Dayshots: Catalina Island Aquaponics and Poppies

I spent a couple of days at the Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies in March. On this visit, I got to check out the new(-ish) aquaponics system in the greenhouse. 

These goldfish shall be switched out for tilapia at some point.



We ate that head of lettuce for dinner. It was glorious. 

Such pretty roots.

The sun was strong in the green house. 

Rainwater catchment and filtration system. 

I took a stroll in the hills surrounding campus and noticed island poppies for the first time.

They were a pleasure to see after a disappointing bloom at the Antelope Valley Poppy Preserve.

Didn't get in the water very much on this trip, but did walk down the ramp for a quick dip before getting on the boat back to the mainland. I dream of a writing residency on the island someday.

Easy Ways to Save Water for Your Garden

Courtesy junior partner

Keep a bucket in the shower. Or a big pot.

• Place the bucket in an area that can catch the water that isn't used--avoid collecting soapy water, though it shouldn't be harmful if you get a bit in, especially if you use natural soaps. You can save this water for your indoor plants since the salvaged water from the kitchen may breed gnats or unpleasant odors.

Keep an airtight jug by the kitchen sink.

• Capture water (sans soap) from rinsing out your coffee cup, carafe, filter, french press (after you compost the coffee grounds). Plants love diluted coffee water and coffee grounds.
• Keep water from blanching vegetables, cooking pasta, and washing rice. If you use enriched rice, there might be even more goodies going into your plants. Who needs Miracle Gro?

I easily keep my indoor and outdoor plants happy with just salvaged water. Of course, the best thing to do is to use as little water as possible in the first place, so I'm experimenting with sub-irrigation for gardening with a reduced water supply.

Another Reason to Garden in Los Angeles: Saving Water

When I first started gardening last year, I worried about whether it was right to expend all this water trying to grow things, especially considering Los Angeles' complicated history (and present) with water. I didn't want to be wasteful, or ultimately do more harm than good.

In an effort to assuage my conscience, I started to save water run off from my showers, washing rice, rinsing out my coffee mug and french press, from as many non-toxic water uses as possible and using that to water my garden instead. Admittedly, things have gotten a little grimy in my household, for which I will be eternally grateful to my roommate for tolerating. I guess the conservation is also an exercise in figuring out how to do things neatly as well. I have a tendency to allow my habitat to start looking like a zoo.

I store the salvaged kitchen water in these plastic orange juice bottles. I drilled holes in the caps, creating a makeshift watering can to avoid crushing delicate sproutlings. After about 8-10 months of use, the plastic eventually cracks, unfortunately, but at least their use got stretched a little bit. Eventually, I remembered how my family always had white five-gallon buckets around that once held various doughnut batters and fillings, and I asked politely for one from a beloved neighborhood donut shop. I use this bucket to capture water from my shower that otherwise just drains off into our municipal system-- perfectly good water that I waste by running the shower until it gets warm. Seeing how quickly the bucket filled up during this pretty typical routine has me considering taking bucket-baths as I did when I was growing up. (I distinctly remember the feeling of switching to showers and getting a thrill from the feeling of assimilation. Now, I want to turn back.)

Wanna learn to keep chickens? // Earth Day South LA April 14

I blogged about the 2nd Annual Earth Day South LA in 2010 with great excitement (because I love this earth, it is so good to me), but this is my first year actually volunteering and attending the event.

Earth Day South LA
Saturday, April 14, 2012
11am to 4pm 

Normandie Avenue Elementary School
4505 S. Raymond Ave, LA, CA 90037
At the corner of Normandie and Vernon 

This event is FREE! Suggested Donation $5+
*No one turned away for lack of funds

Last weekend, I joined CSU with other volunteers to pound pavement to spread the word to the community surrounding Normandie Elementary where the festival will take place. This meant knocking on doors, talking to business owners, approaching anyone we saw on the street, and handing out the beautiful Earth Day flyers. I learned to invite people to the event in Spanish (very rudimentarily), which was great. It reminded me that I told myself to take a Spanish class a couple of years ago and never did.

Fashion District Developer Seeks Rooftop Gardening Restauranteur

I saw an ad soliciting a restaurant & urban garden operation and wrote to the solicitor looking to find out more. My note is below.

11 January 2012 

Hello Mr. Aryeh,
I recently noticed your post looking for a farm/restaurant in your building: http://www.cityfarmer.info/2012/01/09/wanted-farmers-to-farm-a-rooftop-in-los-angeles/. I'm a community member and casual blogger with a keen interest in gardening and public space, so this post really caught my attention. 

First of all, it's wonderful that you're encouraging this kind of venture-- it makes so much sense in Los Angeles to have green rooftop space, considering how our weather is suitable for growing so many things year round. I wonder whether the owners would be interested in the idea of opening the garden to the community? Perhaps providing allotments for a small yearly fee to residents in the nearby buildings? Urban gardening has really gained momentum in these last few years, so it's a great time to start a project like this.  

I look forward to hearing from you! 

Best,
Narinda

So far, no response. Understandable. I wonder how long it will take for our sunny Los Angeles catch on to the rooftop gardening movement that's already happening in other urban areas. Does Los Angeles building code have more lax requirements for how strong a rooftop must be than New York City? When I visited LA Community Action Network's rooftop garden, that seemed to be one of the bigger concerns.

Having a restaurant tenant might be more profitable in dollars than having a community garden, especially considering liability issues, but building goodwill in a community is an important endeavor that doesn't seem to get much attention anymore-- at least not until there's money to be made. This is a sad thing. (This is a general feeling that I can't pin on this particular development because I know little about the operation or building owners, but it is the sense that I get from my own and others' observations about what has been happening in Downtown LA for the last decade.)

600 Jobs vs. 350 Families // South Central Farm News

Last November, LA's City Council voted 12-0 to allow the development of industrial warehouses at 41st & Alameda, breaking its promise to the community that any new development would include 2.6 acres of green space. I learned this after I stumbled across the 30-minute documentary Save The Farm, the story of the South Central Farmers and their fight to keep the 14 acres of land that was the largest community garden in the United States.

From 1992 to 2006, the 14 acres of South Central Farm looked like this:

Courtesy Mitch Glaser

Since the Farmers were evicted in 2006, it has looked like this:

From Google Maps

When I saw the footage of bulldozers razing the farm, pushing down fruit trees and destroying acres of crops, I cried. Watching that destruction, that waste, that disregard for the community, the brutality of the police breaking the picket line, hurt. The pain of the people who had worked that land for a dozen years was very real to me. From my own tiny parking lot garden, I've learned how much it means to coax fertility from unwelcoming ground. Furthermore, I have relationships with my neighbors that come from being out there watering and digging, and probably connections that I'm not even aware of-- a few weeks ago, three big plastic pots half-filled with dirt appeared in front of my door. I thought my roommate had brought them, only to find out from another neighbor that someone a few doors down had left them for me upon moving out. 

So it is hard to think of industrial development as having more real, lasting public good than a parcel of land where people grow things. The 600 jobs that come to the community also come with more traffic from trucks and commuters, adding pollution to to the area. Is "600 hundred jobs" really so much better than "350 families farming"? 

In the same month in which the USDA reported a record number of people receiving food stamps, LA City Council missed an opportunity to declare that a place to grow food and community is more important than a place to conduct commerce. Factories and warehouses close and decay when they are no longer profitable or useful to the owners. Poof, jobs--gone. A community garden will last as long as there are hungry people willing to tend it. LA once had the largest community garden in the nation and proved itself once again to be a city with no qualms about destroying what it has built. 

I look at the urban gardening movement in Detroit and in the world, and I look at empty lot after empty lot in Los Angeles, corralled by chain-link fences and occupied only by trash and weeds. I wonder what might grow there. I wonder how much more concrete will be poured, how much more asphalt will be spread, before we realize what a woman in the feature-length documentary The Garden said: Try planting on cement. You'll get nothing. 

Screenshot from The Garden

"It's a pretty simple idea-- land, people, food. Happy days." - Doris Bloch

If only modern politics were that simple. I've joined the South Central Farmers' email list to try to stay updated. Please share any further information around this issue. 

Gardening Schemes with Colorish Dreams // 1st&3rd Tuesday Night Cafe

My friend A'misa (artist, writer, and creator of Colorish Dreams) and I have been sharing our growing dreams and schemes-- from future claimed public spaces to throwing all sorts of seeds into the moist earth to see if they grow. She and her mother have been incredibly successful with their saved seeds. Particularly cantaloupe seeds.

baby melons

She gave me this little pot of half a dozen seedlings (which I have no idea where to plant), and has a bunch more that she's trying to find homes for. We're on the lookout for a good spot for a guerrilla melon patch.

As for me, I have at least four dozen chamomile sprouts that I foolishly sowed into an egg carton. I have plans for places to plant them, but I doubt I'm going to find enough homes for them. They don't take much care, though, once they get established, and apparently even flourish with a little bit of neglect.

just-sprouting chamomile 

So we're going to bring our extra seeds and little seedlings to the next Tuesday Night Cafe and share them with any takers. I'm sure there are seed bartering/exchanging events around LA, through the Seed Library of Los Angeles and the like, but it's always nice to be able to incorporate new things with old stand-bys. And, there's going to be music, poetry, live art, vendors, and general community goodness at TNC. So why not add some living green things, too? Not sure where we're going to put them, but we'll figure it out.

Guerilla plant exchange/giveaway
1st&3rd Tuesday Night Cafe
Aratani Courtyard
120 Judge John Aiso St, 90012
Show starts at 7:30 so come by at around 7:00 to check out what plants make it to Little Tokyo.

Getting Dirty in Public // LA Urban Gardening

Before

I've decided to claim this little patch of dry, uninviting soil near my apartment. The weeds have died away, which means there's probably not a lot of nutrition in the soil right now considering how much rain we had the week before I took these pictures. That's going to change. I'm starting by putting my vegetable peels and trimmings in the ground. Sure, I could attempt to maintain a real compost heap and then amend the soil with that, but the energy expenditure it takes just doesn't make sense with limited space, time, and raw material I have. And I figure that the moisture from the raw vegetation will be good for the soil, anyway. 

First trench

After receiving a bounty of vegetable trimmings to add to my own healthy supply (which I keep in the fridge in marked containers to prevent strange and terrible odors from accumulating in the kitchen), I took to the streets. To this corner. I dug a couple of trenches with my favorite gardening tool, spread out the veg, and buried the goods.

Get Free Mulch! // LA Urban Gardening

Do you garden? Do you want to start one but find that your soil is mostly clay and dries up and cracks? Mulch is the answer. 

And you can get it for free in ten different locations in LA on Fridays! AND you can get free compost on Thursdays. 

The City of Los Angeles Sanitation Bureau runs a program that's Closing The Loop, taking green waste and turning it into mulch and compost which can be picked up at these locations: