Three more planting beds!

As described here, Stacie made two more beds and planted in those plus another one that had been prepared by a Blitz volunteer this past Saturday. First is our front yard herb garden.

Front yard herb garden

Bearing oregano, sage, thyme, and parsley, but no rosemary…

Next is our strawberry bed, which is between the front yard and the rear garden area. We have before and after pictures. Stacie made the bed frame, and then we laid down newspaper inside of it. It was a windy day, so we had laid the house hose on top of the newspapers to keep them from blowing away while I took the picture.

The built strawberry bed

The strawberry bed, filled with dirt and plants.

The third new bed, which currently contains asparagus shoots, is right behind the evergreen tree in the above picture. It now has a bed liner, and I’ll probably add some more seedlings or sow seeds in it. (Complimentary planting is good.) You can see the back corner of one of the five planting beds in the upper left corner of the picture.

The asparagus patch

Finally, we were delighted to move in and find that raspberries were already growing here.

Raspberries

Given the total of eight planting beds we now have, I am hoping for many wonderful harvests throughout the year. I’ll measure the three new beds and have a rough estimate of total planting space up soon.

We have raised beds!

Thanks to the great work of many volunteers brought together by the Victory Garden Initiative, we now have five 8×4 foot raised planting beds in our back yard! Here’s a quick photo tour.

1) “Before” — the garden area was covered with weeds before work began today. Not pictured: the ten square yards of dirt we had brought in!

2) Planning. We figured out where the beds would be built and accordingly laid out the boards. A big pile of leaves is in the foreground.

3) People came from all over the Milwaukee area to volunteer: Bay View, Riverwest, Tosa, and South Milwaukee. Thanks to every one of you!

4) One bed done, four to go. The tall guy facing right on the right side is Zach of Blogging Blue.

5) Three beds are finished! People loaded soil into the beds. A layer of newspaper is on the bottom, with a second layer in the middle, and dirt is on top of that.

6) The beds are finished! Thank you to everyone who worked on them!!

I’ll have more written up on this in the next day or so. Huge thanks to everyone who helped — especially those whom I’ve never met before!

Big props to Stacie for making wonderful bread, dips, and sweet tea for the workers that day!

Victory Garden Initiative comes to Bay View on Saturday May 23

The Victory Garden Blitz is coming! It will be happening all throughout the county, in Shorewood, Riverwest, Tosa, and the northwest and west sides of Milwaukee, as well as our little south side enclave.

So what is it?

On Memorial Weekend, the Victory Garden Initiative and its many partners will be installing “victory gardens” throughout our great city. In the end, we should have literally dozens of gardens built up, each prepared for growing nutritious, delicious foods.

There are many ways to get involved. It starts in Bay View at Katy Kujala-Korpela’s apartment building on S. Austin Street. Folks will be meeting there at 9am, and will help get a garden set up in a neighbor’s yard, who has graciously volunteered the use of their yard as a garden for the apartment dwellers.

There are further stops at 11AM and 1PM, one of which is our place, which I’ve dubbed the Pennsylvania Avenue Yard-Farm. Please call 750-3818 and talk to Mark to find out where you cna go to help.

At my place, we will need folks who can help build raised beds (which involves lifting wooden boards) and moving a lot of soil into the newly built beds. If you’re up to it, please come; we need you!

We will be using plants bought at the Bay View Garden And Yard Society plant sale, which is happening next weekend (the 30th) at South Shore Park, as well as a few local growers and merchants.

Here’s where to find info:

http://thevictorygardeninitiative.com/

http://thevictorygardeninitiative.com/2009/05/18/how-to-volunteer-for-the-blitz/ ["How to Volunteer for the Blitz"]

Thanks!

Also: Coverage from Journal Sentinel, Shepherd Express, and WUWM. And, Mayor Barrett declared this weekend to be a Victory Garden weekend. Thanks Mr. Mayor!

And… see how our new raised beds look over here!

“Farmer Dave” on WUWM’s Lake Effect

Pinehold Gardens farm owner and Lake Effect contributor “Farmer Dave” Kozlowski is a regualr guest on WUWM’s show “Lake Effect.” You can listen to the show on the air in the Milwaukee area at 89.7 FM, or anywhere with Internets on the WUWM website.

In today’s show, Dave talks about the advantages of stocking your kitchen cabinets with homegrown foods. Having listened to it, I can say that I learned something about growing. Thanks, Dave! You too can listen in, and enjoy.

Food preservation classes at Urban Ecology Center

It turns out that food preservation classes will be taught at the Urban Ecology Center in Milwaukee’s East Side and at St. Matthew’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in Wauwatosa. Both sets of classes are sponsored by the church, the Urban Ecology Center, Braise on the Go Culinary School, Friends of Real Food, and Slow Food Wisconsin Southeast.

Here’s the PDF: 2009canning

The classes are taught by two Master Food Preservers, Annie Wegner LeFort and Jeannine Becker. Enjoy!

Lifehacker: Grow 100 lbs. of Potatoes in 4 Square Feet

I can’t vouch for the actual amount of potatoes grown through this rig that you can make in your very own yard or balcony, but I bet you dollars to doughnuts that it’s not too far off.

Lifehacker: Grow 100 lbs. of Potatoes in 4 Square Feet

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2009/04/2009-04-11_100741.png

Article from the Seattle Times

What I really like about this approach is that it requires nothing more than a saw and a screwdriver. Better still is the harvesting: you unscrew one panel, reach in, take potatoes out, screw the side back on, add some new soil and compost, and you’re good to go. Great, simple innovative little hack. If it’s anything like the tomatoes that I grew last year, I bet the flavor of these potatoes will be hard to beat.

We’ll be talking about this and other things urban ag tomorrow morning at the Anodyne Moments gathering, which happens from around 9AM till around 11. Hope to see you there!

Gardening returns to the White House lawn

Shortly after Barack Obama won election to the presidency, a movement spread across the ‘net calling on the Obama White House to have a vegetable garden on the White House lawn. That idea has been accepted and will soon become reality, according to ABC News.

Quoting that story:

“In an effort to promote healthy eating, the first family will be planting a vegetable garden right on the White House grounds.

ABC News’ Ann Compton and Sunlen Miller report that the new White House vegetable garden will be dug up and planted on the South grounds of the White House — near the fountain but out of view of the main house.

This is terrific news! It’s too bad the Obamas won’t be able to see the garden from the main house. It’s very calming to watch your garden to see how it progresses; about the only thing better is actually working in the garden and doing planting yourself. There’s really nothing like it. You get a sense of connection to something greater, e.g. life, the universe, and — yes — everything. It’s very spiritual, in other words. I’m going to have quite an adventure with a large garden in the near future, which will doubtlessly become the source of many posts on here.

Back to the ABC News story for a moment: the comments are in a way even more interesting than the story itself. Most are congrulatory and adjulate the Obamas for having the garden. A few are the token cranks, but they’re quickly piled on by the other commenters. One slightly better worded but still cranky commenter speculated that the decades of chemicals applied to make the lawn appear greener would eventually poison the Obama children. I would counter that any soil used in the garden will most likely be organic (chemical-free) soil brought in from off-site.

Update: Washington Post has a story on this:

The 1,100 square foot garden will include 55 kinds of vegetables, including peppers, spinach, and, yes, arugula. (The list of vegetables is a wishlist put together by White House chefs.) There will also be berries, herbs and two hives for honey that will be tended by a White House carpenter who is also a beekeeper. The chefs will use the produce to feed the first family and for state dinners and other official events.

The White House will be using organic seedlings, as well as organic fertilizers and organic insect repellents. The garden will be located near the tennis courts and visible to passerbys on the street. The whole Obama family will be involved in tending the garden, White House spokeswoman Katie McCormick Lelyveld said.

Nice!

Chickens in Shorewood? It could happen. And that’s a good thing.

There has been a substantial move back towards people growing their own food in recent years, a movement that has certainly spiked with the onset of the Awesome Depression. (h/t Wired.) Part of this is a move to have the ability to keep chickens, or more specifically, hens, in your yard for their eggs.  Since folks that live north of Bay View can’t get eggs or even whole chicken carcasses delivered from the Jones farm, they need a reliable way to get eggs. So why not have a hen on your property?

Many people have been asking that in recent years, which has led to a movement to overturn laws banning the keeping of chickens. Urban chicken keeping is possible, and can be done well. But before you can do it, it helps to check to see if it’s legal where you live.

Here in the Milwaukee area, it’s not. Apparently someone just called South Milwaukee’s public health administrator about having chickens. This is in  the same story about the South Milwaukee family that has a goat, the very same goat that the city (but not the family’s neighbors) wants to get rid of. (Note to South Milwaukee: approve a variance for this goat. That doesn’t mean everybody can, or will, get one.)

Meanwhile, up in Shorewood, work is progressing on having the law banning the keeping of hens repealed. The “chicken ordinance” will be a topic of discussion with the village board tomorrow, Monday 2 March, at 7pm at the Shorewood Village Hall. If you’re interested in being able to keep these quiet, friendly animals that produce food and wonderful compost, I encourage you to show up. As one of the supporters of the move wrote, “All the leg work is done, the proposal suggested, the
research complete, we just need to show that this is more than a
novelty and that many people are in fact in support of this
ordinance.”

Skeptics in the crowd will surely be thinking, “Oh, so what, anybody that wants to can just have chickens then? Don’t they crow and caw and make tons of noise? Aren’t they a health threat?”

In short, no. That said, it’s not for everyone, and if you’re not going to be around to take care of the animals, don’t do it. But there are more people than you would think who are interested in growing their own food, whether it be cucumbers or chickens.

Will Allen of Growing Power to speak at UT-Austin, Yale

Will Allen of Growing Power, winner of the 2008 MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant,” is off to a great start this year. Here’s a press release from Growing Power:

Milwaukee – Feb. 9, 2009 – This will be a busy weekend for Will Allen, founder and CEO of Milwaukee’s Growing Power Inc. On Friday, Feb. 13, at the invitation of President Bill Clinton, Allen will share the dais at the University of Texas at Austin with, among others, actress Drew Barrymore, for a panel discussion titled “The Future of Food.” In the audience will be 1,000 college students and 200 university presidents and chancellors from institutions across the nation.

After that session, Allen will jet home just in time to turn around and visit Yale University in New Haven, Conn., for a special address Monday to the faculty, students and guests of the Yale Sustainable Food Project.

The Austin conference is billed as a special plenary session of the Clinton Global Initiative, which is sponsored by the Clinton Foundation. Allen and others will address issues of food security and food justice in a world threatened by economic and political upheaval, global warming, overpopulation and outmoded food policies.

The moderator for the discussion is Raj Shah, the director of agricultural development for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Other panelists include Barrymore, who has been named an Ambassador Against Hunger to the U.N. World Food Programme; Emma Clipinger, a student at Brown University; Peter McPherson, president of the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges; and film director Morgan Spurlock.

The Yale Sustainable Food Project directs programs that “support exploration and academic inquiry related to food and agriculture,” and also manages a sustainable dining program and an organic farm on the Yale campus.

“It’s pretty clear that food, pure and simple, is not being taken for granted anymore,” Allen said. “Conferences like these, sponsored by some of the most important institutions in the world, suggest it has finally sunk in: We need to address hunger as a global threat.”

Growing Power Inc. is a national non-profit and land trust that operates community food centers in Milwaukee and Chicago and provides training in urban agriculture around the world. Allen is the winner of a 2008 McArthur Foundation “Genius Grant.”

CONTACT:

Jim Price, Growing Power Inc.
jim@growingpower.org
(414) 531–3395

Will Allen’s are spreading fast, be it at a Milwaukee school with an aquaculture system in its greenhouse, to the new fish farm going in at a former industrial site on the south side. We will all benefit from his work in the end.

Victory gardens springing up in Milwaukee, around the country

Most folks have heard of victory gardens in the context of the First of Second World War. But ever-rising food prices and legitimate concerns about the safety of commercial food has spurred many people in this country and around the world to start victory gardens anew. Up in Shorewood, Wisc., the Victory Garden Initiative is dedicated to helping people start their own victory gardens in their back yards. And front yards. Because, really, who needs grass?

Here on Milwauke’s south side, the Anodyne Moments [Facebook link] group is rapidly gaining momentum, and we have begun talking with a few church ministers about planting gardens on their grounds, or even on their roofs. Book of Matthew, anyone?