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I have now presented my poster to the class about my window farm. Thanks to everyone that stopped by to learn about window farming. Showing my window farm to people gives me an opportunity to educate others about creative gardening and producing/buying local organic food.
I was asked many times today about what I was going to do with window garden now that the class project is over. My garden will live on so do not worry. My window farm will be moving with me to a Boy Scout summer camp that I run. There it will hang in a window in the dinning hall. With this prime location I will have around 1500 people walk by it during the summer and I am sure that many of them will stop to take a look.
The possibility of having 1500 people learn about local food is an exciting idea that I cannot turn down. Exceptionally sense most of that 1500 will be middle school kids. Teaching kids at a young age is the easiest way to make meaning life changes.
And after camp the garden is moving with me to Chicago where I hope to expand it.
I hope that many of you are think about making your own window garden, and if you do please let me know. Here are a few things that I have learned from making my own can could help you.
First, herbs are the best to plant in a window garden because many of them do not grow to big. This style of gardening is not good for large plants. Also herbs allow you to continually harvest them without completely killing the plant.
Second, do forget to water them. The bottles themselves are not very big and with that they cannot store a lot of water. I have to water my garden every two days or it will quickly dry out. I learned this the hard way and my lettuce has not fully recovered from it yet.
Last, come up with a design of your own. You could simply build one close to mine or you could be creative. Being creative with your garden makes this project such a fun to do. A good friend of mine is now making one out of old sections of plastic plumbing of different sizes. Some of the pipes even have right angles in them so he can be even more creative with the design. He is planting wild flowers in his.
Over all this has been a fantastic project. I have truly enjoyed designing and building my garden and learning about environmental issues at the same time in class.
As many of you heard during my poster presentation I was unable to get a garden started at my targeted school. I explained that the reason for this was that this particular school is dealing with budget cuts, like all over public schools in the state, and they are trying to consolidate with another school in the area. For these reasons the topic of a school garden was not something they were ready to discuss this year at least. Hopefully with the few people I have discussed this idea with, they can reintroduce the school garden ideas in the years to come.
I have learned a lot during this semester about the way we look at food as a nation. We are successfully eating ourselves to death by eating this cheap food that comes from our overproduction of crops. If we take away some of the corn fields and replace them with vegetable fields or fruit orchards we would eat better food and not be so dependent on other nations for our fruits and vegetables. I feel if more people knew the facts about our food system and how little our government is doing to help they would be willing to start a true food revolution.
With all this information I have learned I the need to share it with my family and friends. Also I would like to continue researching and working towards getting more edible schoolyards in our state. If we can teach student to do geometry and chemistry we can teach them how to grow, cook, and eat healthy safe food. As Joel Salatin said in Food, Inc., imagine if we measured success by having less people going to the hospital this year than the year before, that is a noble goal. Shouldn’t that be our goal?
Here is all the information from my poster if anyone is interested:
The Problem:
The US Food System:
The way we eat food in this country has changed drastically in the last 50 years. We can now grow 200 bushel per acre when we could only grow 20 a hundred years ago. This is due to genetically modifying seeds as well as pesticides and herbicides.
We can now also “grow” chickens twice as fast as 50 years ago. And since white meat is what is in demand chickens now grow with larger breasts, so large in fact they can’t take more than 2 or 3 steps with out plopping down. With pork and ground beef we can feed them subsides corn very cheap which makes them fat and the meat prices go down. The average American eats 200lbs of meat a year. And a few companies control the beef, pork, and poultry industries. Four companies control 80% of the beef market. Tyson is the largest meat company in the world.
As a result of feeding cows corn a harmful strain of E coli has developed. Studies show that if a corn fed cow is allowed to eat grass for 5 days they can lose 80% of the E coli in their stomachs. But this is not done, they find new ways to “wash” the meat with chlorine to kill the E coli. So we get cheap beef from corn fed cows. Now the more than 12,000 McDonald’s and 7,500 Burger Kings can sell food extremely cheap which then leads to health problems.
The biggest predictor of obesity is income level. Today, 10% of income spent of food in the US, half the amount that was spent 50 years ago. More than sixty-six percent of all Americans are considered overweight, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (Body Mass Index over 25 = obese). One in three children born in the 2000s will have early onset diabetes, 1 out of 2 in minority children. Twenty-five years ago, the average American consumed about 1,850 calories each day, now over 2,150.
What is the government doing?
Between 1995 and 2004 the US government paid $144 billion in agriculture subsidies. So they are spending money on agriculture practices that produce surplus grain that we feed to cows that could make us sick. If a plant is sending out contaminated products whether it is E coli or salmonella, the FDA does not have the right to shut them down, even if they repeatedly make people sick.
The government also gave companies the right to patent seeds, which is essentially patenting life. Over 90% of the soybeans grown in the US are Monsanto soybeans, which contain a patented gene. In 1996, it was only 2%. Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, was a Monsanto attorney. He also helped with the passing of the bill that said a company could patent a seed. Now if a farmer plants his own, non-Monsanto seeds, and those crops become pollinated by his neighbors Monsanto seeds, Monsanto can sure him for seed stealing. And Monsanto has millions of dollars and powerful attorney’s and more often than not win these battles or force the farmers to settle out of court. They then can blacklist the farm from using their products, which are basically the only products left to buy in the market. So they take his money in court then his livelihood by not allowing him to purchase seeds needed to farm.
Both the Bush and Clinton administrations had close ties to Monsanto, whether it was donations or former high up employees. Our government is filled with those who used to work for companies which they now should be regulating.
The Solution:
Edible Schoolyards
In 1995 chef Alice Walker had the same idea and applied it in Berkley, California. As she walked past the same school everyday she began to think it was abandoned, the principle of this school then asked her to come and try a garden there. Two years later most of the asphalt was gone and in it’s place there was green. It was at King Middle School in Berkeley that the first Edible Schoolyard (ESY) was started, on one acre or land. Middle school students were not only taught about gardening but about history behind gardening and the science of cooking food. In the early years of this project there were after school cooking classes as well as cooking meals twice a month for their class. A summer class was offered in the Edible Schoolyard. From interviews you will find that the kids in this school want to take this class. They also find they like the food that is being made with fresh, organic produce that they themselves labored for.
ESY NOLA
Edible Schoolyard New Orleans, was created using the original schoolyard in Berkely, CA. ESY NOLA came about after Hurricane Katrina. The students at two public schools, Kindergarten – 8th grade, learn cooking and gardening by hands on weekly classes. The foods cooked there are specifically meant to teach the traditional style of New Orleans.
REAL School Gardens
REAL School Gardens based in Fort Worth, Texas, serves more than 40,000 children and 2,300 educators in 66 North Texas schools and 15,000 more teachers and students in the San Francisco area. REAL stands for The Rainwater Environmental Alliance for Learning. Their website states “Our goals are to create safe outdoor spaces to engage young children, to use nature to enhance student learning, encourage family and community involvement in schools, and to create vibrant, sharing networks of educators and partners who commit to putting school gardens at the heart of urban neighborhoods.” Founded in 1996 REAL gardens not only teach students how to grow and eat healthy foods, it helps build a since of community with the families of the students as well as the community.
Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution:
Jamie Oliver is a well known British chef who, at age 34, has done some pretty remarkable things. Jamie was born in England and started working with food at a young age at his father’s pub. At age 16 went to Westminster Catering College and spent time in Frances honing his culinary skills. After working under many chefs his first big brake was a TV series where he was known as The Naked Chef. Oliver then channeled his fame and cooking skills into working for the greater good. In 2005 Jamie made a four part documentary called Jamie’s School Dinner’s where he worked to improve the quality of Britain’s school lunches. This was part of a larger program in the UK called Feed Me Better. This program was successful in getting government money to improve school kitchens, more culinary lessons for cooks, and overall better school lunches. Oliver is very passionate about food and about teaching kids where it comes from and getting them to cook and love fresh nutritious food.
Now he is taking on America. His television show Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution takes him to Huntington, West Virginia to try and change with way this town eats and he focuses on school meals. The series is over now but he had some success in changing the way that community looks at food.
The Project:
Bern, KS
This small community would be ideal for a edible schoolyard project. It is a small farming community and there is no shortage of land for this project. I have spoke with some members of the community who show interest in this project. Since the other schoolyards I have researched are in warmer climates there would need to be activities to fill up the fall and winter that would have to do with the garden. Students could then learn about preserving food and cooking with the preserved food. Also they could research fruits and vegetables they are interested in growing and then be able to plant them in the spring. This is a basic outline of what this project would entail.
The cons to this project is that it is a farming community and they could show resistance to organic farming practices. Budgets are another con, this school is in the process of consolidating with another school in the area. This is because of state budget cuts and that takes up the majority of there meetings. They do not have a lot of time to think about projects like this. The seed has been planted in the minds of the community now, hopefully in the next year this idea will build steam and hopefully we will see a garden in the Bern, KS school in the next few years.
This last weekend my window garden took a turn for the worse. I had to be out of town to finalize some post graduation plans in Chicago, where I am moving to, and while I was out of town my garden did not get watered. The red lettuce and chives both are not looking so well, but I believe that they will pull through. I have always had plants growing in my room and have seen them look worse then this before and they have always came back. I am hoping that this happens this time as well.
This does bring up a problem with my design of a window garden. The amount of soil in each bottle is small and therefore the amount of water it can hold is small as well. This means that I have to keep up with the watering or the plants will quickly die. I have been watering every other day or so, but over the weekend they went four days with out water. Just these four days made the plants look sick.
The window farming website does have some plans for building an automated watering system for those who are to busy to water everyday.
Also my last post I talked about a new question that I had come up with. I wanted to know how many trees would I have to plant to cancel out my CO2 emissions. That way I could eliminate all my CO2 emissions and be carbon neutral. Here is what I have found from reliable sources.
The average person in the United States emits 10,185lb of CO2 per year. (International Energy Agency 2009) And a tree absorbs on average 48lb of CO2 per year. (U. S. Department of Energy 2008) Which means I would have to plant 212.2 trees, a huge number but doable at the same time. Please note: This is rough average calculation with many variables not taken in to account and this is also for only one green house gas. With that said this still shows an interesting solution.
I find this to be a fun idea to play with in my head, trying to figure out if this is truly doable.
One last thing, last week I had an unexpected surprise come out of my garden. In with my red lettuce I had a foreign plant start to grow. After it got large enough I was able to identify it as a sunflower. A seed must have gotten mixed in with the potting soil. A sunflower is way to big to grow in a bottle, so I am trying to decide what to do with it. This is one of the things that I love about gardening. You never know what is going to happen.
It has taken me longer to wrap up these blogs than my initial game plan was (oops!). Things have been just a smidge insane but here it goes.
If I have learned anything over the course of this project it would be that reducing my food consumption is really difficult! I hadn’t realized how much I eat and, consequently, how much I also waste.
I like that I have come to a more full understanding and appreciation of the food I choose to eat and the importance of the time I take to eat it. Food is, obviously, an important part of all of our lives. It’s really unfortunate that for the most part people have lost a lot of consideration for what they put inside of their bodies. We need food to keep us alive and healthy.
Since coming to college I have noticed more and more that most of the foods that I do consume are of the overly processed and packaged variety. While this is cheap and convenient, it’s not really ideal. From the information I have gained through our readings and class discussions, other people’s blogs, and my own research I have a new outlook on the foods I want to put into my body.
Over the course of this project I had to sit out a few social events on account of my friends heading down to Aggieville to grab dinner, but other than that I don’t really feel like I “missed out” on anything too dramatic. I feel like I have gained way more—both financially and for my overall health. I have opted to try and find more responsible alternatives to many of the things I enjoy—for example fair trade coffee and tea. I have been doing some research on farmer’s markets that I would also like to start visiting.
I will most defiantly continue trying to keep my food consumption and waste under control. I have talked to my family about plotting out a garden in our backyard and I know that my grandparents have been working hard getting tomatoes and some herbs ready. I’m excited to be home this summer and further my food reduction and pass on my knowledge to my family.
I think that this project has been helpful in just making me more aware of things and figuring out what I can do individually to find solutions that are best suited for my lifestyle.
This is my farewell blog. Earlier in the year, I talked about an elderly woman who lived behind me, who I had met because she saw me over in my yard planting plants. Well the other day I was outside getting something out of my car and she stopped me and said she had a paper of mine that had blown out of my yard and in to hers, she had seen my name on it and remembered me from the day we had spoken. We got to talking and soon enough I learned that she was taking care of her son who is going to die any day of pancreatic cancer. I told her if she needed anything to let me know and we parted ways. I’ve had a lot of people who have been close to me die from cancer, including my Grandma Jeanie, who I was unbelievably close to. I know the helpless feeling and to watch your son go has to be nearly unbearable. I got home and decided to cook some dinner for her and her son. My father had been doing this since I was a child, if someone had a problem he always brought them his famous rigatonis.
So I looked through my cabinets and decided to make some potatoes, give her a vegetable tray my Grandma had given me that was left over from Easter, a loaf of fresh bread, and some bow tie pasta with homeade red sauce. I cooked everything and carried it across the alley over to her yard. Needless to say, it was an emotional visit to her house. As an elderly woman on the college side of town, she doesn’t get a lot of respect from the people around her. She just kept thanking me and we ended the visit with a hug.
This is a prime example of why I love gardening and farming. I would have never met our neighbor if I would have been inside all day watching TV. Instead I got a chance to not only meet her but help her, this is something that a numeric value can never be placed upon. My plants might be dead (with the exception of the tomatoes) but I think that I’ve learned some really great lessons from this project regardless. Simple things are the most valuable. Watching the food that you eat grow from a seed, putting time and effort in to your basic needs, and a simple supper for a neighbor in need are all things that NEED to make their way back in to societal norms. Maybe that is why I am partial to communal living as an alternative living style. The thought of people working to help each other survive in a simple form is, for lack of a better word, absolutely beautiful.
I am always asking myself, what can I do to help the environment. I am just one person with not a lot of time. What I have come up with is gardening. It allows me to not only cut down on the amount of CO2 from farming and shipping the vegetables, but allows me to know for a fact that my fruits and vegetables are truly fresh and organic.
So growing a garden has its problems, I rent the house that I live in and the owners would not like it if I dug up the yard for a garden. This problem is a very common one for people that live in large cities as well.
What I have found to fix this problem was shown to me by Dr. Carroll and her posts on KSOL of some pictures and videos of Window Farms. These are vertical gardens that you make in recycled plastic water bottles and hang in your window.
I have posted an introductory video about Window Farms below along with the website.
So this weekend I am going to be building my own window farm, I will make sure to post pictures very soon. I am starting this project at the start of spring so that I wont have to grow all my plants from seeds; I have waited for the local green houses to start the growing from seeds.
www.windowfarms.org
My green thumb came only as a result of the mistakes I made while learning to see things from the plant’s point of view. ~H. Fred Dale
The last of life has withered out of all of my plants but the tomatoes. I left them with my mom as galavanted off to Northwest Florida to go stay with my sister for a week for Spring Break and they didn’t make it. The tomatoes did though, which makes me think that they are pretty tough plants and can definitely be grown indoors. My mom, of course, blamed herself for them dying and went and bought me new ones. My replacements are ones that are already raised and ready for transplant and I think I am going to plant them in the garden in my backyard rather than try to keep them inside. One reason is because it is beautiful outside and it gives me a reason to go out there. Also, when my plants began to die my mom set out to do some research and the most common answer she got was that the plants needed to in fact be planted outside.
Another reason is that we have ants right now and they are getting bad. For the most part, bugs in my house really don’t bother me, I know that sounds gross or whatever but they exist whether we see them or not and I’m over it. Unfortunately yesterday when I was watering my plants about a million ants went scattering in every direction and they were coming from the plants. This is a problem. I hurried up and carried them all outside trying to get most of the ants safely outside, sadly a few lives were lost.
Since I will be going to Florida for the summer, I have some friends who are really excited about taking advantage of a planted garden for the summer and my roommate and I will still be paying rent at out house so this shouldn’t be a problem. I will post some pictures next week of the planted garden, I plan on getting it all done by Wednesday evening.
I’ve concentrated a lot of communal living as an alternative living style. I realize communal living is not for everyone, so I’d like to introduce everyone to a couple of other concepts that might better suit different people.
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- http://earthfirst.com/7-amazing-handmade-eco-friendly-homes/
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- http://earthfirst.com/7-amazing-handmade-eco-friendly-homes/
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- http://earthfirst.com/7-amazing-handmade-eco-friendly-homes/
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- http://earthfirst.com/7-amazing-handmade-eco-friendly-homes/
You all should also check out Earthships (http://earthship.org/). I am not even going to post pictures because they can’t do them justice, they are truly sensational.
I think that it is important to remember that while all of these houses are beyond awesome, we do have a lot of houses around the United States that are already built and there are ways to make them incredibly sustainable as well. Most of all we need to work with what we have a make that as environmentally friendly as we can first and then move beyond that.
In Overland Park, Kansas an edible schoolyard began almost 2 years ago at the Hiersteiner Child Development Center. This center is associated with Johnson County Community College and the college advocated for the edible schoolyard. JCCC was given $21,218 from the Sunflower Foundation and another $13,000 from a private donor. The Sunflower Foundation works to improve the health for all Kansans. Unfortunately I could not find much about this center, it is a daycare, not a school and I believe it serves the children of JCCC students and well as JCCC employees. I’ll have to do some more digging and hopefully find more edible schoolyards in this area.
Check out a video about the Hiersteiner Child Development Center’s edible schoolyard HERE
This is one thing I didn’t really think about for this project. I do need to do more research about finding out if this is possible for public schools and where to get the money to start a program like this. If the state is willing to fund it that could be a big way to get schools involved. Many if not all of the public schools are facing budget cuts and would welcome funding. This funding could go towards those who would be teaching about the garden and helping in it, so additional funding could save teaching jobs.
Since we are not in California and produce does not grow year round there needs to be other activities for students while there is no planting, cooking, harvesting, preserving, etc going on. A few of my ideas include researching fruits and vegetables that students have an interest in growing. The older students can become the overseers of each of these crops and teach others how to take care of them . Also students of all ages can learn about the benefits of eating local and organic. They can research global environmental issues, as well all know that in the future and now this information will be vital. In the late summer and fall upper level students can be taught how to preserve fruits and vegetables so they can be eaten year round. And with this preserved food they can learn to cook with these local, organic ingredients and learn about healthy eating. As a video I posted on a previous blog said, this generation of kids are expect to live a shorter life than their parents. They are expected to die of heart related diseases as well as diabetes.
I have all these good ideas, at least I think they are good. I feel that is what I am good at. I can come up with great plans and ideas but I have a hard time being able to implement them. For that I must turn to those in the community where I want to propose this edible schoolyard. Lucky for me, one of those people include my oldest sister. She is a outspoken voice in the community. So my goal over Spring Break is to talk to some of these people and see how they feel about this project and see what they may want to bring to the table. In the case of the first edible schoolyard in Berkeley, they had many community volunteers that helped make their garden a success.
Does anyone have any other suggestions of what to do during the off season in schools while nothing needs to be done outside?? All ideas welcome 
My garden is slowly beginning to look worse and worse, I know that it isn’t getting enough light. I think now that the weather is getting better, I am going to start putting all of my plants outside during the day so they can get light until I find an affordable way to get light to them while they’re inside. I feel like they not only are they not growing as fast as they should, but they are just very long and weak. One thing that is a positive side of that they aren’t doing well is that they are still alive and green. That is one thing I love about nature and plants, when you mess up they give you a little leeway and let you have the option to keep them going and make them healthy again. I find plants very comforting, they allow you to screw up and redeem yourself constantly. You can let them get a little too big for their pots or you can forget to water them right when they need it sometimes, but once you give them what they need, they spring right back to life. This project has really reminded me of how much I love growing things, something I’d sort of forgotten. So the more I thought about how much I was enjoying myself, something I’d been wanting to do for about a year now kept popping in to my head and finally I made the decision that had already been in the back of my mind for a while now, I changed my major to horticulture. I had been scared to do it for the normal reasons. I’ve already switched three times and I am only a sophomore and when it comes to science, not a fan. But the more this semester goes on and the more I look at my garden in my window and think of when the time comes when I don’t live in Manhattan when I have classes, southeast Kansas about one weekend a month, and Florida for Christmas Break, Spring Break and Summer, and I actually have somewhere where I could start a huge garden, the more I want that to be my way of life, not just a hobby. So, I finally did it.
If you remember my first blog at all, I wrote a little bit about how I really like that community feel of farming communities and that is something that I feel a commune provides. Well, I got reminded the other day of how gardening can bring people together. This little old lady lives across the alley from me and prior to Thursday, we’d never spoken before. I was out transplanting my garlic on Thursday and planting some flowers for my mom’s garden that I could give her on Mother’s Day in May and I saw my neighbor come outside to take her trash can. She literally stopped at her tracks and stared at me. I waved and said “Hello” and she half heartidly waved back and continued to stare at me. Then she began to walk my way, when she got in to my yard she began to ask all about what I was planting. We had a nice talk and I told her if she needed any help starting her garden in the spring, I’d be more than happy to help and she told me to stop by anytime. Needless to say, I was smiling ear to ear the rest of the time I was transplanting.
For the rest of this blog, I thought it would be really informative to take you through a hypothetical day on a commune from information I’ve gathered from various websites. On my last blog someone commented they had rather negative thoughts about communes and I definitely want that to change! There are communes and ecovillages that are bad and there are ones that are good, just like everything else.
Dancing Rabbit EcoVillage – this is a link to Dancing Rabbit’s newspaper which keeps everyone updated on daily happenings. Online Tour of Dancing Rabbit
