Hey there lovers… of food-system infrastructure, this weekend (June 26 & 27) from 13.00h we will pilot the DIY-Mmmmuseum of Oven Typologies (Dutch acronym is DHZMOT) at Art at the Pool during the Sloterplas Festival in Amsterdam. (Links are in Dutch, unfortch.)

Tamp 500 kilos of earth into oven mold

DHZMOT = Ovens, ovens, ovens, and more ovens…
Ovens made of tamped earth, underground ovens, solar ovens made from wasted umbrellas and/or pizza boxes. Ovens in and for the public space – you design ‘em, you build ‘em, we use em! The DHZMOT is an always in development, ever-growing collection of manuals and materials with which tweeners of all ages can make their very own. Simmered sous vide, blackened, smoked or molten, smack of lip and finger lick, attention absorbing, at the very least transforming, producing together a cuisine végètal in and on the ovens will afford the necessary trial by fire.

Do a little dance for good luck, spill some beer

The DIY Mmmmuseum of Oven Typologies is one of five projects in and around the outdoor swimming hole at the Sloterplas Festival event Art at the Pool. We are situated on an island accessible by a floating waterwalkway. Aside from meandering, lounging and soaking up rays, come and enjoy this opportunity to pilot the DHZMOT with us.

Release 500 kilos from the mold, piece o cake

The DIY Mmmmuseum of Oven Typologies is a project of URBANIAHOEVE, Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture. Setting up this foundation and getting funding for the projects has occupied most of what used to be my time for blogging. (Which is why the foundation’s project’s are generously supported by Stichting DOEN, Fonds BKVB, Koers Nieuw West and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst.)

URBANIAHOEVE is about developing new models for food-system infrastructure within the public space. We believe in setting up public access food infrastructure like open kitchens and outdoor oven installations that facilitate group cooking, group harvesting community jam sessions and the Int’l month of sauerkraut. THe DIY Mmmmuseum of Oven Typologies is a way of getting used to cooking ad hoc in the public space.

Dang! And we’d even kissed the earth!

DIY Mmmmuseum of Oven Typologies Island
Sloterparkbad
El Presidente Allendelaan 3
Amsterdam

Saturday night special guests: Caspian Hat Dance will blow us away acoustically with original and traditional Romani music, Klezmer, misbehaved village wedding music, Southern Italian Pizzica, and pretty songs sung in Romani on Bolivian mountaintops. Your high heels will be of no use to you at all.

2nd attempt: Walk away in disgust…

• 
  Art at the Pool - Sloterplas Festival on fb

  Caspian Hat Dance is COMING SATURDAY EVE!
  

The 3rd attempt at the tamped earth oven hasn’t yet been released from the mold. Come to the DIY Mmmmuseum of Oven Typologies this weekend and see what happened!!!

Shrine of *Chametz in the foyer belies the seat-of-the-pants factor of Pesach-ultra-lite. This is me nullifying my chametz.

And here’s another question for tonight: What kind of gawd would ask us to throw out locally grown soft whole wheat flour from the ancient fields of Osdorp?

Happy Passover, y’all.

• * - Chametz (also Chometz, Chumetz) refers to bread, grains and leavened products that are not consumed on the Jewish holiday of Passover, as well as all food items that are not specifically marked “kosher for Passover.” According to Jewish law, Jews may not own, eat or benefit from chametz during Passover. This law appears several times in the Bible. The punishment for eating chametz on Passover is karet (”spiritual excision”), one of the highest levels of punishment in Jewish tradition.
  Chametz is a product that is (a) made from one of five types of grains, and (b) has been combined with water and left to stand for longer than eighteen minutes without being baked.

  … The Talmudic enumeration (which has become the traditional list of those grains) is:
  Wheat, Barleym Spelt, Rye, Oats.
  

Now that all the folks are gone I can start using my window sills again to get the kitchen garden started.

Filled with potting compost and seeds.

That crazy climate delivered us a bitter and lengthy winter, such that seasonally, we’re 6 weeks behind schedule.

Whatever sprouts out of these is going in the ground in May.

Crammed into waterproof containers, recycled packaging of purchases past.

You can make these with a wooden thingie.

My experience is that it saves time to plant 1-3 seeds per pot (I put a few extra since a lot of my seeds are past their sell-by date or are self-harvested) and then when the seedlings are ready to transplant (w/3-5 real leaves), I carefully cut the paper pot, folding it open, and then transplant pot and all into the new space. This is easier than growing seedlings in one big container and fishing around with fingers and sticks traumatising the little buggers, exposing their infant roots to the air.

And I’ve been vindicated by this two-step windowsill method, since none of the seeds I put straight in the ground at the kitchen garden have yet to show their heads (radishes, spinach, rocket, chives).

Early last week I invited some of my lady posse over for dinner on Saturday. In the spirit of more is more, if only under less auspicious circumstances, I called upon this constellation of girls because not all of them had met, and I titled my invite, Fresh Blood.

Would you believe that every single one of those ladies arrived thinking that there was actually going to be a blood ritual at dinner? Not amplifying.

At the very least they came expecting a performance, or some blood in the food. Meat, maybe? Dang witches all got their noggins a-crankin’ that I would dish them up a challenging, blood-related evening, and they showed up behaving thusly. By the wee hours, one of ‘em had to be forcibly dragged out by her feet!

Way to rock the house, Ladies! I’m openly gloating that you hold my potential for visceral impact in such high esteem, but it’s time I dispel this myth. Fresh blood just means I invited new folk for you to meet.
Behave.
Let’s do it again real soon, K?!

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Image used entirely without permission.
Thank you Fourmilab.

Dang I can’t wait for my permaculture class to start up again. Just two more nights.

January demonstration of rocket hardiness.

While I was back in Northern California complaining that no one heats their homes, here in the Polar Circle the canals had frozen thick. We’d had night frost since the end of November, and until last Sunday this garden was covered with snow, some of it a month old. But a surprising amount of edible permaculture was revealed in the thaw! What better way to rejoice than with a Winter Salad Celebration at the Slim Pickins Garden Restaurant, this Sunday.

Seasonally fresh, right here, right now.

Rocket, curly leaf parsley, mizuna lettuce, fennel, and if it weren’t for my boundless generosity towards the Bird Community in and around Amsterdam Central Station, there could have been abundant broccoli, cavalo nero, and kale. I’ve made a New Year’s resolution to become more aggressive towards birds since I have discovered that they’re not nearly as community-minded as they make themselves out to be.

Thrive little greens, that we may celebrate your winter hardiness, shredded into our salad!

The demonstration garden has proven once again that you can grow and harvest leafy greens in the open ground, in the Polar Circle, all year long. Slim Pickins garden restaurant is open for reservations this Sunday. Bring warm blankets, it’s going to be absolutely freezing, if not bitterly cold.

A garden accident involving one of the beds revealed sub-terranean worm eggs. Or slug eggs. If they’re slug eggs, the Bird Community is cordially invited to tuck in. Otherwise, ‘Birds, back the EFF OFF my Worm Community!’

Sunday, January 24th, 2010:
Late-ish lunch menu-fixe for 4 ppl:

- freshly plucked winter salad, dressed in situ with
*meyer lemon and
**olive oil

* - hand plucked and ferally transported from the ancestral home in California
** - hand plucked, pressed, and ferally transported from the permaculture farm of Annelieke vd Sluis in Meló, Portugal

- cockle-warming home made kimchi-kidney bean soup

- meyer lemon water kefir

- something cockle-warming involving vodka

Reserve now, Slim Pickins seats only 4 ppl! Children permitted if they don’t complain (at all) or trample anything.

Chef is not above stealing/recovering a partially frozen endive from the neighbours.

Slim Pickins is an outdoor, micro-eatery situated on the edge of a raised bed, in an urban kitchen garden, serving amuses gueules from whatever the tiny garden has to offer, even and especially when that’s not very much. Occasionally open, rain or shine.

In order to secure from landslide the steep incline that cups our house, my father planted it full of trees whose main job in life is to become really large. Something like 30 years ago, he introduced the deodara, pines, redwoods, and then predicting the gaps that come with arboreal maturity he planted the juniper chinensis; limb-rich, majestic, scented and kinetic. An eco-system from top to bottom, a plant wall, a live filtre of foam green sprays catching drifts of pine needles on heaving articulated branches before falling further, to carpet the man-made forest floor.

Suillus luteus or brevipes, ‘Sticky Bun’ or ‘Slippery Jack’ Bolete. 5 kilos from our garden!

This swathe of woodland, where animals live and pass through, whose shade and soft ground make it the ideal spot for wood splitting, and where wood in various states of being split gets stacked to dry. There’s an abundant humus layer that comes from moving all that wood around; prunings, rotten bark, saw dust, chips, all landing on the ground and getting covered up by the ceaseless needle fall. This is how the woodland harvest of one household inadvertently developed into an ideal environment for mushrooms.

Chroogomphus vinicolor / Pine Spike, under the redwoods, edible but not choice.

But these two discoveries were choice.

Culiblog author shows off one afternoon’s haul.

During a recent visit to the ancestral home, a two-day myco-blitz revealed more than 20 sorts of fruiting fungus, most remarkably, an easy 5 kilos of Suillus Luteus, or ‘Slippery Jack’ style boletes.

I’d like to give a shout out to the Mycelium Community for giving us a good show right through the cusp of the changing year, for feeding us and the trees that keep up that hill, well into 2010.

Here’s to a long future of collaboration, abundant fruition in 2010, and best wishes for superb soil fertility for all parties involved.

• The purple mushrooms turned out to be Blewits or Clitocybe nuda.

  More information on the Blewits right here. Next year we’re eating them.

  About the Chroogomphus vinicolor or Pine Spikes: These fungi are members of the family Gomphidiaceae which are agaricoid members of the Boletales (suborder Suillineae). Related to the genus Gomphidius (in which they were once classified), Chroogomphus are distinguished from Gomphidius by their lack of a partial veil. Members of this genus have been thought to be ectomycorrhizal with various species of pine, however, there is now evidence that all members of the Gomphidiaceae are parasitic upon other boletes. Specifically, Chroogomphus species are thought to be parasitic on various pine-associated Suillus species, with this parasitism often being highly species-specific.

  True to the description above, in the garden the chroogomphus vinicolor and the suillus luteus were growing ‘gregariously’ (as they say in mushroom talk) right next to each other.

  Another form, the chroogomphus ochraceus/Pine Spikes

  Lactarius rubrilacteus - We also had around 8 of these growing near the wooden path.

  The boletes in the garden were either suillus brevipes, aka short-stemmed Slippery Jacks or Sticky Buns.

  More on the the short-stemmed Slippery Jack or Suillus Brevipes.

  About the sub-order boletecae on Mykoweb.

  Or were they possibly the Suillus Luteus? Both s.luteus and s.brevipes are edible. Indeed, some of the boletes were more slimy than others. Probably that was the s.luteus growing in the wet areas and the s.brevipes growing in the dryer areas according to Mushroom Expert.com

  At Mushroom Observer participants share photos and descriptions to aid each other in identifying different species.

  About the mycorrhizal relationship:
  A mycorrhiza (Gk.,: fungus roots, pl mycorrhizae, mycorrhizas) is a symbiotic (generally mutualistic, but occasionally weakly pathogenic) association between a fungus and the roots of a plant.

  In a mycorrhizal association, the fungus colonizes the host plants’ roots, either intracellularly as in arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), or extracellularly as in ectomycorrhizal fungi. They are an important component of soil life and soil chemistry.

  Mutualist Dynamics:
  Mycorrhizae form a mutualistic relationship with the roots of most plant species (and while only a small proportion of all species has been examined, 95% of these plant families are predominantly mycorrhizal).

  Sugar-Water/Mineral exchange:
  This mutualistic association provides the fungus with relatively constant and direct access to carbohydrates, such as glucose and sucrose supplied by the plant.[4] The carbohydrates are translocated from their source (usually leaves) to root tissue and on to fungal partners. In return, the plant gains the benefits of the mycelium’s higher absorbtive capacity for water and mineral nutrients (due to comparatively large surface area of mycelium:root ratio), thus improving the plant’s mineral absorption capabilities.[5]
  Plant roots alone may be incapable of taking up phosphate ions that are demineralized, for example, in soils with a basic pH. The mycelium of the mycorrhizal fungus can, however, access these phosphorus sources, and make them available to the plants they colonize.[6]
  

  Here’s a superb RANT about mushroom foraging and the exaggerated fear of poisoning

  Toxic Fungi of Western North America: poisoning guide

  PDF Guidelines for pot­hunters
  1. Learn the known toxic fungi first and the genera in which the major poisonings are found: Amanita, Lepiota, Galerina, Conocybe, Inocybe, Clitocybe, Paxillus, Hypholoma, Psilocybe, Cortinarius and Gyromitra.

  2. Eat new edible fungi in small amounts at first.

  3. Be cautious offering wild fungi to guests even if you have had no problems. Idiosyncratic GI reactions are common, although typical allergies such as hay fever, asthma and hives are uncommon. There are no reports to date of mushrooms causing allergic (anaphylactic) shock.

  4. Remember that many mushrooms cause trouble when eaten raw. These are usually GI upsets. Gyromitrin and some other toxins are destroyed, at least in part, by cooking. The Europeans have found that, on rare occasion, a number of common genera including “edible” amanitas are able to provoke red blood cell destruction when eaten raw or partly cooked. This should be true of all western hemisphere ?blushers? and of species referred to by the European name Amanita franchetii (Boud.) Fayod.

  5. Don’t be gluttonous. Small amounts of some toxins may be tolerated.

  6. If a canned mushroom has been ingested, call attention of physicians to botulism if there are pupil dilation, muscular weakness or central nervous system symptoms. There is an anti-serum available, which may keep victims off a respirator.

  7. Heed the advice of Elias Fries in his Observationes mycologicae, “Illustrations appeal to idlers who do not have energy enough to study
  descriptions”. Using a poor photograph of Agaricus augustus, but not reading the description below the colored plate, two California victims
  misidentified what was actually Amanita phalloides. Both required liver transplants.

  A hilarious text: Fungal diseases that must be overcome to have a traditional Thanksgiving dinner

On a recent trip to the border between rural and urban Amsterdam I got a look-see into the tamping-technique of Farmer Wim Bijma. He produces organic leafy greens that you can order online and pick up on site. Despite it’s reputation, it’s a beautiful bike ride out to Osdorp. If you enjoy experiencing the contrast between a densely built city, and 900 year old farmland, the ride will be entirely your cup of tea.

When Guus Beumer, artistic director of the Utrecht Manifest: Biennial for Social Design, asked me what I would like to contribute to the 2009 edition, I responded with a programme called Ultimate Meeting. I would invite a strategic group of people together for dinner to start planning resilient local food-systems. Due to its non-commercial nature, this activity was constantly being placed on the back burners of our agendas. It was high time to meet.

Forced authorship of the plan, guests sign in

As part of the UM programme Unforseen Magic, the Ultimate Meeting dinner was held last Thursday in Bas van Tol’s Koers Locale at Centraal Museum’s CM studio. Koers Locale was van Tol’s prescient W139 installation in 1992, a year before the public opening of the internet in the Netherlands. The installation represented the end of 80’s artist-activism before the digital public access of the 90’s temporarily turned the physical side of social engagement on its ear. As a location for the Ultimate Meeting, the Koers Locale was a fitting backdrop for a gathering of vital (Utrecht) food-related voices to come together and hash out some essential food system issues. I invited folks that by coincidence or by social construct until now had not been in communication with each other, folks who’s agendas would mutually benefit through discussion. Illustrious guests included representatives from Transition Town Utrecht Alowieke and Helmut, (who came bearing gifts!), Louis & Roland from Lekker Utregs, Rob from the City of Utrecht Planning and Development, Marijke from New Utrecht and a slew of other very important designers and design writers slash philosophers.

Indelible seating arrangements

The subject of urban food production is an urgent one. We don’t flinch when we hear the term ‘national security’, and we are complicit with our governments’ actions, often to the detriment of our own civil liberties. But somehow we accept it as reasonable that we have a four-day food supply in urban areas. In this country we have a well-worked out 200-year plan for land and water management but only a four-day food supply that is by design dependent on fragile infrastructure.

Ordnung muß sein. Cynthia Hathaway and Gwendolyn Floyd floored us with a presentation on the sustainable design principles of the Old Order Amish and Mennonites.

Food sovereignty is our right to define and produce our own food, our own forms of agriculture, how we will raise and treat our livestock and fisheries, and how we will ‘harvest’ ‘our’ oceans, in contrast to having our food supply primarily subject to global market forces largely beyond our control. Someone slightly more activist than I might posit that the folks in charge of our food since 1947, (the authors of the so-called Green Revolution) have done a consistently crap job. By the folks in charge I am referring to the policy level and the highest levels of the industrial food and agriculture business. These folks are responsible for creating and maintaining poorly designed food systems that result in food scarcity in parts of the world (some closer by than you may think), in high rates of farmer suicide, in the destruction of our natural habitat that is a prime contributor to the dangerous and sometimes irreversible forces effecting our climate. Creating effective means to invest in our own ‘resilient local food economies’ is a powerful mechanism for change. It is in this spirit that I held the Ultimate Meeting.

Guests simultaneously eat and save the world

Was this dinner successful? Did it meet my goals? Upon leaving, one guest held up his hand, and gesturing with his thumb and forefinger 8cm apart joked, ‘Tonight we made the world this much better.’ Now I don’t know how Ed managed to calculate a 4,5% improvement in the ‘world’ from this one little dinner in Utrecht, but he must have been thinking about the huge effect of all of those ultimate meetings of the past. The ones in which some economists and agronomists from 1947 onward decided that we should be spending less money on food and more money on flat screen TVs and cars. And throw-away fashion. The stuff that makes the ‘Economy’ grow. Now if you subtract all that stuffy-stuff, factor in one heq of a lot of social engagement and carry the two, it seems you do end up getting something close to a 4,5% improvement. Ed, that is huge!

Who actually does know jack?

But seriously, on a practical level? The Ultimate Meeting had 24 guests. Transition Town Utrecht now knows 4 people in or related to the city council and 8 designers and 1 researcher that they can engage in setting up their food systems. Lekker Utregs has met at least 6 people that can be specifically useful in setting up their urban agriculture conference in November. 3 separate food entrepreneurs have met with 8 different people that have experience in setting up local food economies both on the farm and social entrepreneurial side. 8 internationally recognised designers have been introduced to the design principles of the Amish, the social design skills of the Transition Town movement and have opened themselves and their design practice to opportunities dealing with creating resilient (food) systems. One design magazine editor-in-chief was introduced to and became fascinated by the Transition Town movement. Probably more than but at least one conceptual artist and one researcher have learned about the activist tradition of Utrecht. And all 24 of us present at the Ultimate Meeting have committed ourselves to working to create food systems with a primarily social face. And that is huge.

• Utrecht Manifest, 3rd Biennial for Social Design
  4–17 October 2009 (the exhibitions last longer)
  The starting point is the utopian potential of Modernism, which has left explicit physical and mental traces in Utrecht…
  the positioning of modernism was initially focused on engagement, and in the second place on design with a social ambition.

  Images from the Ultimate Meeting
  on Debra Solomon’s FlickR page

  Ultimate Meeting, Oct 08, 2009
  Present: Debra Solomon, Anneke Moors, Cynthia Hathaway, Gwendolyn Floyd, Marijke Orthel, Rob Hendriks, Alowieke, Claudia Linders, Hanneke vd Barne, Louis de Jel, Roland Pereboom, Joshua Kauffman, AMC deGersem, Helmut Steeman, Brigitte van Mechelen, Robert Thiemann, Piet Hekker, Erik Wong, Sophie Krier, Ed van Hinte, Jurgen Bey, Carolyn Strauss, Ana Paula.

  Delicious food by: Chris Igesz, Bauke and Martijn

  Utrecht Manifest: Hanneke Beukers; wonderful production, Olga Godschalk, Marjolein

  Transition Town Utrecht
  Voortvloeiend uit de landelijke informatiedag in Utrecht, was er op 8 juni een vervolgbijeenkomst met geïnteresseerden uit de regio Utrecht.
  Een kort verslag van Peter Polder van deze zeer succesvol verlopen avond.

  The Transition Town Handbook

  Dutch Transition Towns
  Sinds de introductie van Transition Towns in Nederland, in het najaar van 2008, is er een niet te stuiten stroom van lokale initiatieven tot stand gekomen. Een TT-initiatief begint met het vormen van een groep mensen die als lokale ’stuurgroep’ willen gaan fungeren. Een stuurgroep moet zich committeren aan een aantal internationaal gehanteerde criteria. Naast initiatiefgroepen zijn er ook contactpersonen of groepjes die fungeren als aanspreekpunt voor belangstellende plaats- of buurtgenoten.

  Lekker Utregs
  Dit jaar is Lekker Utregs in een heel ander vaarwater gekomen. Halverwege het jaar zijn Stichting Lekker Utregs en een handelsonderneming opgericht. Dit alles om de handel in Utrechtse producten en de promotie degelijk aan te kunnen pakken. Binnenkort horen we definitief of de Europese (‘LEADER’) en Provincie subsidie hiervoor beschikbaar komen. Omdat de molens veel langzamer gaan dan iedereen dacht, is er dit jaar helaas geen geld om mooie evenementen als een Oogstfeest en Boer zoekt Burger-dagen te organiseren.

  Igesz Party Management
  did a brilliant job preparing our vegetarian dinner with primarily locally sourced foods. I would recommend IP to anyone.

  A critique of the Green Revolution
  The agronomists/economists didn’t get it right the first time, will they get it right now? The Green Revolution describes a economics only based agriculture that has never delivered on its promises. For those who remember the original “Green Revolution” promise to end hunger through miracle seeds, this call for “Green Revolution II” should ring hollow. Yet Monsanto, Novartis, AgrEvo, DuPont, and other chemical companies who are reinventing themselves as biotechnology companies, together with the World Bank and other international agencies, would have the world’s anti-hunger energies aimed down the path of more agrochemicals and genetically modified crops. This second Green Revolution, they tell us, will save the world from hunger and starvation if we just allow these various companies, spurred by the free market, to do their magic.

  
  A time to bury jack o’ lanterns as compost, a time to grow green manures.

One of the reasons I gave my Amsterdam kitchen garden the name Slim Pickins was to show that even a postage stamp-sized garden with a relatively little crop could serve up a surprising amount of food. But the real reason was that it had piss poor soil and I always thought the garden looked scrawny. I used to blame the slow rate of growth on the location, but visits to many local organic farms and especially to the nearby school gardens had made it painfully clear that the anemia of my produce had nothing to do with living so close to the Polar Circle. Well maintained school gardens right in the middle of the city were lush because they had great soil.

I’ll be chewing this cud all week

In the hope of increasing soil nutrients, I grew the green manures that were hugely successful in the Occitanian kitchen garden. But at Slim Pickins, the alfalfa, vetch, fenugreek and phacelia didn’t burgeon and produce huge mats of biomass like they did in the south, in a large part due to the blasted ground conditions. I’d been thinking about asking a farmer I knew if he’d bring me a load of composted manure, but I never ended up going ahead with this because I just don’t like the idea of importing large volumes of additives from afar. Searching for a solution closer to home, I considered making a worm composter and biking the castings over one recycled yoghurt container at a time, but there were already so many worms casting away in the garden that this plan just seemed bass-ackwards.

By the time I had returned to my garden in August I had basically resigned myself to a mediocre harvest. But two weeks ago I starting bumping into links about fertilizing with urine. I knew that pee was nutrient rich, balanced in nitrogen, potassium and phosphorus, and I had no problem with it in the animal manure. Why it hadn’t occurred to me to try using my own I’ll just chalk up to a deeply ingrained societal taboo against humanure. One YouTube video and 3 articles later and suddenly urine fertilizer seemed like a painless experiment with a material both abundant and free. I decided to give it a go. I might have even been giddy, biking over all those recycled yoghurt containers filled with pee.

Not piss poor anymore

Following instructions, in a big bucket I diluted (DILUTE! DILUTE! OK!) 1 part fresh pee to 10 parts Amsterdam tap water, gave it a stir and poured it on my soil, trying to avoid splashing the leaves. It’s possible that there was some more giddiness at this point. Recycled yoghurt containers empty, I left the garden and returned one week later.

AND…
WOWWY!
KAZOWWY!
And now with jazz hands!

Pity I didn’t make scientific-style before and after pictures but you’ll have to believe me when I say that the results were striking. In one week’s time all of the plants suddenly produced a great deal of leaf, and the leaf-colour seemed to have deepened considerably. All of the plants, but especially the climbing ones (calabas and hokkaido), appear to have undergone an enormous growth spurt. This happened during a waning moon, and with ever cooling temperatures. At home in the window box my spindly vervain and green shiso that had always resembled bonsais, suddenly filled out in their pot.

Possibly you are thinking, “Hey Nut-Job, OY VEY, what about the SMELL, what about the TASTE?” I can report that there is no urine or amonia smell at all, even on my indoor plants. (When I saw the difference in just a few days on the herbs, I had to try it indoors.) Some of the net-lit studies suggest that insects (like aphids) can taste the difference and stay away. I can’t taste … any… urine. Well, how do you know what urine tastes like? I don’t know, how do you don’t? What? I don’t know. Shut up.

And to get back to the reason I did this in the first place, the Slim Pickins kitchen garden produced a two bike-bag bumper crop and it looks like next week will be the same. I had such an abundant harvest (chard, kohlrabi, kale, cavalo nero, various leafy herbs, tomatoes, chives) that I didn’t need to go to the Farmers’ Market. Although I don’t think the folks at Organic Farm the Knotwilg will have to get another day job, the results in my garden after just one week of urine fertilizing are impressive.

In case you were planning on coming over for a nibble of some Slim Pickins goodness, I’m harvesting on Saturdays and fertilizing on Mondays. You’ll probably pray for rain.

• Urine Charge Every day we urinate away nutrients–nutrients that could grow food, fiber, flowers and even fuel! Human urine contains nutrients in the form of nitrogen, which plants love, and it’s usually pathogen free.

  Tomatoes thrive on urine diet …Yields for plants fertilized with urine quadrupled and matched those of mineral-fertilized plants. The urine-fertilized tomatoes also contained more protein and were safe for human consumption.

  A great review of Steve Solomon’s book, ‘Gardening When it Counts, Growing Food in Hard Times’ …The main issue with growing plants the biointensive way, Solomon writes, is that in addition to the extra work of turning over the soil 24 inches deep, a large number of plants growing close to each other will have an high demand for water and nutrients, made even more acute by their inability to fully grow out their root structure due to competition from neighboring plants. In contrast, Solomon offers advice and guides for growing vegetables in larger, more spread out beds that will grow (in his opinion) more robust and more nutritious food, taking a fraction of the time, water and energy needed to keep the biointensive beds running.

  Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon …Designed for readers with no experience and applicable to most areas in the English-speaking world except the tropics and hot deserts, this book shows that any family with access to 3-5,000 sq. ft. of garden land can halve their food costs using a growing system requiring just the odd bucketful of household waste water, perhaps two hundred dollars worth of hand tools, and about the same amount spent on supplies - working an average of two hours a day during the growing season.

  Online version of the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, humanure expert

  Human Urine As A Safe, Inexpensive Fertilizer For Food Crops Researchers in Finland are reporting successful use of an unlikely fertilizer for farm fields that is inexpensive, abundantly available, and undeniably organic — human urine. Their report on use of urine to fertilize cabbage crops is scheduled for the Oct. 31 issue of ACS’ Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

  Your Crap, Our Compost: Turning Human Feces Into Fertile Soil A generally fecal-phobic society reacts to the thought with a mix of snickering interest and fearful aversion, all dispatched in a single flush. But Nance Klehm, 43-year-old urban forager and grower, transforms human excrement into nutritious soil one bucket at a time. Klehm’s Humble Pile, a local do-it-yourself human waste composting project, introduces a backyard alternative to the machine-churning, power-draining waste-processing facilities tucked away in remote locations. “I’m not treating it chemically. I trust microorganisms to do it for me,” Klehm says.
  

  Free Urea Based Fertilizer Human urine makes an excellent high nitrogen liquid fertiliser for most plants. Dilute it 10 to 1 and pour it over and or round fast growing plants once a week; like vegetables, Green manure crops and sugar cane. Indeed just about anything that you want to push along rapid green growth

  USING URINE AS PLANT FOOD TO MAKE PLANTS BLOOM - FREE FERTILIZER The YouTube video that got me all excited in the first place!

  Piss Poor, a video about the EcoSan Toilet system, recycling urine for agricultural use in… where else, Africa!

The tomato that keeps on giving