Growing veggies when the economy goes to hell

This morning I read an article in our national paper on Greece. Yes, they’re throwing firebombs at one another and protesting up and down in Athens but — one woman’s quiet voice made itself heard. From her balcony. Where she’s started growing veggies outside her parents apartment to feed the family.

Her plan is to expand her patch of lettuce, carrots, onions, coriander and spinach from the balcony to the roof in due course. The way things are heading in Greece many more will have to do something similar to make ends meet.

And Greece is just one country. Admittedly it’s well and truly in the news but it’s far from being alone when it comes to people having to face facts. That food is expensive. That money is short. And that growing your own food is the only rational way of helping to make ends meet when the housekeeping budget goes the way of the national budget.

The article (sorry it’s in Swedish) also describes how a local organization called something like “Gardens in the City” is involved in helping people get started. As we all know, there’s usually a ton of trial and error before your first carrots look like the ones on the seed packet, but once you get the hang of it it’s all astonishingly easy.

Which is where we have to help one another out. Gardeners who “can” help gardeners who want to learn. Generation to generation, neighbor to neighbor. I know I’m an optimist but this is hardly rocket science. And we all, deep down, want things to be good. At least that’s what I believe.

Now this article doesn’t say a word about Bokashi. Chances are they don’t even know about it yet. But it’s the obvious missing link and in due course things will fall into place.

Meanwhile the most important thing is to get the first little salad patch going on every balcony and every rooftop. In Greece and everywhere else. And then give your neighbor a hand with theirs…

Bio-bags. Dead easy and a great way to do Bokashi.

I keep talking about bio-bags. And to be honest I’m not completely sure what they’re called in different countries. But they are basically these — a roll of bags that work just like plastic bags but that are made from corn starch. Organic in other words, and they will break down in the soil.

We use them here in our Swedish “green bucket” system. The bucket itself is a super standard plastic bucket with tight fitting lid. You can whatever you have handy as long as it fits the bill. Pizzerias and bakeries usually throw out tons of similar buckets. Not necessarily green, but white will work just as well

Step one is to put the bag in the bucket just as you would a normal rubbish bag. Then put in some newspaper to take up the liquid that the food waste will produce. You’ll learn pretty quickly how much you need, I usually tear the local paper in two and just plonk it in. If you have wood pellets, hay pellets, cat litter or anything like that on hand you could test it. Anything will work as long it’s cheap and easy to get hold of, will absorb a lot of liquid and you’re happy about having it in your soil.

A sprinkle of Bokashi bran on top of the newspaper layer then you’re ready to tip in your days food waste. Just as you would with any other bucket. A little more bran, some extra paper if it looked like it’s going to be wet. Serviettes are ideal if you use them at home. Otherwise kitchen paper, egg cartons, dry bread. You’ll get the hang of it soon enough.

How much paper (or whatever) you use will depend partly on how wet your food waste is and partly on how long you plan to store your biobag. Let the food drain as much as possible before you put it in and you’ll save yourself some trouble. If your bag is going to wait a few months before going into the soil I’d say be a bit generous on the absorbent front. Food waste just goes on getting wetter as time goes on (unless you have it frozen out in the snow, but one day it’s still going to thaw). The quality won’t be particularly better or worse if it’s wet or dry but there will be a big difference in the smell. Wet = smelly. No way round it. So aim for damp or dryish if you can. It’s usually worth squeezing in an extra section of newspaper before you tie up the bag.

Final step: tie a good tight knot in the bag and carry it out to your storage spot. The bag will still need to ferment in a warm spot for a couple of weeks, just as in any other bucket. But the advantage is you don’t have to clean out the original bucket. In fact, you only really need the one bucket as you can remove the bag as soon as it’s full and use the same bucket again and again.

What you’ll need to think about:
- That the bio-bags you use are good and thick. We’ve tested a lot here and many are extremely flimsy. They will drive you nuts. The thick bio-bags will take time to break down in the soil (4 to 6 months even), but you can hack them up with a spade when you “plant them” to speed things up. At least you know they are organic so you don’t have to worry about getting plastic in your soil.
- That you have somewhere warm enough to store them for a couple of weeks. 20 degrees C is about right, depends of course where you live. Room temperature in other words. It can work in a coldish cellar but you’d want to make sure the bucket got going properly in the kitchen before it hit the cellar.
- That the bags are airtight — knotted tightly or with a good tight clip on. They are your “bucket” and the microbes just don’t like a lot of fresh air at this stage.
- That you have somewhere to store the “ready” bio-bags if you’re keeping them till spring or storing for someone else to carry away. One option is to load them into  black plastic rubbish bags, another is to keep them in plastic barrels or bins. Whatever, as long as it works for you.

I wrote a bit in the previous blog about how we collect Bokashi bags from a pre-school and an office building. It’s honestly so extremely easy once you get going. And the bio-bags do make it easy on a lot of fronts.

The three main advantages I can see are that…
- the process is a lot cleaner, especially valuable in an office environment where no-one wants to do the icky sticky stuff.
- it’s easy to hand over the bags to someone else for their garden. They don’t even have to see what you had for lunch!
- it’s easy to store the bags as long as you need until spring comes or you have some time to do some gardening.
and four,  it’s easy just to plonk a couple of bags in the wheelbarrow when you have a garden project on the go and plant the whole bag in the right hole in the right spot. You don’t have to deal with all your bags at the same time, just use them up gradually as you need some fertilizer in the garden.

So the way we see it, this opens up a lot of possibilities for the future. The key to making this whole Bokashi thing happen is that it has to be easy. Preferably nice and clean and preferably without a lot of digging involved.

So we’ll keep inventing things till we find the path of least resistance. Then it will be easy for everyone to start getting their food waste back into the ground and getting us back on track so we can grow the food we need in the future.

Growing up the wall in Jerusalem

Cool idea isn’t it? Tomatoes growing up the wall. Veggies growing in pyramids.

This high-school in Hod-Ha’Sharon makes research on agriculture which can be done by people in their apartments, balconies, walls or roofs.
They also study how to re-use and recycle water.

They test whether tomatoes can grow in bags on the wall or whether it is possible to cultivate plants in triangle-shaped pyramids, made from soil in plastic foils.
This method advantage is that the ground area can multiply in 3 times the number of plants growing comparing to conventional flat bed.

Given that most people in the world live in dense urban environments this is the way to go. How can we feed a growing world population? My guess is that the first thing is to learn how to “produce” soil and then find a whole lot of creative new ways of using it so we can grow on whatever spaces we have available.

Here we’re testing the idea of producing soil and growing in bread crates. It’s looking promising at this stage! 10 bread crates stacked on a wooden pallet (2 stacks of five shallow crates). Make soil in the lower crates (Bokashi and potting mix) and grow herbs and salad in the top ones. You maybe don’t grow so incredibly much food but it’s looking like a small family could take care of all their own food waste on a space no bigger than a pallet. On asphalt or a sunny corner at the back of an apartment building.

Love to hear your ideas! There are probably many crazy ideas worth testing — who knows, some of them may be what our children’s children end up using to grow their own food. It would be nice to think we’ve helped make it happen.

Read the article here>>

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Save the bees!

Some of our best friends are bees. (And worms!) But we’re losing them, faster than many of us realised.

So I signed a petition in the weekend, along with a half million others. Let’s save the bees!

It’s all about chemicals. Getting them out of our food chain and getting the bees back in. If enough voices are raised our governments will hopefully act to ban the chemicals that are doing the damage. Here’s the message from Avaaz, the guys trying to get the movement off the ground. (Read on to the end and there’s a list of links to articles and other info on the situation).

Bees are dying off worldwide and our entire food chain is in peril. Scientists blame toxic pesticides and four European governments have already banned them.

Silently, billions of bees are dying off and our entire food chain is in danger. Bees don’t just make honey, they are a giant, humble workforce, pollinating 90% of the plants we grow.

Multiple scientific studies blame one group of toxic pesticides for their rapid demise, and some bee populations are recovering in countries where these products have been banned. But powerful chemical companies are lobbying hard to keep selling these poisons. Our best chance to save bees now is to push the US and EU to join the ban — their action is critical and will have a ripple effect on the rest of the world.

We have no time to lose — the debate is raging about what to do. This is not just about saving bees, this is about survival. Let’s build a giant global buzz calling for the EU and US to outlaw these killer chemicals and save our bees and our food. Sign the emergency petition now, and send it on to everyone and we’ll deliver it to key decision makers:

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/save_the_bees/?vl

MORE INFORMATION

Bee decline could be down to chemical cocktail interfering with brains
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jun/22/chemicals-bees-decline-major-study?INTCMP=SRCH

Bee briefing
http://www.soilassociation.org/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=RXLEm9WXrHk%3D&tabid=439

$15 Billion Bee Murder Mystery Deepens
http://www.businessinsider.com/colony-collapse-disorder-still-unsolved-lead-researcher-had-connections-to-bayer-2010-10

“Nicotine Bees” Population Restored With Neonicotinoids Ban
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/05/nicotine-bees-population-restored-with-neonicotinoids-ban.php

EPA memo reveals concern that pesticide causes bee deaths
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/green/detail?entry_id=79910

Beekeepers want government to pull pesticide
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/money/beekeepers-want-government-to-pull-pesticide-1107701.html

Bees in freefall as study shows sharp US decline
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jan/03/bumblebees-study-us-decline?INTCMP=SRCH

Pesticide industry involvement in EU risk assessment puts survival of bees at stake
http://www.corporateeurope.org/agribusiness/news/2010/11/16/pesticide-industry-future-bees

How do we feed a growing world population?

It’s a good question. So, how do we?

If the chemical companies could decide the solution would of course be easy. Which is of course the angle here on this poster. According to them…

We can grow more using less water and land through technologies that unlock the potential of plants. These include drought-tolerant seed varieties, products that enhance plant performance and products that protect against insects, diseases and weeds.

Scary if you ask me.

How about we just start looking after our soil properly? Put everything back into the soil that we possibly can, find smart new ways of hanging onto nutrition so it’s not lost from the food chain, cool ways of working in our local communities so we can grow more food locally in the space we have using the resources we’ve already got on hand.

More common sense and less chemicals would be a good start. And Bokashi is definitely on the common sense side of the balance sheet. We just have to find ways of getting it all moving faster, so we really can feed this growing world population.

In time. Without taking scary shortcuts.