient, and mineral distribution that supports an entire forest.
Now back to our story. You’re out in the field, on a foray as they say in the trade, and you know the lovely little piglets are associated with certain plants, specifically Pines, Oaks, Beech, Aspen and Firs. That narrows it down a little since out of those few trees there are only Monterey Pines (Pinus radiata) at Lands End, and now you can really get down and dirty. You may only see a little lump pushing up the pine duff or you may find a twenty pound porker, and they may not be right under a tree since the mycelial networks can stretch great distances underground, but if you go with an open mind and open eyeballs you have a decent chance of finding the makings of a gourmet meal right on the trail. Even if you don’t find Boletus edulis your first time outyou’re guaranteed to find a whole new world of fungus amongus and that can be just as good. If you do find a Bolete check out this website on how to prepare it at home.
There’s tons of information out there about Boletes, mushrooms and fungus in general and here in the Bay Area we are lucky to have a very active mycological community facilitated by the Mycological Society of San Francisco. The Society leads regular forays with local mushroom experts and puts on many other great community events all about fungus. A respected field guide on the Boletes is California Mushrooms: a Field Guide to the Boletes written by Harry D. Thiers who taught Mycology at San Francisco State for many years, and for whom the herbarium at the university is named. To study the standard university text with a complete treatment of all the fungi from Cellular Slime Molds to Yeasts to Gilled Mushrooms check out Introductory Mycology 4th edition by Alexopoulos et al. Finally, for the serious mushroom maniac a must read is Paul Stamets’ Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Save The world, which covers the historic and spiritual importance of fungi, ecological roles of fungi, myco-forestry, myco-remediation, myco-restoration, mushroom cultivation and lots of other fascinating info. Another useful reference Mushrooms of San Francisco: A Walk on Land’s End was written by Roger Bland with illustrations by Sally Bland; members of ECOSF and their hard to find but fascinating and very informative book is available in our lending library. As always, the best way to learn is to get out there and connect with the natural world. See ya on the trail!
ECO MEDIA
If you think biodiversity die-off is a problem only affecting plants and animals, consider that we’re animals too, and indigenous cultural survival is just as important. Hundreds of cultural traditions disappear each year because they don’t fit the role the regional governments that occupy their lands want them to be and with them the sacred, profound, and sustainable practices of their people. Wade Davis, an anthropologist, ethnobotanist, and explorer-in-residence with the National Geographic has been one of the strongest advocates for indigenous cultural awareness and survival for several decades. Click here to watch or listen to a talk he gave at the recent TED conference.
Still unclear about the debate over a carbon tax vs. cap and trade, or the pros and cons of a nuclear energy future? Earthbeat Radio, a syndicated Pacifica Network program that features leading environmental activists and thinkers – the politics and people behind the efforts to defend the planet, offers answers to these questions and more in their past two shows which you can download from their website here.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz and published by Chelsea Green Publishing has been a real inspiration for us in so many ways. It’s a cookbook for probiotics and nutrition, a history of fermentation culture and tradition from around the world, and a call to action for all of us to stop accepting mass produced and mass marketed foods that represent a global cultural homogenization wiping out languages, oral traditions, beliefs, and practices associated with local fermented foods, and replacing them with uniformity the likes of Kraft, Coca-Cola, and McDonalds around the world. Katz brings together a decade of experience, study, and teaching the art, science, and magic of fermenting foods at home ranging from Japanese Nuka Bran Pickles (one of our favorites), Tempeh, Lebanese Kishk, Tibetan Tara-Buckwheat Pancakes (also known as Drawoe Kura), Sourdough bread, Ethiopian Injera, Cherokee Sour Corn Gv-No-He-Nv, as well as your more familiar yogurts, cheeses, and honey wines. I short read packed with big ideas and lots of encouragement. It’s easy! Here is an excerpt on Vegetable Ferments:
KIMCHI
Kimchi is a spicy Korean pickle, made in an impressive variety of styles. It is prepared by fermenting Chinese cabbage, radishes or turnips, scallions, other vegetables, and often seafood, with ginger, hot red chili pepper, garlic, and often fish sauce.
Kimchi is a national passion in South and North Korea. The Korean Food Research Institute estimates that the average adult Korean consumes more than a quarter pound (125 grams) of kimchi every day. Day after day, that adds up to a lot of kimchi. Though factory-manufactured kimchi is gaining in popularity and making it at home is on the decline, according to the same source, three-quarters of all kimchi consumed in South Korea is still made in the home. It is customary practice for employers to give their employers an annual “kimchi bonus” in the autumn so they can purchase the ingredients to make their annual supply.
I recently served kimchi to my friend MaxZine’s father, Leon Weinstein. Leon served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. The smell of the kimchi reminded him of that time. Smells are powerfully evocative, and the kimchi’s assertive essence brought him right back to the front lines fifty years ago.
A recent international trade dispute between Korea and Japan focused on kimchi authenticity. It seems that many people in Japan have developed a taste for the Korean-style pickle. Japan has become Korea’s biggest export market for kimchi. But Japanese manufacturers developed a kimchi-like product that replaces the fermentation process with flavor additives such as citric acid. The Japanese pseudo-kimchi is cheaper than kimchi, since the element of time is removed from manufacturing. It also appears to have somewhat broader appeal because of its less sharp flavor.
South Korea appealed to the Codex Alimentarius, an international food standards commission, to establish a definition of kimchi as a fermented food. “What the Japanese are selling is nothing more than cabbage sprinkled with seasonings and artificial flavorings,” said Robert Kim, of Doosan Corporation, which operates the world’s largest kimchi factory in Korea. Japan counters that its product is simply an innovate variation on traditional kimchi, arguing that Korea has no more of an exclusive claim to kimchi than India to curries or Mexico to tacos. After more than five years of deliberation and diplomacy, the Codex process rendered a decision, established the fermented Korean version as the international standard for kimchi.
In certain respects, making kimchi is like making sauerkraut. One difference is that kimchi recipes generally call for soaking the cabbage and other vegetables in very salty brine for several hours to soften them quickly, then rinsing them and fermenting them with less salt. Kimchi is also distinguished by the generous use of ginger, garlic, scallions, and hot chili peppers. Kimchi generally ferments faster than sauerkraut. You can certainly make it in crock like sauerkraut but these recipes are for smaller quantities using quart size (liter) jars.
Baeuchu (Cabbage)
Kimchi
This is a basic kimchi.
TIMEFRAME: 1 week (or longer)
INGREDIENTS (for 1 quart/1 liter):
Sea salt
1 pound/500 grams Chinese cabbage (napa or bok choi)
1 daikon radish or a few red radishes
1 to 2 carrots
1 to 2 onions and/or leeks and/or a few scallions and/or shallots (or more!)
3 to 4 cloves of garlic (or more!)
3 to 4 hot red chilis (or more!), depending on how hot-peppery you like food, or any form of hot pepper, fresh, dried, or in a sauce (without chemical preservatives!)
Mix a brine of about 4 cups (1 liter) or water and 4 tablespoons (60 milliliters) of salt. Stir well to thoroughly dissolve salt. The brine should taste good and salty.
Coarsely chop the cabbage, slice the radish and carrots, let the vegetables soak in the brine, covered by a plate or other weight to keep the vegetables submerged, until soft, a few hours, or overnight. Add other vegetables to the brine, snow peas, seaweeds, Jerusalem artichokes, anything you like.
Prepare spices: Grate the ginger; chop the garlic and onion; remove seeds from the chilies; and chop or crush, or throw them in whole. Kimchi can absorb a lot of spice. Experiment with quantities and don’t worry too much about them. Mix spices into a paste. (If you wish, you can add fish sauce to the spice paste. Just check the label to be sure it has no chemical preservatives, which function to inhibit microorganisms.)
Drain brine off vegetables, reserving brine. Taste vegetables for saltiness. You want them to taste decidedly salty, but not unpleasantly so. If they are too salty, rinse them. If you cannon taste salt, sprinkle with a couple teaspoons (10 milliliters) salt, and mix.
Mix the vegetables with the ginger-chili-onion-garlic paste. Mix everything together thoroughly and stuff it into a clean quart-size (liter) jar. Pack it tightly into the jar, pressing down until the brine rises. If necessary, add a little of the reserved vegetable-soaking brine to the submerged vegetables. Weight the vegetables down with a smaller jar, or a zip-lock bag filled with brine. Or if you think you can remember to check the kimchi every day, you can just use your (clean!) fingers to push the vegetables back under the brine. I myself like the tactile involvement of this method, and I especially enjoy tasting the kimchi by licking my fingers after I do this. Either way, cover the jar to keep out dust and flies.
Ferment in your kitchen or other warm place. Taste the kimchi every day. After about a week of fermentation, when it tastes ripe, move it to the refrigerator. An alternative and more traditional method is to ferment kimchi more slowly and with more salt in a cool spot, such as a hole in the ground, or a cellar, or other cool place.
IN THE GARDEN THIS MONTH
This is the time of the year to finish up your planning for the coming seasons. Go over seed catalogs or meet with seasoned gardeners to find out which varieties do best for what you’d like to grow and your particular microclimate and situation. This is also the time of year to do your transplanting of bare root fruit trees and pruning and grafting. Be sure to check out the Scion Exchange going on here in San Francisco and other places around the Bay Area at the California Rare Fruit Growers website. It’s also a good idea to load up on mulch or moisture holding material so a lot of nutrients remain in the soil as the rains wash through and organic matter can build up for spring planting.
Autumn has officially arrived, and with it the relenting of summer fog (depending on your proximity to the ocean) and often the longest stretch of warm, sunny days before the wet chill of winter sets in. There is still lots of fruit ripening and summer veggies to pick and enough sun late into the day to establish some winter crops if you haven’t had a chance to do so already. Garlic and artichokes are best planted this time of year. Softneck varieties (of garlic) like ‘California Early’ and ‘Silverskin’ do best in our climate and you can braid them for a beautiful kitchen ornament next summer. It is also a great time to plan and plant a native garden, sow native wildflowers or a cover crop like Fava beans, if you have any space not currently under cultivation. Larner Seeds in Bolinas is a great source for local, native seeds of all types and varieties. As always, you can sow or transplant hardy Brassicas, lettuce, and beet family favorites like chard, spinach, and beets, as well as many herbs like dill, cilantro, and chives. You can also begin thinking about varieties and placement of fruit trees to be planted bareroot in January and February. It’s good to start a cover crop right in the spot you plan on having a tree so the soil is rich and fertile when you do. If you’re looking to transition from cultivation to preparation, this is a good time to gather gather all your spent veggies and flowers to start a fall compost pile, or better yet, build a “bomb-proof” lasagna garden bed a la Toby Hemenway. Here is his recommended steps to building soil from the ground up while suppressing weeds and making the best use of garden scraps or lawn clippings:
1. Flatten down and grass or weeds - don’t remove anything - everything will decompose into rich soil nutrients. Thoroughly soak the area to begin the decomposition process.
2. You can aerate the soil with a fork if necessary, and add some dolomite lime, or oyster shell, or any other amendment you have and would like to use.
3. Lay down a weed barrier, ideally cardboard 3 sheets thick. You can always find free cardboard from grocery stores or appliance retailers if you don’t have any laying around, but be sure to only use brown cardboard and remove any staples and tape.
4. Pour on a thick layer of mulch at least 6-8 inches high.
5. Now make the lasagna by added a few inches of compost, or better yet some fresh or aged manures, then a few inches of mulch, then compost, then mulch until you’re up to 24 inches or more. You can also use chicken scraps or any garden refuse.
6. Keep moist until the rains begin and then it’s best to wait until spring to plant in when it should be completely decomposed and full of rich, fertile, organic matter. Your plants (and the earthworms and other soil microorganisms) will love you for it!
If you want to try something really amazing, consider mulching in some Elm Oyster (Hypsizygus ulmarius) mycelium available through Fungi Perfecti. A perfect over-wintering garden mushroom that has been found to more than double the yields of brassica’s like Broccoli and Brussels Sprouts when companion planted. For detailed information, check out Mycelium Running, the ground breaking (and perhaps revolutionary) book by Fungi Perfect’s founder, Paul Stamets. For those of you who are members, this book is available in our lending library and is one of the most amazing texts on fungus to grow at home, in the garden, restore ecosystems, clean up oil spills, and possibly save the world!
LOCAL ECOLOGY
If you’re crossing the Bay this time of year, you’ll probably notice Pickleweed (Salicornia virginica) brightening the salt flats with their red hue and along riparian corridors, the fall colors of Big Leaf Maple (Acer macrophyllum), Willow (Salix spp.), and Red Alder (Alnus rubra). Febale Coyote Brush (Baccharis pilularis) displays its fuzzy flowers and while Douglas Fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) bears cones that provide a major food supply for squirrels and birds, Coast Live Oaks (Quercus agrifolia) and many other Oaks bear acorns that once sustained native populations for thousands of years. You might catch male California Sea Lions (Zalophus californianus) congregating on coastal rocks, and young Elephant Seals (Mirounga angustirostris) gathering onshore (but don’t disturb them if you happen to find then on the beach). Sadly, what you probably won’t see much of are the Chinook, also known as King (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), Coho (O. kisutch), and Steelhead (O. mykiss) Salmon that once numbered in the tens of millions and have now declined to the tens of thousands per year due to over fishing, human population expansion and development, logging, and many of the 1,494 dams found throughout the state of California. These magnificent victims of civilization, much like the indigenous tribes that relied on them for food while protecting their population numbers, leave the open ocean where they have spent several years maturing and absorbing vital ocean nutrients before heading up the (formerly) fast-flowing rivers of Northern California to spawn in the few remaining sediment-free riverbanks. They played a vital role for forest ecosystems as their non human predators, the now extinct California Grizzly Bear (Ursus arctos), a formidable “ecosystem engineer”, would feast on the salmon - after they had a chance to spawn - and spread their rich ocean nutrients throughout California’s diverse conifer forests. This tragedy is not getting any better with the lowest numbers in 15 years for Central Valley Chinook runs. For more information on their predicament and what can be done about it, check out these articles from Save Our Wild Salmon or get involved and take action locally with groups like Salmon Protection and Watershed Network (SPAWN), The Monterery Bay Salmon and Trout Project, and the Alameda Creek Alliance. They need your help! To read about Salmon Decline in North America from its historical context, read this. UPCOMING EVENTS
Oct. 4th - Saturday - 11am-4pm : Monroe Elementary School Garden Work Day -
- Cob Bench building : The fun never stops! Cob building in the sun doesn’t get much better, especially with friends and family and the goal of completing the student’s outdoor classroom. It’s coming along very nicely, but we want to get it done before the rains begin so we could really use your hands and feet!
- Enjoy a potluck of local, homegrown, and homemade foods, including solar oven baking! Bring something to share!
- Salad bar gardening : We’ll be adding to our salad bar bed we planted last month - the lettuce and spinach look great, and the carrots and radishes are taking very nicely. Learn about crop rotation, succession, and fertilizing for maximum yields and quality.
- Lasagna Sheet Mulching: We’ll be preparing a massive lasagna bed of garden debris and manure for the spring - come learn how to do it!
Oct. 18th - Saturday - 11am-5pm : Baker’s Alley : Cob Oven Workshop -
- An inaugural workshop for Baker’s Alley, Tori’s community space that is in the making and soon will be a place for ECOSF to sell nursery stock, conduct workshops, and provide a community bread oven to build stronger relationships in the neighborhood
- We’ll be constructing a cob oven and having a garden party and potluck to meet new and old members and rekindle the fire that glows in our community.
- Learn about how to site and gather materials for building a cob oven designed to bake breads, pizzas, and more in your backyard, or community space.
Other exciting events in San Francisco this month:
Oct. 3rd-6th - All Day : Radical Women Conference
- This 41st Anniversary Conference held at the Women’s Building in San Francisco will focus on multi-racial organizing; the dynamic leadership of youth and queers; women of color and immigrant women spark a labor revival; declaring independence from the twin parties of war.
- Yes, this is an integral part of a healthy urban ecosystem and will have workshops offering skills building for women organizers; political theory; movement strategy and much, much more.
- Some of the speakers include civil rights attorney Lynne Stewart and activists and scholars from Central America, China, Australia and the U.S. For more information, or to register, click here.
Oct. 4th - Saturday - 10am-6pm : Wildlife Conservation Expo 2008 - An event by the Wildlife Conservation Network, this year’s Expo brings together twenty of the world’s leading conservationists from all corners of the globe to convene for the weekend and share their stories from the frontlines of wildlife conservation.
- Held at the Mission Bay Conference Center, 1675 Owens St. in San Francisco
- For complete details, click here.
Oct, 4th-5th - Sat. & Sun. - 10am-6pm : World Veg Festival Weekend - Put on by the San Francisco Vegetarian Society and In Defense of Animals, this festival will feature outstanding speakers, healthy food demos, international vegan cuisine, live entertainment, pet adoption, and so much more!
- Located in the San Francisco County Fair Building at 9th Ave. and Lincoln in Golden Gate Park - we’ll be there at the Other Avenues Health Food Co-op booth.
- $6 suggested donation, but kids, students, and seniors with ID are free, as well as anyone who arrives before 10:30am - for more information, click here.
Oct. 10th-11th - Fri. 5:30pm-8:30pm & Sat. 8:30am-4:30pm - Growing Greener School Grounds Conference
- Put on by San Francisco’s Green School Yard Alliance, this event will bring together over 300 teachers and community members from around the Bay Area to learn more about creating, using, and sustaining, ecological schoolyards.
- Workshop sites at Sherman, Sanchez, and Alvarado school, and St. Mary’s Cathedral Conference Center
- Prices vary, click here for complete details.
Oct. 12th - Sunday - 11am-1pm : San Francisco Walk for Farm Animals
- Organized by Farm Sanctuary, one of the nation’s leading farm animal protection organizations, this walk is one of many going on around the country in October.
- Walk and carry signs encouraging people to take action to end farm animal abuse by voting YES! on Prop 2 the ballot initiative that would put an end to the intensive confinement of egg laying hens in battery cages, breeding pigs in gestation crates and calves in veal crates - affect 20 million animals in California.
- Beginning at 1 Ferry Building in San Francisco, click here for more information and a printable flyer to share with others and post around town.
Oct. 21st - Tuesday - 6:15-9:15pm : Brower Youth Awards - Join the Earth Island Institute for a festive evening celebrating the achievements of six exceptional young environmental leaders.
- Held at Herbst Theater, in the Veterans Building, 401 Van Ness Avenue at McAllister in San Francisco.
- For tickets to support this special event, please click here.
We hope you can come to one of our events this month, and encourage you to go to some of the other happenings throughout San Francisco as October is packed with informative, ecological, and exciting events. If you would like more information, have us list your like-minded event, or would like to plan an event or community building project with our help, please let us know. If you’re doing any trick or treating this month, offer this treat to those you come in contact with: Make a list of 5 things that you recently learned or would like to share about your local ecosystem, community events and opportunities, or global ecological crises. Gather some compelling and concise facts, names and contact info on organizations taking action, and references for more information and make a 1/2 - 1 page sheet to hand out. That’s how you can take action to spread the word, make new friends, and strengthen your interdependent relationships in your community. If you’d like some ideas, or help, please contact us.
Thank you for your support and words of inspiration, appreciation, and suggestions. Happy Hot Days of Autumn!
You may be wondering where we’ve been for the last few months, but there’s no need to worry; ECOSF is thriving like a young tree, bearing bountiful summer fruit after drinking up the energy stores of winter and setting vibrant new buds in the spring. We’ve been working all around town (naturally) building two unique cob benches with students in the Sunset and West Portal, making an outdoor cob classroom with parents and kids in the Excelsior, learning the true meaning of sustainable living while workin’ the land in schools, backyards and street corners and just being thankful for our year-round growing season. Of course we’ve also been meeting with many new friends and members and collaborating on innovative ecological designs, activities and events. With our hands steadily building and balancing the load we have not sent out our monthly updates as usual, but instead, here is our summer update to spread the word about what ECOSF is doing, what’s going on in the city and how you can stay connected. We have a lot to say in this update but be sure to check out our UPCOMING EVENTS like the Cob Building Garden Party at Monroe Elementary School this Saturday the 13th of September. Be sure to click on any links you see below for further information, photos, and resources.
LOCAL ECOLOGY
Late summer and into early fall, in the Bay Area, can be the warmest, driest and sometimes most exciting time of the year. The Himalayan Blackberries are ripening, the birds are chirping, and the mild weather gives us a good reason to get outside and enjoy some of our local ecology. Hazelnuts, Huckleberries and Elderberries are a few of the tasty wild foods that can be found on the trail this time of year, and of course a garden can provide all the favorites like Tomatoes, Squash, Beans, Peppers (If you’re lucky), Corn, Garlic, and all the juicy fruits like Apples, Plums, Peaches, Figs and Berries. If you don’t have access to a small plot of arable land (a garden) then this is the best time of the year to visit your local Farmer’s Market to see the great diversity of food grown in California, including some less common fruits and veggies like Prickly Pear (Nopales) and Chayote both of which grow well in our climate and are easily propagated. One of our favorite things to do in the summer is make preserves of wild fruit like Blackberries, but also less commonly known fruits like Chilean Guavas, Wild Currants, and our abundant Strawberry Tree (Arbutus unedo) fruits found on many San Francisco streets.
September 15th is this month’s full moon, which rises at sunset and an hour later each subsequent night afterward, and is known as the ‘Harvest Moon’ because it provides usable light well after nightfall, allowing farmers to keep working in their fields. Other traditional names for this moon include Cool Moon from the Cheyenne, Salmon Spawning Moon from the Haida, and the Moon Without a Name from the Paiute. The new moon arrives on September 29th. If yer fixin’ on plantin’ a plot, this is the time to start your Brassicas like Kale, Mustard Greens, Broccoli, Cauliflower, Collards and other greens like Chard, Lettuce and Spinach, and you should direct sow Carrots, Beets, Radish, Parsnips and Peas since they don’t transplant well. A true ecological garden would not be complete without some beneficial color from plants like Bee Balm, Calendula, Hollyhock, and Rudebeckia, which all have edible flowers and also attract pollinating and predatory insects for the garden. Shingiku, also known as Edible Chrysanthemum, is an especially useful garden plant that provides edible flowers as well as prolific greens for salads.
Now is also the time to start thinking about natives to plant as the rainy season approaches and the quiet of winter sets, but for now enjoy the year’s last burst of fiery sunlight that makes our Indian Summer such a beautiful time. The magic draws us nearer to the Autumnal Equinox, which occurs on September 22nd, the moment in time when the Sun can be observed to be directly over the equator. It is also a key phenomenon that contributes to passive solar building design.
WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO
Earlier this year, when the gardens were sleeping, we began several Natural Building projects in local schools to show the many virtues of building with locally sourced, usually recycled, and always non-toxic materials. We started out at Jefferson Elementary, constructing a cob bench with a 4th and 5th grade class that had been learning about adobe and other tried and true Indigenous building techniques, and wanted to work on a class project that would leave something behind for future classes. ECOSF found clay rich subsoil at the Sava Pool excavation site on 19th Ave., brought in sand and straw (purchased unfortunately, in some cases even this can be free), and facilitated building sessions with the class each week.
At first some students were hesitant to get dirty but after a while nobody could resist joining the group and playing in the mud. After just two days one of the young girls was already saying she wanted to be a Cob Builder when she grows up, a testament to cob’s accessibility to all ages, and abilities. Before long our bench had taken shape into a Whale/Fish creature that was then studded with colorful, rounded glass purchased from Building Resources, a non-profit, recycled building materials yard, off of 3rd Street and Cargo Way. The project was a lot of fun but also turned out to be a lot of work, although we loved it, and despite falling behind on some of our administrative tasks we agreed to help design and build another, larger cob bench at nearby West Portal Elementary.
With a good feel for the mixing process, and more to discuss about why Natural Building is so different from modern day concrete, steel, and wood construction, we easily led several of the 5th grade classes from West Portal in work sessions during school, and kicked off the bench with a massive community effort on a weekend school gathering. People were amazed that clay, sand, and straw (basically mud with some fiber) could be combined and shaped to make a unique hand-built bench/playstructure/sculpture right there in the schoolyard. When a teacher asked if we could shape the bench into a Panther, the school mascot, we told them that the beauty of cob is that it can be easily shaped into almost any form you like. We were even able to color the clay with natural pigments - in this case, Iron Oxide - to make our panther black. As the sleek body of the panther took shape - thanks to the great work of the 5th graders - and the beautifully sculpted face was adorned with beads and mosaics, we were also able to design and start building an art garden that would provide plant based dyes and other implements for future classes to use. You didn’t think we could stay out of the garden for long did you?
Some of the species that can be found in West Portal’s dye garden are Pomegranate, Elderberry, Mulberry, Holly Leaf Cherry, Silver Bush Lupine, Goldenrod, Alkanet, Calendula, and St. John’s Wort. Plants like Hazelnut, Willow, and Manzanita were planted both for the colors they lend and their use for making tools and implements. Oca, a Peruvian root crop that provides oxalic acid, and Crab apples were planted as natural mordants. If you would like a full species list, or more information about this project, please let us know.
Our most recent - and biggest - natural building project is an outdoor classroom made of cob at Monroe Elementary School. We broke ground in April by digging a drainage trench for the foundation of the 16 ft diameter circular bench that will provide an ecological, educational space for students and a community meeting space for the school. During monthly garden workdays with the help of parents, children and volunteers we moved literally tons of aggregate and urbanite to complete the foundation and build up the inner core of the bench. At times it felt like building a pyramid but the many helping hands made light labor of this heavy work by using cooperative techniques like forming zipper lines to move things from one place to another.
Last month’s workday was especially productive since we were joined by the Urban Permaculture Guild’s ‘Permaculture Design Class’ and we co-led a hands-on workshop about building with cob with Marisha Farnsworth of The Natural Builders. This fall we will be holding workshops with students during the school day to continue building up the outdoor classroom and sharing with them the millennia old earthen building tradition. The project is progressing nicely and there are still plenty of opportunities for anyone who wants to learn, share and converge with us to add the next layer to the bench on Saturday the 13th of September. This is a great chance to play in the mud and participate in a community-building project. We’ll see ya there!
We also had the opportunity to take a Natural Building Intensive workshop at Emerald Earth Sanctuary in Mendocino County to expand our awareness and ability to apply natural building techniques and principles to our work. Michael G. Smith, one of the instructors, co-founded the Cob Cottage Company back in 1992 and was instrumental in the cob building revival in the United States. He has since been teaching Natural Building workshops from his home at Emerald Earth for the last nine years and their site showcases one of the best examples and varieties of homes and buildings made entirely (or mostly) of natural materials, most of which were obtained from the land and earth around them. While cob, an excellent thermal mass and high compression strength material, can be used for a wide variety of applications, it can be quite laborious and not the most suitable for walls that need more insulation or sites that don’t need 2-3 foot thick walls, like interior walls. We learned about and built Slip-Straw (also called Light Straw Clay) and Clay-Wattle walls that are perfect for interior wall home improvements that can benefit from the added insulation and ease and quickness of putting them together. Both incorporate a high amount of straw, less clay, and no sand or aggregate so they are much more insulating and provide a great base for an earthen finish plaster.
We also learned about and applied earthen plasters and Alis clay paints and encourage anyone who is doing an interior remodeling to consider using an earthen plaster either over existing sheetrock, lath, or a Slip-Straw or Clay-Wattle addition. The beauty of an earthen plaster comes from the textured finish, and warm and inviting earth tones that can be added with natural pigments. Vibrant colors can be obtained from some pigments and lime plasters can be added for durability and waterproofing for bathroom walls. Once you getting started learning and working with earthen materials, the possibilities and creative expressions are endless. If you are interested in learning more about these techniques and materials, or would like to utilize them in your home, please let us know.
On another note, if you haven’t checked out our website recently, definitely check out our post ‘Can You Live With Less?‘ Since February, Davin has been living outside and off the grid, so to speak. Certainly there is some use of electricity to work on our website, correspond with others and other computer related tasks but he has pledged to use less than 10 gallons of water a day, and no indoor energy except to charge his cell phone and laptop. He has taken less than 10 showers indoors and only done his laundry with a washing machine a couple of times. That’s not to say he doesn’t like being clean, he just prefers heating water for an outdoor shower in a solar collector, and attempting (though that soon got rather tiring) to wash his clothes by hand.
90% of the food he has been eating has been cooked on a rocket stove, a solar oven, or occasionally a backpacking stove when time does not permit for other options (and yes, he has eaten out with friends an average of once a week and succumbed to the occasional bakery treat here and there). His diet consists of oatmeal for breakfast, and rice and beans (grown in the Central Valley) for lunch and dinner. He adds vegetables from the garden, plus some leftovers from Other Avenues Health Food Store. Of course he has eaten some extras here and there, but he has kept all the trash from any packaged foods he has purchased and the ball of landfill trash is about the size of a basketball (after 6 months). His new bathroom facility is a compost toilet, and his sink is a bucket with a spigot that collects in a greywater system to water the garden. Why would someone do something like this? Well, he says its because he’s always encouraging people to live with less, and do their best to consume less, but how easy is it really? He decided to find out.
Originally, it was only going to last a month, maybe a few, but he seems to have fallen in love with the sounds of the ocean waves lulling him to sleep and the chirping and chatting of songbirds waking him up in the morning; and has remained outside since. But there is another side to the story. We are asking you to consider how you could live with less. Whether it is drive less, use less water (and certainly recycle and reuse any that you do use), less electricity, less natural gas, less consumer goods, less foreign or high transportation necessary goods, and less of anything that you can honestly live without. Maybe it’s less bananas than you might normally eat, or less coffee. Maybe you carpool more often or take public transportation sometimes if you don’t already. Maybe if it’s yellow, you let it mellow, and if you do your dishes by hand, maybe you can do them in a tub that can then be emptied into the garden. Maybe you decide to not buy anything new for a month, or more. Maybe you try to eat a diet of food that comes from less than 300 miles for a month. It may require moving a little left of your typical comfort zone, but what if you tried it, and it wasn’t so bad? What if you liked it? What if you preferred it? What if it felt natural? What ever it may be, try it, and tell us about it. Tell us what you did, or what you’re doing if you’re already making changes in your life.
There are some that would say personal change doesn’t equal social change, and we would be the first to point out that multinational corporations are probably the biggest consumers and wasters of our precious natural resources, animals and people. But we all are responsible for a lifestyle of consumption, whether it is a lot of a little, and to strive to be in balance with what our planet offers, is to strive to see how you can thrive with just what you need and work towards providing a surplus for nature and others. We would also like you to consider making a pledge to help fund a micro lending program in Africa as part of a fundraiser for the low-consumption lifestyle Davin has been living for the past 6 months. Village Hope Core, a small Kenyan based and Sonoma County connected non-profit organization provides life giving and community enriching loans along with education and assistance to help a group of families create successful, sustainable small businesses in their village. Complete details of why Davin decided to do this, as well as photos and details of his experience can be viewed here. Please make a pledge and send a link to others who would like to help as well.
UPCOMING EVENTS
ECOSF has many projects currently going on and you can get involved in a number of ways. Learn about cob bench building, salad bar gardening, cob oven building, or help us with our vegetable, medicinal, native, and perennial plant nursery and City Orchards project development. We would like to increase the availability of locally grown vegetable starts and native and perennial plants for schools and residences as well as ramp up community food production by working with city agencies and landowners to increase the edible landscape of the city. We are looking for a couple of volunteers who would like to help with outreach, maintenance, and harvesting so if you’re interesting in learning more about growing your own food and providing for local food security for others, please contact us. We also have several mini-projects going on throughout the city that need weekly or monthly volunteer help either working with students in a school, checking on existing gardens, helping establish new gardens, propagating and seeding starts, and doing research.
Here is a list of the events ECOSF has scheduled for the next couple of months. For complete descriptions of each event, please check out our UPCOMING EVENTS page on our website.
Sept. 13th - Saturday - 11am-4pm : Monroe Elementary School Garden Work Day -
- Cob Bench building : Learn how to make a good earthen building mix from clay, sand, and straw, plus apply to our existing bench helping the parents, teachers, and students at Monroe complete their outdoor classroom.
- Salad bar gardening : We’ll be preparing beds and planting a salad bar garden to enhance the salad bar program already at Monroe with organic veggies from their garden. Learn about crop rotation, succession, and fertilizing for maximum yields and quality.
- Native plants for wildlife habitat, wild forage, and ecological support in the garden : Find out what plants do best for a variety of needs and benefits and how they can create a more ecologically minded space in your garden.
Sept. 20th - Saturday - 12pm-5pm : Double Rock Community Garden Herb Maze -
- Finishing up an herb spiral that grew into an herb maze we started several months ago.
- We’ll be stacking urbanite for garden bed borders and make for future no-tilling beds
- Plant native (as well as some non-native) medicinal and culinary herbs for the Alice Griffith community to use.
Sept. 21st - Sunday - 2pm-4pm : Other Avenues Workshop : Off-the-Grid Living -
- Davin will explain the use and history of appropriate technologies like rocket stoves, solar ovens, and sawdust composting toilets
- Learn about how you can build and use these in your home or anywhere to maximize use of local materials and be less reliant on imported fuels, precious resources, and the economic, social, and ecological costs associated with them
- We’ll build a rocket stove and a solar oven from recycled materials and we’ll be baking cookies in the solar oven (provided it is a sunny day) and cooking rice and beans in the rocket stove.
` - Contact Other Avenues to reserve a space.
Oct. 18th - Saturday - 11am-5pm : Baker’s Alley : Cob Oven Workshop -
- An inaugural workshop for Baker’s Alley, Tori’s community space that is in the making and soon will be a place for ECOSF to sell nursery stock, conduct workshops, and provide a community bread oven to build stronger relationships in the neighborhood
- We’ll be constructing a cob oven and having a garden party and potluck to meet new and old members and rekindle the fire that glows in our community.
- Learn about how to site and gather materials for building a cob oven designed to bake breads, pizzas, and more in your backyard, or community space.
Other notable events in San Francisco this month and next:
Sept. 13th - Saturday - All Day : San Francisco Botanical Garden’s Plant Sale
- Native plants and succulents from the amazing Botanical Garden’s collection
- Click here for more information
Sept. 13th - Saturday - 2pm : Conscious Consumption Workshop
- As part of their annual film series, the Chinese Cultural Center Cinema (C4) is holding a workshop about the issues facing seafood resources and their relevance to us as individuals and as a community.
- There will be a panel discussion, tips on conscious consumption choices, and a screening of the film Farming the Seas (2004, 55mins) a documentary about the aquaculture industry.
- Chinese Cultural Center - 750 Kearny Street, 3rd floor
- Click here for more information
Sept. 15th - Monday - 6:30pm-8:30pm : Toward a Sustainable Forest Products Industry - Pacific Energy Center’s Evening Lecture Series will be hosting Jason Grant who will provide a whirlwind tour through humankind’s historical relationship to forests, discuss what the relationship might look like if we are able to make a transition to sustainability, and
suggest paths to get us from where we are today, to where we need to be.
- The PEC offers many informative (both simple and technical) free to the public on a wide range of topics including Renewable Energy, Residential Energy Efficiency, Building Performance, HVAC Systems, Lighting Technologies and Title 24. There are many classes on solar
basics for home owners but they fill up fast, so go to their website to see the calendar of listings.
- Pacific Energy Center is located at 851 Howard St in San Francisco, click here for more information.
Sept. 20th - Saturday - Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup Day - Take part in the largest volunteer event of it’s kind!
- Last year, 378,000 volunteers from 76 countries and 45 states cleared 6 million pounds of trash from oceans and waterways and recorded every piece of trash collected.
- For more information on how you can get involved, click here.
Sept. 27th - Saturday - 8:30am-9pm : Grand Opening of the new California Academy of Sciences - Experience life on top of the largest Platinum LEEDcertified public institution in the world via there 2.5 acre living roof, home to over 30 different native plant species that will provide superior insulation, reducing energy inputs for heating and cooling, absorb 98%
of the rainwater that falls upon it, preventing 3.6 million gallons of storm water from carrying pollutants in the ecosystem each year, and be an important source of food for native wildlife, including the endangered San Bruno Elfin and Bay Checkerspot Butterflies.
- So much can be said about this place, you’ll have to see if for yourself, and the opening day is free. There are many events and activities going on all day so be sure to check it out.
- For more information, click here.
Sept. 27th - Saturday - 10am-4pm : 14th Annual Sunset Community Festival
- In keeping with the explosive interest in “Going Green,” this year’s Sunset Community Fest theme is, rather appropriately, “Greening the Sunset”
- The hope to share many new products (not that you should buy products to be green) and practices that promote environmental stewardship. We’ll be there doing our thing, showing how to set up a simple drip irrigation system, plant natives for ecological benefit, and more.
- Sunset Playground - 28th and Lawton in the Sunset district.
Sept. 27th - Saturday - 9am-4pm : 2nd Annual Breaking Ground : Urban Gardening Youth Conference - Wow, Sept 27th is quite a day huh? This is a special event open to all Bay Area high-school students interested in getting involved in local gardening projects, habitat restoration, and action towards sustainability.
- Hosted by StreetParks (a project of the San Francisco Parks Trust) this event is free, but space is limited.
- Potrero Del Sol Park - Click here for more info.
Oct. 10th-11th - Friday 5:30pm-8:30pm & Saturday 8:30am-4:30pm - Growing Greener School Grounds Conference
- Put on by San Francisco’s Green School Yard Alliance, this event will bring together over 300 teachers and community members from around the Bay Area to learn more about creating, using, and sustaining, ecological schoolyards.
- Workshop sites at Sherman, Sanchez, and Alvarado school, and St. Mary’s Cathedral Conference Center
- Prices vary, click here for complete details.
Well, so it was more than just an update. We always have a lot to say, but we don’t always get a chance to sit down for long enough to say it. If you would like to help us with future newsletters or community outreach either as a contributor, editor, or more, please let us know. We appreciate the support and patience from our members and our community. We are still an all-volunteer organization that is supported by our community, and that means you! If you haven’t become a member, please consider supporting us at this time, and perhaps you’d like to renew your membership. You can be sure that your support makes the community development and ecological education projects we provide possible and allows those who are less fortunate and unable to pay expensive contractors an opportunity to create a community building experience that shares the values of all involved and nurtures a formidable future of sustainable stewardship and meaningful relationships. Until next time, always be sowing seeds for food, for nature, and for community!
As a friend of mine recently put into words, we have taken yet another intrepid trip around the sun, all the while, producing more CO2 then we ever have before, consuming more fossil fuels then we ever have before, seen more Arctic ice disappear than we ever have before, along with continuing to salt our once fertile fields, contaminate our rivers, aquifers, and oceans, and destroy habitats and species in every bioregion around the world. On the other hand, one could say we have done more to build awareness about climate change, fossil fuel depletion (and dependence), air, water, and soil pollution, habitat destruction and species extinction then we ever have before. We can certainly say the message is clear - we are heading in a direction few of us would like to go. While there is debate about the possible extinction of our own species, we can look to the building of our awareness, education, and action to empower us to become resilient stewards rather than helpless victims. We can choose to look at the trees and branches taken down by recent storms with despair or we can see those trees and branches (logs) as mediums for mushroom spawn inoculation, and excess organic matter as mulch and abundant soil nutrients. In a way, storms that surge through an ecosystem, much like fires, can be purging, cleansing, purifying, and regenerating, making for a more cohesive, productive, and biodiverse environment afterwards. January is a perfect month for us to follow suit, taking in our surroundings; our place, in our homes, occupations, communities, and cultures and purging out that which is not sustaining, cooperative, and equitable. It could take the form of a internal body cleanse like the Lemonade Fast, which as an astringent, squeezes out toxins from deep tissues and vital organs, while purifying the blood and providing mental clarity. It may take the form of clearing out our physical enclosures of unused household items to donate or giveaway, or bring our hazardous chemicals to Sunset Scavenger Household Hazardous Waste drop off, relying on natural cleansers like baking soda, vinegar, and borax. It could take the form of expanding our awareness through recent films such as What A Way To Go, The 11th Hour, or the online flash film, The Story of Stuff. It could take the form of a commitment to use less energy, less water, less “convenience,” and less luxuries. The important thing is to do something different this year. Do something new, courageous, thoughtful, radical. Collectively commit with friends, family, neighbors, and acquaintances to stand for something, volunteer, take charge, vision, plan, and see it through, make it happen, make a paradigm shift and become the stewards we are intended to be. Many of you are already doing this. Can you tweak it? Can you do more? Can you cooperate with others that you haven’t interacted with yet? These are the thoughts we are reflecting on as we embark on another year of commitment to San Francisco’s inhabitants (flagellated microscopic organisms to many-legged, and all in between), land-base, infrastructure, and social fabric. This year, with your help, we want to weave the frayed ends of our City’s tapestry into a regenerative and nourishing ecosystem that supports and invigorates all who inhabit it.
NATURE AWARENESS
There is much to do and see this time of year if you can brave the chill and rain. Our landscape is alive with the swelling of flower buds from fruit trees that have been dormant, and flowers that have begun to open, like the deciduous, Magnolia cambellii, which is flowering right now in our SF Botanical Gardens along with 300 other species including M. dawsoniana, Ribes speciosum and R. sanquinium, and the beautiful South African Erica’s.This is the time of year the Snowy Plover, Spotted Sandpiper, Grebes, Teels, and countless other birds begin to breed or begin their spring migration. Roosevelt, and Tule Elk and Black-tailed Deer begin to lose their antlers, while Coyote, and Gray Fox begin breeding as well. While the California Sea Lion feeds on spawning Pacific Herring (that which survived the Cosco-Busan oil spill), the Pacific Gray Whale’s southern migration peaks, while the Northern Elephant Seal’s birthing period peaks with 75lb. pups along the shores of Point Reyes, Ano Nuevo, and the Farallones. The male Western Spadefoot Frog calls from vernal pools around the Bay Area, while California and Rough-skinned Newts migrate to water replenished by our recent rains, and Coho, Chinook & Chum Salmon spawn in our streams, while Steelhead migrate. All this and more, buzzing around you. Have you heard what the GGNRA has cooked up? The 2008 Golden Gate National Recreation Area Endangered Species Big Year is a race against time to observe each of the 33 endangered and threatened species found within the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, while taking 33 discrete conservation recovery actions that will prevent these species from going extinct. It is a competitive event: the person who sees and helps the most species between January 1, 2008 and December 31, 2008, will win the Big Year. We don’t think it should be about winning, and if anything, the prize should be we all get a more biodiverse and healthy ecosystem to share with others. That being said, it’s a great opportunity to learn, act, and take part in something that could have a tipping point for some endangered species in our area. To learn more, check out their website.
WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO
It has been a fruitful year for us and the work we have been doing in San Francisco. We have transformed many backyards into edible and native landscapes, created educational, organic gardens in three elementary schools, assisted with the planting of edible and medicinal native species from several bioregions of California to replace our concrete sidewalks, created community building opportunities in a supportive housing facility, developed educational tools for schools and residents, and promoted the imperative vitality of a localized economy that focuses on the needs of the people, and not corporate interests. Some projects have been more fruitful than others, but after taking the time to meditate and evaluate each one individually, we have come away with a plan to sink our roots deeper, absorb the nutrients around us, and flourish even more this year, improving what we are already doing through more cooperation and planning. We recently took a trip to Big Sur for our 2007 Annual Meeting and to improve on our vision and action plan for 2008. Check out our story with details and photos about the Monarch butterflies we saw, and much more here. Our renewed and revised vision for the Ecology Center of San Francisco will be available in February for your viewing. Check out the following pages to see photos and descriptions of some of the work we’ve been up to: School Gardens, Lending Library, Workshops, as well as some of our recent postings to various categories on our homepage.
UPCOMING AND ONGOING
Jan. 26th, Saturday - 12pm-4pm : Backyard Bounty Brigade - Carmen Aguilar’s backyard rejuvenation project : 4731 Irving St. (btwn. 48th and LaPlaya)
Come learn about sheet mulching, native plants for wildlife and medicine, and planting a winter/spring vegetable bed. We will be setting up a new irrigation system, sheet mulching most of the backyard space to prevent invasive plants from taking over, and creating a native wildlife garden specifically with shrubs, herbs, and other elements to attract birds, bees, butterflies, and more. We’ll also be putting in a winter vegetable bed complete with our favorite brassicas (Broccoli, Cauliflower, Kale, and Cabbage), as well as some garlic and other medicinal herbs. Lend a hand, learn a skill, or bring some wisdom and expertise of your own for this community building Garden Party! We will provide all necessary tools as well as some organic and local snacks and refreshments. Call/Email for more details. Jan. 28th, Monday - 1pm-3pm : Cob Bench Building with 4th & 5th graders from Jefferson Elementary School : 1725 Irving St (btwn. 19th and 18th avenues)
We’ll be continuing our cob bench project we started a month ago at Jefferson Elementary School in an effort to bring ecological awareness, education, and action to the students of Jefferson. They learned about why we are building a bench out of earth as opposed to wood, concrete, or plastic, and they’re helping to build it as a legacy to the kindergarteners who will be using it. Come lend a hand, and a foot as we mix batches of clay, aggregate, and straw to a sublime stickiness to apply to our existing foundation. Share experiences or wisdom with some of the students, or just observe and learn about natural building and its potential in San Francisco. You may get dirty, so plan ahead if you would like to stomp the cob with your bare feet. Ideally, the sun will be warming the air around us and the rain will pause for a day, if not, this event will most likely be canceled. Please call ahead for details or confirmation (415) 846-8164. This event is on-going, so if you can’t make it this Monday, check back for future days (typically Monday or Wednesday).
BOOK OF THE MONTH
This month’s selection from our Lending Library is Joseph Jenkin’s The Humanure Handbook, an informative and amusing discussion on how composting our “undigested leftovers,:” could save the world, or at least recycle currently wasted soil nutrients while improving soil fertility and reducing soil and water pollution;, while saving millions of gallons of clean water daily, something that is currently done around the world, but little understood or accepted in the United States. Jenkins, who has been feeding his family from crops grown with the family’s “humanure” for 26 years, explains the history, science, and practicality of composting all organic matter generated by humans in a clean, safe, and productive way. One caveat is many of the statistics of sources referenced are from the 80’s and so may not apply today though they still reflect the reality experienced by many people around the world today. Though “humanure” composting is currently not allowed in San Francisco, the proper composting of pet manures is unregulated and a simple means of replicating a basic principle of ecosystems which is to recycle nutrients through the food web. Doing so will divert a great deal of soil nutrients out of our landfills and back to the soil, allowing them to be broken down by beneficial microorganisms that convert the manures into fertile, pathogen free compost for our plants - edible and ornamental - to benefit from.
The Humanure Handbook, 3rd Edition: a guide to composting human manure by Joseph Jenkins - Chelsea Green Publishing
An edited excerpt taken from chapter two, Waste Not, Want Not…
“WASTE: …Spoil or destruction, done or permitted, to lands, houses, gardens, trees, or other corporeal hereditaments, by the tenant thereof…Any unlawful act or omission of duty on the part of the tenant which results in permanent injury to the inheritance…” Black’s Law Dictionary
America is not only a land of industry and commerce, it’s also a land of consumption and waste, producing between 12 and 14 billion tons of waste annually. Much of our waste consists of organic material including food residues, municipal leaves, yard materials, agricultural residues, and human and livestock manures, all of which should be returned to the soil from which they originated. These organic materials are very valuable agriculturally, a fact well known among organic gardeners and farmers. Feces and urine are examples of natural, beneficial, organic materials excreted by the bodies of animals after completing their digestive processes. They are only “waste” when we discard them. When recycled, they are resources, and are often referred to as manures, but never as waste, by the people who do the recycling. We do not recycle waste. It’s a common semantic error to say that waste is, can be, or should be recycled. Resource materials are recycled, but waste is never recycled. That’s why it’s called “waste.” Waste is any material that is discarded and has no further use. We humans have been so wasteful for so long that the concept of waste elimination is foreign to us. Yet, it is an important concept.
The world is divided into two categories of people: those who shit in their drinking water supplies and those who don’t. We in the western world are in the former class. We defecate into water, usually purified drinking water. After polluting the water with our excrements, we flush the polluted water “away,” meaning we probably don’t know where it goes, nor do we care. Every time we flush a toilet, we launch five or six gallons of polluted water out into the world.12 That would be like defecating into a five-gallon office water jug and then dumping it out before anyone could drink any of it. Then doing the same thing when urinating. Then doing it everyday, numerous times, and then multiplying that by about 290 million people in the United States alone. To read the rest of this excerpt, click here.
BIRD OF THE MONTH
Thus far, we’ve only offered information about plants that we would like to highlight, but this month, and going forward we would like to improve upon this feature of our newsletter by adding other species that are an important part of the ecology of both San Francisco, the surrounding Bay Area, and beyond. This month’s selection is the Pelicanus occidentalis, or Brown Pelican. Brown Pelicans, are primarily fish eaters sustaining themselves on roughly 4 pounds of a variety of fishes including menhaden, herring, sheepshead, pigfish, mullet, grass minnows, top minnows, anchovies, and silversides, and sometimes crustaceans. Being a fairly large bird, up to 4 feet long with up to a 7 foot wingspan, it needs a larger amount of food then some other seabirds, and there for prefers, some would say needs, larger fish to consume. Pelicanus inhabits warmer coastlines all up and down North, Central, and South American on both the western and eastern coasts, but is limited to areas with cooler temperatures. Mating and breeding takes place in warm islands off the coasts of Southern California and Mexico, including the Anacapa and Coronado Islands. Specifically it remains in open ocean waters to intertidal zones and estuaries though it is not too uncommon to see them in freshwater marshes or larger bodies of water occasionally. They nest in a variety of areas including scraped holes on the ground, in rocky cliff outcroppings, and in bushes and tree tops.
Many species make up part of the food web for Pelicanus, including the fishes mentioned above (Striped Mullet, anchovies, menhaden, etc) but also the food sources that those fish consume including the various smaller fishes, planktons, and sea kelps such as Sugar Wrack and Sea Palms that provide up to 90% of the primary productivity for intertidal ecosystems. Pelicanus has no known predators though in areas around Tijuana, Mexico, humans are known to steal their eggs for consumption. That practice is illegal in the United States for many reasons, including its current status as Endangered or Threatened, depending on the jurisdiction and region Pelicanus inhabits around the country.
The historical range of Pelicanus in the United States includes the Pacific and southeastern coastal areas, as well as Central and South America, occasionally reaching up to Vancouver Island. They were wiped out of Louisiana in the early 1970s due to chemical pollutants including DDT and other pesticide residues that disrupted solid eggshell production. At the peak of their decline in California in 1971 only one bird hatched, but after the passage of a ban on DDT use by the EPA in 1972, breeding success improved greatly to hatched numbers reaching 6500 and more in the mid-80s. Currently, Pelicanus continues to inhabit much of its historic range and can be seen expanding this range inland here and there but not for breeding. This species is unique in that it is one of the largest seabirds and certainly the largest (and only Brown) of the 7 species of Pelicanus worldwide. It’s habitat, which is mostly ocean waters and breeding sites need to be restored to more pristine conditions free of pesticide and heavy metal residues coming from inland runoff and sewage outlets as well as development along estuaries and coastlines, to ensure long term success of the species. Pelicanus is a migratory seabird, so it moves around to many different regions that have both easily maintained habitats and delicate habitats. In some regions, it feeds on certain organisms that are sensitive to warming water temperatures and a important source of food could be lost if climate change dramatically alters the temperatures of some of these regions. In addition, Pelicanus needs areas close to the ocean to breed and so tree tops and bushes in coastal scrub areas need to be designated wild and scenic or wildlife preserve lands so they can safely mate and fledge their offspring in these regions. Pelicanus is a colonizing bird that often nests within a wings distance of each other and there for to support a population of 4,000 or more breeding pairs would require large tracts of undeveloped or seldom used space at least during their breeding season of late summer.
The most important aspect of habitat restoration for Pelicanus occidentalis is the necessity to reduce our toxic chemical and heavy metal use in industry manufacturing, processing, agriculture, and sewage treatment as these elements are the most destructive to their environment and their effluent and pollutants are systemic throughout the food chain. While some measures have been proposed such as the banning of various chemicals like DDT, and moving sewage outlets farther out to sea, problems still arise with the use of other chemicals not yet banned, the use of chemicals that contain trace amounts of DDT which are still used, legal use of DDT and similar chemicals in Mexico, and illegal use here in the US. Concentrations are found in many species still today that are above the National Academy of Sciences safe limits, and while moving sewage outlets farther away from intertidal communities and areas of high biodiversity, the problem is not solved or mitigated just moved to another region that is now in danger of further human disruption and continued exploitation without regards to ecological needs and balance. Did I mention humanure composting as opposed to central sewage systems? If you didn’t know already, the effluent from San Francisco’s sewage system goes right into the ocean and the Bay. The term effluent is used because the liquid, while being as clear as water, contains enough harmful materials that it is unsafe for human consumption. If it is unsafe for human consumption, why are we dumping it in the ocean and the bay? Stay tuned for more on this to come.
RECIPE OF THE MONTH
Well besides all of the lovely winter vegetables you could be enjoying this month, and savory ways to prepare them, we though we’d offer the recipe for a simple liver flush, and a recipe for the “Lemonade Fast,” based on the small book by Stanley Burroughs’s The Master Cleanser Book. If you are intersted in a cleansing or purging fast, it can be a wonderful, educational experience, but you have to be prepared, mentally and “logistically.” The ideal lemonade diet would last for 10 days, or at least 5-7, because after three days, your body has eliminated everything in your digestive system and can work on cleaning out anything that might have been left behind or built up over the years. In addition, it gives your digestive organs a time to rest, since most of the time they’re working nearly round the clock. You’ll want to ease into and out of the diet with only whole foods, especially raw fruits and vegetables. That being said, you will have very little energy compared to what you’re used to and it is advisable to not do any major activities during the fast. It is also important to note that the special blend is actually everything the body needs to survive. For more details on this, please check out www.thelemonadediet.com. While the lemonade fast is something you could or should do up to four times per year, the liver flush is something you can do anytime and will always be healthy as a routine maintenance for your liver’s health. It is actually part of a most complex diet based on Dr. Randolph Stone’s Polarity System and it’s purifying diet. This recipe has been taken from The Holistic Health Handbook, which is also in our Lending Library.
Liver Flush:
2 tablespoons cold-pressed oil (preferrably olive or almond)
Juice of 1 large or 2 small lemons
Juice of 1 or 2 oranges (or 1 grapefruit)
1 to 4 cloves of garlic (if this is too strong, garlic can be eaten in a luncheon salad)
Dash of cayenne pepperBlend the garlic and oil in a blender (or mince the garlic thoroughly and mix with oil), then add the other ingredients and briefly blend or mix well. After drinking this mixture down, follow immediately with two cups of herbal (not black) tea, or hot water if tea is not available.Suggested Herbal Tea Blend: Boil about half a finger of fresh ginger root, sliced into six or seven pieces, with a tablespoon each of fenugreek, fennel seed, and flax seed for three minutes at a slow boil, and pour the broth into a teapot containing comfrey leaf and peppermint leaf teas (about one tablespoon of each). Makes about one pint.If you can, you should try to eat only raw or well cooked, and thoroughly masticated fruits and vegetables while excluding any dairy, grains, meat, coffee, alcohol, eggs, sugars, starches, or black tea. You can do the liver flush for a couple days or up to two weeks. Ideally a period of 3 to 5 days in between a two week period would consist of just liquids only.
Lemonade Fast: Combine 2 tbsp. of fresh lemon or lime juice, 1 or 2 tbsp. of organic maple syrup and some cayenne pepper (as your taste allows), per 1 c. of pure water.
Drink a minimum of six cups of this mixture a day for a minimum of 10 days. Eat no solid foods. You may drink herbal teas or water as well.
Keep your bowels moving with laxative teas in the morning and evening to help your body eliminate the toxins accumulating in your colon as the lemonade cleans your entire system. Taking enemas on the last few days is also highly recommended for clearing out your colon.Break your fast by drinking orange juice for two days to prepare your stomach to assimilate other foods. On the third day, drink orange juice in the morning, raw fruit for lunch, and fruits and salad for dinner. Resume normal, healthy eating on the next day.
TILL NEXT MONTH
Remembering that there are so many beautiful creatures and happenings all around us everyday, all day is what makes being alive such a gift. We often get caught up in our day to day struggle, through its ups and downs and forget about taken moments to slow down, stop, smell the roses, or just observe what is around us, speaking to us in a language older than words. We want to leave you with those thoughts, and ten ways you can enjoy natural sounds around you next time you take a moment for yourself. Share this with friends, family, and others:
1. Sound Sense - Stop. Listen to what’s around you. Now close your eyes. Do you hear other sounds? Do you hear more with your eyes close?
2. Sound Count - Close your eyes. Lift up a finger for each sound you hear. Use your left hand for natural sounds and your right hand for human-made sounds. Which time of sound reaches five first?
3. Sound Walk - Walk and listen. Do you hear your footsteps? Do you hear your clothes rustle? Can you walk without making any sound?
4. Sound Draw - Take a moment to hear one sound around you. Use your finger to draw the sound in the air. Have a friend guess the sound.
5. Sound Pleasure - What is the most beautiful sound you hear? What is the ugliest?
6. Wind Blown - Try to hear the wind’s sound blowing through different plants.
7. Water Sounds - Find a stream or waterfall and listen carefully with your eyes shut until the sound separates into single notes.
8. Landscape Listening - How does the shape of the land affect the way sound travels to your ear? Where is the source of each sound? Are there any echoes? What is the closest sound you hear?
9. Walk in the Wind - Walk as though a predator was after you. Walk as though you were a predator.
10. Animal Chat - Listen for an animal. What sound does the animal make? Can you make its sound? Can you communicate with the animal?
This list was compiled by the Nature Sounds Society to encourage the preservation, appreciation, and creative use of natural sounds. I hope you enjoy that and other ecological opportunities coming your way. Until next month, keep warm, go at least a day without any electricity, and keep planting winter veggies like broccoli, kale, cauliflower, cabbage, spinach, and mustard greens for some yummy, nutritious meals in the spring.
Davin, Sam, and Tori
Ecology Center of San Francisco
We thank you for your patience despite our absent correspondence over the past couple months. We have had our hands and hearts full of work in gardens and projects throughout the city so much that we haven’t been able to get into the office and share the details. We’ve got highlights of recent projects and news of projects to come as well as many volunteer, educational opportunities this month! Are you welcoming winter and its thirst quenching rains as much as we are? With a little more consistency we can turn off any irrigation systems that have been keeping our fall gardens productive and let Mother Nature do what she does best. Among others you might think of doing in your garden before the end of the year include:
Cut back evergreens for holiday decorations.
Clean and sharpen garden tools for the New Year.
Protect any tender plants from frosty nights and bringing indoors any heat preferring plants grown in containers.
Plant garlic cloves either from store bought or selected varieties for their flavor. Softneck varieties are best for California. Look for “California Early,’ ‘California Late,’ or ‘Silverskin.’
Transplant sweet peas, leafy salad greens, asian greens: mustard, tatsoi, bok choi, and any brassica family crop: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kohlrabi, or kale for spring harvest.
“Chop and drop” (prune healthy limbs back to last year’s or longer growth) nitrogen fixing evergreen trees and shrubs such as acacia or Ceanothus to mulch fruit trees and other large shrubs for a nutritive winter addition.
Plant a cover crop of Lana Vetch, Australian Winter Peas, and bell beans to add organic nitrogen to the soil. A good local mail order source for seed is John Jeavon’s Bountiful Gardens, which is a non-profit project of Ecology Action that offers heirloom, untreated, organic seeds.
Start researching which fruit trees will do best in your space and place an order for January through May delivery of rootstock. Sandy Bar Nursery has exceptionally grown organic rootstock of many rare varieties, and Raintree Nursery has many unusual and exotic fruits from around the world.
Spray your peach, nectarine, and almond trees for peach leaf curl with a lime sulfur (calcium polysulfide) spray. It’s considered the least toxic for organic use, but it is a skin and eye irritant so wear glasses and gloves and only mix enough to use at one time. Available at most garden supply stores.
Celestial Sightings
Have you looked up into the night sky recently? If so you might have noticed Jupiter which has been accompanying the Moon in our evenings since November 12th and will be departing December 10th. It is the largest of the planets and the brightest celestial body after the Sun, Moon, and Venus. The12th of the month will be a Full Moon with the New Moon disappearing on the 27th. On December 14th, you can witness the peaking of the Geminid meteor shower. Considered by some to be the best light show of the whole year. Just four days later, Mars is nearest the Earth and easiest to see, and on the 23rd, the Moon and Mars dance together from sunset to sunrise. But of course the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year when the Sun blazes across the Tropic of Capricorn, occurs on Monday, December 22nd. Be sure to gather with friends and have some merriment for the coming of longer days and shorter nights.
Nature Awareness
Perhaps you’re looking for an outdoor ecological adventure of exponential proportions this month? December also happens to be the peak month for Monarch Butterfly’s fall migration to roost among lupines along the California Coast from Cape Mendocino to Baja California. Amazingly, an estimated 100 million Monarch’s find their way to the same 100 winter roosts each year having never been their before, navigating the 1000’s of miles it takes each fall-winter. Some of the best places to spot them in large colonies is the Natural Bridges State Beach which is a great site for viewing lots of marine wildlife as well, and Pacific Grove’s George Washington Park. If you’re looking to spot animals with larger wings, then maybe the 108th Annual Christmas Bird Count is for you. Started on Christmas Day, 1900 when ornithologist Frank Chapman and friends decided to scatter across the Northeasts to see how many birds they could “bag” or count in contrast to the unsettling enjoyment had by hunters who had a tradition of competing for the biggest bag of dead birds on Christmas Day. 108 Years later, the scientific and educational (and enjoyable) event begins on December 14th and goes till January 5th, 2008. It is put together by the Audubon society locally although volunteers from every state and province through the US and Canada and around the world take turns watching various regions in a 15 mile circle, twenty-four hours a day to collect data on the species and number of birds seen. Accuracy is ideal as the findings are published each year in a catalog larger than a Manhattan phone book. This unique publication is often utilized by scientists to chart population changes and can often be indicators of the health of ecosystems around the world. There are over 40 volunteer viewing sites in Northern California alone with the San Francisco site being held on December 27th. (You have to register with the Audobon volunteer coordinator Dan Murphy (murphsf@comcast.net) by Friday December 8th if you’d like to participate). There are also viewings in Oakland and throughout the Bay Area.
Recent Highlights
So what HAVE we been up to these past few months? Besides keeping edible schoolyards growing at Jefferson, Monroe, and Francis Scott Key Elementary schools, we’ve also spent dozens of hours in K-5 classroom workshops in each of these schools. In doing so, we’ve provided an opportunity for the students to become more literate and in tune with their local ecology, food systems and principles to ecological gardening including planting their own vegetables, sowing cover crops, pest identification and management (hand removal), species identification, art in the garden, medicinal and culinary herb selection, harvesting crops, nutrition, and food preparation. We are also happy to have just begun an ongoing natural building project with 4th and 5th graders at Jefferson Elementary School. This past Monday was the first of a series of educational workshops on cob building at Jefferson. The students are learning about the traditional and sustainable practice of earthen construction by building a cob bench for their fellow kindergarteners to enjoy. They are learning the value of sourcing materials locally and opting for natural, renewable materials over imported and factory produced products. The clay which makes up part of the mix has been brought in from the subsoil excavated to build a foundation for the new playground on 19th and Wawona. We will be sealing the bench with a beeswax and linseed blend to weather proof it. If you would like to learn more or get experience with building a cob bench, come down to the school on Monday December 10th and 17th from 1pm till 3pm, or contact us.
Tori Jacobs had the educational and ecologically enlightening opportunity to participate in two great workshops offered by the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center in Occidental, CA over the past few months. First she went to the week long School Garden Teacher Training Program that has been helping teachers, gardeners, and volunteers learn how to establish and sustain school garden projects, and to integrate garden curriculum with state standards for the past 10 years. She had the opportunity to meet and connect with others in the surging school garden movement from throughout the Bay Area and California. Then she embarked on OAEC’s world renowned two week Permaculture Intensive, modeled after the 72 hour pioneering course taught by Bill Mollison over 30 years ago. For more information, click on the links to see the curriculum and details of these and many other exciting programs offered by this beacon of regenerative and restorative ecosystem design. Tori has also been collaborating with community visionaries, non-profit leaders, and organizers from all over the Bay Area as well as the folks from City Repair in Portland, OR in preparation for The Big One, a Community Transformation Convergence. For more information or to get involved go to TheBigOneIsComing.
In September, ECOSF held a workshop on Permaculture Guilds with Native Edible and Medicinal Plants at Other Avenues Worker-Owned Health Food Store. With the help of the participants we planted 4 different sidewalk plantings representing native plant communities of California including the Coastal Coniferous Forest with their Redwoods, Huckleberries, Wild Ginger, and Hazelnuts and Riparian areas that include California Wild Grape, Mugwort, and Blue Elderberry. The project is not yet completed and we would love your help wrapping it up, see our upcoming events for more details!
We also have had the pleasure of working with some of the residents of the Dudley apartments, a permanent supportive housing program of the Hamilton Family Center. Located on 6th St in the SOMA, the neighborhood isn’t exactly a green patch of pasture, so we’re working with the staff and residents to help breath some new life into the building and the neighborhood by offering exclusive workshops to the residents to provide an enjoyable community building experience around the areas of nutritional cooking, energy efficiency, non-toxic household products, and are hoping to help bring in some air purifying plants such as golden pothos (Epipremnum aureum), philodendrons (various species), and Boston ferns (Nephrolepsis exaltata) which the EPA suggests if maintained properly can completely rid the air of pollutants on a daily basis. We recently completed a Vegan-In-Season Cooking class their with Alyssa Cox, an accomplished Natural Chef and personal “cuisine curator extraordinaire” who has whipped up nutritious and delicious meals for the vegans and vegetarians on multiple Warped Tour’s, and volunteered her time for the folks at the Dudley. Check out her website EarthenFeast for catering or personal chef services.
Upcoming Events
Are you ready to fight the greedy-gravitational pull of holiday consumer consumption and volunteer with your local community-building-ecology-action organization instead? If so, join us for a variety of volunteer projects this month:
December 10th and 17th, Mondays - 1pm-3pm at Jefferson Elementary School located at 1725 Irving St, btwn. 19th and 18th Avenues.
Cob Bench building with 4th and 5th graders
Learn about natural building and the artful science of making a good cob mix, starting with an urbanite foundation, and natural weather sealants and plasters.
December 15th, Saturday - 12pm-4pm at 3930 Judah St. btwn 44th and 45th Avenues.
Replanting the Chaparral and Coastal Scrub communities that have succumbed to human pressure on the sidewalk.
Build a sturdy kick-walk-dog proof (or at least resistant) fence around all seven sidewalk plantings to prevent further damage and improve look and function of the urban native landscape.
December 16th, Sunday - 12pm-5pm at Double Rock Community Garden located at the corner of Griffith @ Fitzgerald in the Bayview
Medicinal Herb Maze completion and planting
Come out and help us stack another layer of urbanite for the borders of the walkable herb spiral, fill in with compost and mulch, and plant dozens of native, traditional, and Chinese medicinal herbs for the Alice Griffith Community and Bayview Farmers Market.
For more information about these events please go to our website, email us, or call (415) 846-8164
Planting A Seed
One of the primary goals of ECOSF is to connect the community to outstanding local organizations, institutions and businesses that provide vital goods and services in a sustainable way. The cohesiveness of our community grows as we become more interconnected with local efforts and support more local commerce, and in that spirit of community we will be featuring an example of excellent local players in our newsletters. The first organization we will spotlight is Garden For the Environment (GFE), our own preeminent local gardening organization.The GFE serves as a community gardening resource and outreach organization that promotes sustainable landscaping practices and wise resource use mostly through direct training of volunteers and interns that then go out and spread the knowledge throughout the community. The problems they address range from consumption of consumer goods and finite resources like water and fossil fuels to waste mis-management and unsustainable food systems. Founded in 1990 as part of the San Francisco League of Urban Gardeners (SLUG), now fiscally sponsored by the Haight-Ashbury Neighborhood Council and located at 7th & Lawton in San Francisco, GFE maintains a beautiful one acre demonstration garden including edible and native plants, fruit trees, resource efficient gardening techniques, and a wide array of composting systems on display. Outdoor classrooms hold weekly workshops and Gardening and Compost Educator Training (GCETP) classes which are taught by Suzi Palladino and Blair Randall who also wear every other hat for the organization.
GFE Programs include:
Monthly compost education workshops conducted at the garden and other community gardens throughout San Francisco
Resource Efficient Landscape Education series (RELE), covering mushroom cultivation, water wise gardening, container growing, guerilla gardening, bike tours, using recycled and reused landscape materials, and more.
School Education program offered in partnership with San Francisco Unified School District and San Francisco’s Department of the Environment. – centered around compost education
Three month intensive Gardening and Composting Educator Training program-or “getup”
The Garden for the Environment is a wonderful local resource for ecological gardening and resource awareness. Their work makes learning about gardening and many other ecological issues accessible and fun for everybody. They are a shining example of a vital organization that brings the community together, raises ecological consciousness and promotes awareness and action. We will be partnering with them on many projects in 2008 so stay tuned!
News and Media
We came across some interesting media we wanted to share with you. Earthbeat Radio, a groundbreaking environmental news and interview program of Washington D.C.’s WPFW and Pacifica Radio.Unfortunately it isn’t broadcast on a station local to the Bay Area, but you can download programs off their website and they podcast as well. Some recent interviews were with presenters at the recent International Forum on Globalization Teach-In: Confronting the Global “Triple Crisis.” Climate change, peak oil, and global resource depletion and extinction were on the agenda for discussion by great thinkers, scientists, educators, researchers, and activists from around the world, including: Vandana Shiva, Richard Heinberg, David Korten, Michael T. Klare, Bill McKibben, among others. IFG, a San Francisco based non-profit says the audio and video from the Teach-In will be posted on their website by December 14th. Be sure to check out the November 20th recording of Earth Beat radio for to hear a recorded speech by David Korten, publisher of YES! magazine and author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. If you’d like to read a story we did about the recent oil spill in the Bay and some information and ideas you may not have read in your newspaper go to Cosco-Busan Spill.
Until Next Year
It has been a truly inspiring year of opportunities and events and we hope to bring you more ecological education and community building opportunities that make a direct impact on you and other residents of San Francisco. We will be working on goals, objectives, and programs for 2008 in the coming weeks and we value your input as citizens, stakeholders, teachers, students, and community members. We wouldn’t be able to do what we do without your support and appreciation for the commitment we bring to San Francisco. We want to make sure our programs are focused around community needs and respond to requests from people of all demographics and interests. Please take some time to send us a note saying what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see, and how you’d be able to help us achieve those goals be it volunteering your expertise, ideas, or muscle, donations, or by becoming a member.
We look forward to serving you and yours for years to come! Happy Solstice!
Hopefully you are all enjoying the fruits (and veggies) of this wonderful summer harvest. We have heard from many farmers that it has been a great year for crops despite real drought concerns. Our backyards are blooming and ripening and the farmer’s markets are exploding with peaches, nectarines, plums, pluots, and blueberries. Even though we’re at the peak of our typical harvest time, San Francisco’s climate graces us with a long growing season, and if you get your seeds sown and transplants planted now you can reap a winter harvest of broccoli, cauliflower, kale, Romanesco, lettuce, sugar snap peas, carrots, radishes and if you planted some winter squash about a month ago, you’d be ready to harvest around October. If you’re not planning on growing a winter crop, maybe you’d like to grow a cover crop that can overwinter and then be mulched into the soil to add fertility and organic matter for some new veggie beds for spring. A good “green manure” mix of 50% Bell beans, 30% ‘Magnus’ peas, and 20% Common Vetch can compete against the weeds that come with our winter rains and add lots of organic matter and nitrogen for your spring crop. Harmony Farm Supply just outside of Santa Rosa offers this winter mix for $0.79/lb and 2-3 lb. is good for 1000 sq. ft.
August is also an exciting month for the Cosmos, which Rudolph Steiner and his biodynamic teachings suggest are integral to a healthy, ecologically balanced garden or agricultural system. If it weren’t so fogged in the evenings of August 6th and 7th you could have seen Mars and the Moon appearing together in the night sky. But don’t fret, if you can find yourself on a cloudless (or fog-less) spot the night of Sunday, August 12th you’ll catch the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, which happens to coincide with the New Moon so it should be a dark sky. Towards the end of the month, on the early morning of Tuesday, August 28th there will be a total lunar eclipse that you won’t want to miss. During this eclipse the moon’s appearance can go from bright orange to blood red to dark brown.
Plant of the Month - Quarcus agrifolia (Coast Live Oak)
Summer time in our Mediterranean climate of California means dry weather and rolling hills of golden grasses dotted with the occasional forest green canopy of a mighty oak tree. Much of the state’s land below 3,000 feet used to be covered with oak woodlands and today even after extensive agricultural and urban development Oak trees still play an important role in California’s ecology. We find many species of Oak here including Valley Oak, Blue Oak, Tanbark Oak, Black Oak, and our local native the Coast live oak.
Coast Live Oak (Quercus agrifolia) is in the Fagaceae family along with 900 other species of Oak around the world and can be found along the coast from Baja to the Northern Coast Ranges. The name live refers to the evergreen nature of the leaves and sets this tree apart from most other Oak species (there is also a Canyon Live Oak that grows more inland). These trees can grow more than 40 feet tall and can cover a horizontal area at least that wide with a curly weeping branch pattern that represents the dendritic form that can be found throughout nature. The Ohlone, an indigenous people native to the Bay Area harvested ripe acorns from the Live Oak in the fall with gratitude and celebration for their usefulness and abundance. The flour derived from mashing fresh acorns and then leeching out the tannins can be turned into a hearty mush or even baked into a tasty bread. Although Live Oak acorns have more tannins and thus require more leeching than the valley oak they supposedly produce a more filling meal. Live Oak can be a powerful addition to your ecological garden of native shrubs like Toyon (Heteromeles arbutifolia) and Flowering Currant (Ribes sanguineum), or planted as a street tree provided that you have an area with full sun exposure, and its drought tolerance makes watering unnecessary after a few years. Refer to our excerpt from Toby Hemmingway’s “Gaias’s Garden” to learn more about the ecological functions of oak in the landscape.
The Coast Live Oak can be found growing in the the mixed conifer forest with Douglass fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), California Bay Laurel (Umbellularia californica), Pacific Madrone (Arbutus menziesii) and other Oak species. In San Francisco we are lucky enough to have some old Oak groves surviving right under our noses. The northeast section of Golden Gate Park behind McLaren Lodge on Stanyan is home to some of the oldest Coast Live Oaks in the City. In fact these are the only trees native to the shifting sand dune habitat of coastal San Francisco. Another large and probably older stand of trees carpets the hillside of Buena Vista Park on Haight and Baker. You can also see them in Glen Canyon, the Presidio, dotting the Brotherhood Way corridor and in McLaren park in the southern part of the city (you can usually tell the Coast Live Oak by the fuzz on the underside of the small, rounded ,light green leaf). Unfortunately the Coast Live Oak is one of the species that the epidemic Sudden Oak Death is decimating across the state. It is believed that up to 90% of the California’s Coast Live Oaks and Tan Oaks are affected and dying. For more information on Sudden Oak Death see click here.
One way you can learn more about our native species is to become familiar with what the San Francisco Park and Recreation Dept. calls our Significant Natural Resource Areas. These are fragments of original natural communities that still survive in San Francisco. As Rec and Park puts it “they are essentially “islands” in a “sea” of human-built environment. This fragmentation has many effects which threaten their continued existence. In order to counteract these threats, people need to help care for them. They are the last vestiges of the beautiful and unique ecosystems that are our natural heritage in San Francisco. Our actions can help to guarantee their survival. To get more involved contact a land-steward or community group for your neighborhood park or SNRA.
Volunteer Opportunities with ECOSF this Month
This month ECOSF will be helping to revitalize and regenerate a 2800 sq ft school garden for Monroe Elementary School in the Excelsior District. The school is located at 260 Madrid St. (btwn. Excelsior Ave. and Avalon Ave.) and there is usually ample street parking available. We’ll be out there 3 days this month so you have plenty of opportunities to get involved:
Tuesday August 14th - We’ll be doing some initial site work in preparation for planting a fall/winter salad bar garden for the students the following week. We will remove some of the existing vegetation and clearing overgrown pathways to make room for edible and medicinal native shrubs and the young aspiring naturalists who will be exploring the garden this fall. Some of the work will include pruning, and removing trees and shrubs, fixing the irrigation system, weeding some areas and applying sheet mulch methods to prepare some veggie beds. We will be out there from 12pm till 4pm and will provide all necessary tools and some organic juices and snacks.
Saturday August 18th - We’ll be planting the winter salad bar garden of lettuce, sugar snap peas, broccoli, cauliflower and kale. We’ll also be planting some edible and medicinal native shrubs such as Pink-Flowering Currants, Elderberries, Huckleberries, Serviceberies, Salmonberries, Osoberries, and Salal. (That’s a lot of berries!) We’ll also be adding some support species because how can we emulate a balanced ecosystem with only food for humans? Certainly the children will have to compete with some crafty birds for some of these Berrrrrific shrubs, but we’ll also include some nitrogen fixing, and beneficial insect and wildlife habitat plants like Ceanothus, Lupine, Yarrow, Coffeeberry, Toyon, Buckwheat, Goldenrod and Coyote Brush and more. We’ll be on the site talking about the benefits and use of these species and planting them from 12pm till 5pm with tools, plants, and organic refreshments.
Monday August 20th - Cob-Mortar Rock Wall Completion at Sally and Roger Bland’s Home. We’ll be back at the Bland residence to finish the cob-mortared rock wall we started for their veggie bed. If you’re unfamiliar with cob (a mixture of sand, clay, and straw) come on down for a stomping good time as we make up a fresh mix of natural mortar and slap it between some rocks to make an attractive rock wall for a raised bed. We’ll be talking about using cob for lots of other projects for the backyard enthusiast like building a cob oven or a cob bench. We may also do a little tending in the garden and plant a few winter veggies for the family. Their home is located at 1370 12th Avenue (btwn. Irving and Judah St) in the Sunset. We’ll be there from 12pm till 5pm with refreshments and dirty fun!
Saturday August 25th - We’ll be back at Monroe Elementary school for a school picnic for incoming kindergartners and 1st graders so we’ll finish planting some of the native shrubs with them and to sow some carrots, radishes, and beets with them as well. That will be from 11am till 2pm.
Some of the work we do wouldn’t be possible without the help of volunteers like you. We hope to see you out at one of our events this month and if you have any questions please email us at info@eco-sf.org
Other Events and Happenings this Month and Beyond The SF Botanical Garden will be having their Shade Plant Sale this Saturday, August 11th. For more information click here to refer to their website. The Urban Farmer Store, San Francisco’s premier irrigation specialists, will be offering a free Landscape Watering workshop Saturday August 25th at 10am to introduce you to innovative sprinkler and drip irrigation solutions. You can learn about system automation with valves, timers, and rain sensors. This class will teach you how to plan your own efficient irrigation system. The class is free but space is limited so reserve your seat by calling the store at (415) 661- 2204 or by email. If you don’t mind a beautiful drive past Sebastopol to Occidental we encourage you to check out the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center’s Fall Plant Sale and Open House. Choose from hundreds of varieties of California Certified Organic heirloom brassicas (broccoli, cauliflower, kale, etc), lettuces, salad greens, chards, leeks, herbs, as well as old-fashioned annual flowers. Select from an array of ornamental and edible perennials propagated from their own collections. OAEC is located on 15290 Coleman Valley Road in Occidental which is about a 1.5 hour drive from San Francisco, but well worth it. The plant sale will go from 9am till 5pm on August 25th and 26th and they will offer garden tours at 10am and 11am each day. If you haven’t been up to OAEC yet, you won’t want to miss out on this incredible sale and ecological paradise.
Other Avenues, a worker-owned cooperative health food store located at 3930 Judah St. (btwn 44th and 45th Avenues) has been provided organic produce, bulk bins, and more in the Sunset district for over 25 years. In September they will be hosting ECOSF for a workshop on Creating and Planting Native Guilds. This workshop will go introduce the concept of planting species that can harmonize with one another and create a cooperative community of plants that can produce food and medicine, fix nitrogen, attract beneficial insects, provide habitat for birds and other wildlife, make its own mulch, and thrive with little maintenance. We will spend some time talking about the roles each plant plays in a guild and which native species can fill those roles as well as taking it to the streets to plant a variety of these guilds out in front of Other Avenues in some recently removed sidewalk space. If you would like to attend this free workshop going on Saturday September 8th from 2pm till 4pm, stop by Other Avenues in the last two weeks of August to sign up. The workshop is free but space is limited and you have to sign up in person. While you’re there, check out their local organic produce and other earth-friendly products.
Sizzling Succulent Recipe for your Summer Harvest
For delicious, seasonal, vegetarian meals in under an hour, Peter Berley’s cookbook Fresh Food Fast may be just what you’re looking for. We have it available to check out in our Lending Library so we wanted to offer you a tasty side dish to any summer harvest meal:
Pan-Seared Summer Squash with Garlic and Mint
- Pan searing the squash caramelizes it and produces a nice crust. The sugars become concentrated and the juices are locked in. You can use the same technique with eggplant slices and onion rings. Yield: 4 servings. (You may want to double the recipe its so good)
2 pounds summer squash, sliced 1/2-inch thick
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tablespoons fresh mint, torn into pieces
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
1 teaspoon coarse sea salt or kosher salt, plus additional to taste
1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
Freshly milled black pepper
1. Warm a large heavy skillet, griddle, or grill pan over medium heat. Arrange the squash in a single layer and sear until speckled with brown and beginning to blacken, about 5 minutes. Flip the squash and cook for 4 to 5 minutes more. Repeat with remaining squash.
2. In a serving bowl, combine the lemon juice, mint, garlic, sea salt, and red pepper flakes and let marinate for 5 minutes. Whisk in the oil.
3. Transfer the seared squash to the bowl, toss to coat with the dressing, and let rest for about 5 minutes. Season with additional salt and pepper and serve.
As always, ECOSF is dedicated to provided information, education, and services of an ecological nature to San Francisco. If you haven’t become a member, please consider making a contribution to these efforts and help create a cooperative community. If you have any projects, ideas, or suggestions, please let us know. We’d love to hear from you! Remember, blueberries are only in season for a couple more weeks so you might want to stock up while you can.
To a delicious August filled with fun, frolicking, and festivities,
Davin, Sam, and Tori
Ecology Center of San Francisco
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/
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!
Summer is here, or at least right around the corner. Traditionally the first day of summer falls on The Solstice, which is also known as the Feast of St. John the Baptist, Gathering Day, Litha, Midsummer, Sonnwend, Alben Heruin, Alban Heflin, Thing-Tide, Feast of Epona, Feill-Sheathain, Johannistag, Vestalia, and All-Couples Day. “Solstice” is derived from two Latin words: “sol” meaning sun, and “sistere,” to cause to stand still. This is because, as the summer solstice approaches, the noonday sun rises higher and higher in the sky on each successive day. On the day of the solstice, it rises an imperceptible amount, compared to the day before. In this sense, it “stands still.”
The Solstice was referred by some as Midsummer because it is roughly the middle of the growing season throughout much of Europe. But it’s not to late to sow seeds for summer crops in San Francisco. The renowned biointensive farmer and educator, Alan Chadwick, believed that the best time to sow your seeds was during the New Moon, which is when the Moon is directly between the Sun and the Earth and it appears dark without the indirect light of the Sun. It is believed that at this time, the greatest forces of nature - gravity, light, and magnetism - are at their greatest intensity as noted by the high tides of the ocean, and the high tides of water in soil, which help seeds germinate faster. The New Moon occurs on June 15th this month, and the Full Moon, which is the best time to transplant your new seedlings, occurs on June 30th. Some crops you might like to consider planting for June are corn, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squashes, and beans.
You may even like to consider the indigenous Three Sisters Garden of corn, beans, and squash. The benefit of growing these three “sisters” together is the harmony created by allowing the beans to grow up and be supported by the corn stalks while fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere into a soluble form which can be taken up by the corn and squash, while the large leaves of the squash, which is also grown at the base of the corn provides shade over the soil, creating a micro-climate that improves water retention in the soil, and decreases the likelihood of competition from “unwanted volunteers” (or as some would refer to as weeds).
There are lots of exciting events going on in San Francisco this month, including a pagan gathering and ritual for the Solstice at Ocean Beach near Taraval Street starting at 7pm. This event is put on by Reclaiming, and would encourage people to gather at the end of the longest day of the year to celebrate the light and honor the turning of the Wheel of the Year back toward the darkness. They ask people to please bring clean firewood (firewood is always welcome - no pallets, nails, construction material, plywood, painted or treated wood), warm clothes, food or non-alcoholic drink to share, and a towel if you want to plunge into the ocean.
Are you feeling the need for more information about the 2007 Farm Bill currently being debated by our lawmakers? Many people disregard the importance of this bill, which is revised once every 5 years, assuming it only concerns residents in farm or rural communities. Since the purpose of the the Farm Bill is to regulate farm production, prices and subsidies, and outline provisions on commodity programs, trade, conservation, credit, agricultural research, food stamps, and marketing, it is something that concerns and affects everyone, including farmers around the world. If you would like to learn more about the current debate and how you can get involved come to Alemany Farm this weekend, Saturday June 9th for a 2007 Farm Bill Teach-In. The forum will be from 2pm to 4pm and will include the following panelists: Anuradha Mittal from the Oakland Institute, Tim Frank from America Farmland Trust, Chris Cook, award-winning journalist and author of Diet for a Dead Planet (which is available in our Lending Library). For directions to the farm, check out their website at www.AlemanyFarm.org.
Some other interesting events going on in San Francisco and beyond this month include:
June 5th - World Environment Day. This year World Environment Day focuses on the effects that climate change is having on polar ecosystems and communities, on other ice- and snow-covered areas of the world, and the resulting global impacts, and will be held in the city of Tromsø, Norway. You can stay tuned to whats going on and learn more by visiting the UNEP’s website.
June 8th - World Ocean Day. Preview Ocean related films and meet several leaders in the Ocean Conservation community including filmmakers, marine biologists, and other notable guests of honor at the Gallery Lounge, a cocktail lounge and art gallery located Brannan and 4th Streets. For more information go to http://oceandaysf.org/
June 6th-8th - Bay Delta Tour. Put on by the Water Education Foundation, this 3-day, 2-night tour takes participants to the heart of California water policy – San Francisco Bay and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Stops include the Delta Cross Channel, the federal Tracy Pumping Plant, Bay-Delta model in Sausalito, Los Vaqueros Reservoir and Suisun Marsh. Issues discussed include Delta Planning initiatives, water project operations, fish passage, ecosystem restoration, levees and flood management, Delta agriculture, drinking water quality and water supply reliability. The tour begins and ends at Sacramento International Airport, and includes a ferry ride across San Francisco Bay.
June 9th - Herb Spiral design and creation. An ECOSF Garden Party follow-up, Tori will be showing you how to design and create an edible, medicinal, herb spiral which maximizes growing space by going vertical. She will be talking about selecting rocks, and ideal plants to use and placement of them, as well as how to incorporate drip irrigation into the spiral.
If you haven’t had a chance to come down to a Garden Party and would like to see what you missed, check out the photos from some of our recent Garden Parties on our website. More photos are being uploaded daily, so check back often. On May 31st, Sam and Davin hosted a group of 19 students and 3 teachers from Lick Wilmerding High School for some education and volunteering at Alemany Farm. They discussed the ecological and social impacts of our industrial agricultural system and prepared the students for thinking about sustainable alternatives. The students also enjoyed weeding the strawberry beds instead of using herbicides like most commercial fruit growers, and double-digging newly cleared plots to plant instead of fossil fueled tilling machinery. If you would like us to host a field trip like this for your group or class, please let us know.
As always, we encourage everyone to continue our collective civic engagement with community building efforts. Little movements can have big changes and we all benefit from one another’s good will. Until next month, have a happy June!
