Inner City Farmer

Don’t you wish the intersections in your neighborhood looked like this? If you live in the Northwest (of the country, not Austin, sadly), there’s a good chance at least one of them does. The City Repair Project, an “organized group action” that educates and inspires communities and individuals to creatively transform the places where they live, was created in Portland, Oregon in 1996 by citizen activists who wanted a more community-oriented and ecologically sustainable society. The movement and its ideals have since spread up and down the West Coast to towns like Eugene, Olympia, Seattle, Santa Monica, and Oakland.

Could Austin be next? If so, I know of a perfect intersection, Nelray and Chesterfield, which is right here in my neighborhood. A guerrilla gardener has already hit one corner of the intersection, creating this beautiful array of flowers and vegetables:

On the northwest side of the intersection sits this pleasant-looking bush, the name of which escapes me:

This was the shrub that was sporting pretty lavender flower just last week. I think it might be a Bush Germander?

Together these two corners of the intersection show the inherent natural beauty of the area, but the the two corners opposite show the present-day reality.

Nice tag on the curb, huh? The southeast corner has also been hit with a splash of graffiti:

To me, this intersection represents all that my neighborhood is (as well as could be). Instead of allowing some high-school punk to lift his leg and piss on all of our street corners, wouldn’t it be nice if we were to come together and take back our streets? A City Repair-type action is the most beautiful way of doing it I can think of. Anyone want to join me?

Yesterday evening, I was walking the dog around the block when I ran into a neighbor, Adam, who was pushing his daughter Ada in a stroller. We got to talking about a bush on the side of the road that had recently flowered but only for a couple days. All its purple petals lay on the ground, their color rapidly fading, as we spoke.

Adam made his keen interest in horticulture immediately apparent. He pointed out a plant at the edge of the dry creek bed (taro, I think it was) and informed me that it was edible. Which got me talking about the pond I hope to create in my backyard someday and the plants I hope to grow in it. Which made him think of Tony, who lived just down the road from where we were standing and who I just had to meet.

Like Adam, Tony was my kind of guy. He spoke the same language I do, peppering his sentences with references to “synergy” and “feedback loops” and “aquaculture.” He seemed especially well versed on the last, and I made it known that I wanted to hear more. He promptly led me to his backyard where he showed me his aquaculture system (some of which can be seen in the picture above). In its heyday vegetables—mostly salad greens—grew in the three bins, which held gravel and nutrient-rich water that came from an aquarium full of fish. After the vegetables purified the water, it returned to the fish tank. It was a perfect closed-loop system that grew both veggies and fish… until it got so ridiculously hot and shut down. The same thing happened to the aquaculture project at the Rhizome Collective.

The whole explanation of how it works only took a couple minutes, but it was enough to get me hooked. I now know what Project #91 is.

This Saturday, July 19th, Leah’s Friends are throwing a benefit concert at Sam’s Town Point in South Austin to help raise money to pay for a local young mother’s surgery and treatment for breast cancer. $10 at the door will not only help this brave single mom recover from a difficult time in her life, but it will also get you a healthy serving of strong local music. Paul Kemplerer, Juan Gutierrez, Susanna Van Tassel, Corrine Rose, and Rosie Flores will all be opening up for local legend Dale Watson. The music and BBQ starts at noon and ends at 6 pm at this colorful and “family-friendly” venue. For more information or to buy tickets online, please visit www.ForTheLoveOfLeah.org.

The Artists:

The Locale:

In today’s world it’s easy for an environmentalist to get frustrated and say the whole world is going to hell—Bush lifting the ban on offshore drilling immediately comes to mind. But there are places that prove that it doesn’t have to be that way. If you look hard enough, you can find little pockets of hope.

One of them is the Danish island of Samso, which acclaimed environmental author Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about in a recent New Yorker article. Since 2005, the island has produced more energy than it’s used, and most of that energy has come from renewable sources like wind turbines and heating plants that run on biomass. In less than a decade the island’s residents went from heating their houses with oil brought in by tankers to earning an international reputation for living on “the renewable-energy island.”

Another example is Kamikatsu, a small town in the hills of southeastern Japan, which prides itself on producing “Zero Waste.” Residents have to compost all their food scraps and sort the rest of their garbage into 34 different categories for recycling. The one flaw in the plan, critics point out, is that residents have to drive their recyclables to Kamikatsu’s Zero Waste Centre.

For all its talk about being a Green City, Austin has a long way to go… but, seeing the change that’s starting to take place all around the world, I remain hopeful.

With my own garden growing increasingly haggard and brown, I set off early Saturday morning in search of a little inspiration, and I found it (as well as enough veggies to feed an army) on Caswell Avenue just a mile southeast of my house. I had heard all about Suzie and John Warren’s garden; if you live in Austin and have any interest at all in gardening it would be hard not to.

Less than six months old, the garden has become something of a mecca for gardening enthusiasts. John Dromgoole, the organic gardening guru and owner of the Natural Gardener, recently filmed it for his “Backyard Basics” segment on KLRU’s Central Texas Gardener. Garden designers from the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center have stopped by to take a look. Even UT students have taken an interest; one of them took pictures of it for a photo assignment, which was judged to be the best in a class of over 400 students. It is also the first vegetable garden to be given a Green Garden Award by the City of Austin. In all, over 200 people have taken a tour of this garden, and on Saturday I joined their ranks.

What makes this garden so special? Not only is pleasant to look at, it also produces a ridiculous amount of food. Whereas so many gardens in Central Texas are now withering in the heat, the Warrens’ garden is—to use Suzie’s word—“boomin’.” For the past two and a half months, it has supplied enough vegetables to feed Suzie, her husband John, her son, his wife, two other couples in the neighborhood, and an assortment of friends. What’s their secret? How have they succeeded where so many others have failed? That’s what I was hoping to find out.

I was amused to discover that the yard where the garden sits was once riddled with lugustrums and hackberry trees, just as mine is now. With help from some of their neighbors, the Warrens chopped down all of these trees, and then sent a soil sample off to the Soil, Water and Forage Testing Laboratory at Texas A&M. They discovered that, like most lots in Central Texas, their soil was high in phosphorous but otherwise safe for gardening.

Next they had two truckloads of soil from Garden Ville dumped on their yard, which they used to make a raised bed nearly a foot high. (In retrospect, they would have preferred to have purchased the soil from the Natural Gardener as the soil from Garden Ville contained some dreaded ragweed.) To keep the garden well watered, they installed a drip irrigation system hooked up to four 75-gallon rain barrels that collect rain water off their roof. Because the rain barrels are only about two feet off the ground (see picture), they don’t always produce enough water pressure. As a remedy, local permaculture expert Dick Pierce recommended the Warrens buy a “sprinkler hose” from Breed & Co., which at such low pressure would act just like a soaker hose.

This all seemed like fairly standard operating procedure so I pressed Suzie a little harder. Her garden looked like an oasis in a desert. When I visited, it was at the peak of production. There were big, fat, round, healthy fruits and vegetables everywhere I looked, eggplants as purple and shiny as Barney’s forehead, watermelons and cantaloupes begging to be smashed and feasted upon, chard as high as my knee. Carrots? Check. Beans? Check. Only the tomatoes looked a little off because some pesky stink bugs had found them.

I pressed Suzie for the secret to her success. She suggested cottonseed meal, which they had spread liberally throughout the garden. But I knew that wasn’t it because I had done the same. Finally, after retrieving a little boom box from inside the house, she produced an answer that satisfied me: music. Since the garden’s inception in the spring, she has been playing music for her plants every day. She swears they like Wilson Pickett the best.