Thanks for bringing those most tasty and juicy pears to the food co-op last pickup day. We bought 4 kilos and the next day had already eaten an entire kilo! The last 3k we dried because they were threatening to go soft. Just look what they turned into! Golden, chewy, hint of vanilla, sticky, full of flavour!

Please let us know if you’ll be harvesting again soon, because I’d love to go with you and help pluck. Of course I’m happy to dry a bunch for you as well; dried pears bring a huge amount of happiness into the home.

Merçi, verheugnis alom en tot straks op een pluk dag,

Debra

What an exuberant spore print, probably of an agaricus arvensis, or maybe an agaricus campestris, possibly an agaricus bitorquis, or if I’m lucky, an agaricus silvicola. They’re all edible. Still, most likely it’s a horse mushroom, agaricus arvensis. I found it along the bike path, cutting through the woods, near the border of some grassland.

Ruling out the poisonous possible doppelgängers, it’s unlikely to be an agaricus xanthodermus. Why? Because it’s flesh is not turning yellow when bruised or cut, and because it doesn’t smell of creosote. It smells of anise, and of sweet leaf mould, like the woody path it came from. It smells like it’s going to be delicious fried in butter and served on toast at lunch.

And there’s at least one more…

At the moment my fridge is filled with the bubbling product of home-fermented foods, lots of home grown and a visit to milk lady at the farmer’s market. A few days earlier Mark Menjivar’s photo essay about what can tell us, popped up on my radar again. The first noticeable difference between my fridge at harvest time and all but one of Menjivar’s subjectsis the lack of packaging. An ever earlier Autumn and ’tis the season for pickle and sauerkraut making up here in the Polar Circle, for salting and sugaring food away. That coupled with a penchant for making (dairy) kefir that has been enlightening on many levels; the amount of milk it ‘costs’ to keep a culture happy, the numerous uses for kefir and whey, and the discovery that in the olden days all of these cultured products probably kept just fine without a fridge. Apparently it’s all the rage… The ship contains the shipwreck once again.

From Mark Menjivar’s You Are What You Eat, image used entirely without permission. Midwife/Middle School Science Teacher | San Antonio, TX | 3-Person Household (including dog) | First week after deciding to eat locally grown vegetables. | 2008

From Mark Menjivar’s You Are What You Eat, image used entirely without permission. Bar Tender | San Antonio, TX | 1-Person Household | Goes to sleep at 8AM and wakes up at 4PM daily. | 2008

Owner of Defunct Amusement Park | Alpine, TX | 1-Person Household | Former WW II Prisoner of War | 2007

From Mark Menjivar’s You Are What You Eat, image used entirely without permission. Short Order Cook | Marathon,TX | 2-Person Household | She can bench press over 300lbs. | 2007

Six years ago my fridge was a different place, yet vodka and lime juice still feature prominently.

• 
  A refrigerator is both a private and a shared space. One person likened the question, “May I photograph the interior of your fridge?” to asking someone to pose nude for the camera.

  Each fridge is photographed “as is”. Nothing added, nothing taken away.

  These are portraits of the rich and the poor. Vegetarians, Republicans, members of the NRA, those left out, the under appreciated, former POWs, dreamers, and so much more. We never know the full story of one’s life.

  My hope is that we will think deeply about how we care.
  How we care for our bodies. How we care for others. And how we care for the land.

Dutch text below is not a direct translation.

Imagine this: you’re an internationally recognised Dutch cultural institution of art/design/media culture. You have a substantial collection; media art, landscape art, but also paintings/ sculptures/ installations/ photography/ film/ design objects/ and artist-activist works in the public space that regenerate your city’s ill-planned urban areas. In short, you host a platform for innovation representing the entire gamut of your discipline. Over the past decades you have made substantial cultural impact in your field and thus you are considered to be a driver of culture. The artists/designers/architects whose works comprise your collection and fill your programming are also recognized internationally, and they often represent the Netherlands all over the world, in biennials and important exhibitions.

And then one day you receive a letter from the new Dutch Ministry of Culture that your funding will be completely withdrawn as of January 1, 2013. What do you do with your collection? Your staff? Your buildings? Your publications? The rest of the year’s programming? What will the artists/activists/designers/architects and your engaged public do, now that they no longer have access to your platform?

Infographic illustrating the proportion of cultural spending in comparison to the total Dutch national budget. Miljard = billion.

Infographic illustrating the proportion of cultural spending compared to the total budget of EU spending. Miljard = billion.

This Sunday and Monday the Dutch cultural sector will gather and protest en masse the unspeakably ill-informed budget cuts proposed by Secretary of State Halbe Zijlstra. These cuts are not simply across-the-board austerity measures taken from all sectors, but represent the destruction of Dutch cultural heritage in one fell swoop. Aside from the radical and sometimes COMPLETE obliteration of budgets for new media culture, design, art in the public space, and architecture, Zijlstra’s proposed budget, which ignores the advice given by his own advisory panel, will also severely and negatively impact spending in the areas of science, health care, and the environment.

Infographic illustrating the proportion of cultural spending in comparison to the annual amount of Dutch spending on Christian holidays.

Shockingly, though not surprisingly, the proposed cultural sector budget erasures represent a proportional drop in the bucket of overall national spending, less than 1%. By comparison, a 1% reduction in our annual asphalt budget alone would make cuts in culture in these areas unnecessary.

Infographic illustrating the proportion of cultural spending in comparison to the budget for the Joint Strike Fighter.

The Dutch cultural sector has produced a counter proposal which you can read here.

Here is a list of actions we can all take before June 27 that will likely impact the parliamentary debates on Monday:

1. Sign our petitions. 10.000 signatures to support Dutch media culture, art in the public space will make an enormous difference.

2. Occupy with us. On Sunday from 11-17:00 hours we will join together to occupy the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

3. Wear sensible shoes and walk with us: Sunday evening we will march en masse from the Boijmans Museum to the Hague in a Civilized March Mars der Beschaving.

4. Attend our demonstrations: Here is a complete list - in Dutch infortch - but you’ll be suprprised how well you’ll manage it.

5. Vote correctly and encourage those around you to do so as well in all future elections. Do not let the undereducated populists ever come to power again.

6. And if you’re a believer, we urge you to please pray the rapid disintegration of this embarassingly shortsighted MINORITY cabinet.

A no less less emotional (Dutch) version of the above post below I have excerpted from the Sonic Acts. On their website is an even lengthier and impassioned English version - a worth read for those trying to inform themselves about the current political situation in the Netherlands:

Aanval op de kunst

Read more here:

Saturday 7 May at 16.00h, is the closing event of the Farming the City exhibition at ARCAM. URBANIAHOEVE’s phytoremediation installation on ARCAM island, titled ‘The Shipwreck’ will be dismantled and distributed to guests. Do not miss the only opportunity to taste 6 week old hyperaccumulators fed on Oosterdok water and to take home a big block of highly polluted spinach.

Planting phytoextractors, phytostabilisors, and vegetal caps at ARCAM Island

From the Ancient Greek phyto, for plant, and the Latin, remedium, to restore balance, phytoremediation bridles the natural properties and chemical dynamics of specific plant families to repair polluted sites and soils. Used properly, it is considerably less expensive, less dangerous to the environment, and ultimately more effective than the practice of digging out ground material and resituating it from one site to another.

T=spinach, H=mustard, E=clover, S=phacelia, H=spinach, I=clover, P=mustard, 3 techniques

A complex web of interconnected traits and characteristics ensures that that the stationary chemical factories we call plants, get what they need where they are. While some plants excel at accumulation, others do not. For example, distributing toxic metals from their roots up to their fruit is not what fruit trees do. One urban agriculture solution to heavy metal contamination can be to heavily plant orchards and thoroughly carpet their beds with nectar-rich groundcovers.

Certain plant characteristics can restore soil health over time by generating enzyme fields that spawn flurries of microbial activity around their roots. Just two (of many) phyto- techniques used to repair polluted ground with living plants are: phytoextraction and phytostabilisation. Urbaniahoeve contributes a new technique to this list, which we have named, The Shipwreck Contains the Ship, in which we recontextualise urban soil pollution as a means to its own solution. Our contaminated urban soils provide both the necessity and the opportunity to implement city-wide urban agriculture. No baby, no bathwater. The shipwreck contains the ship.

• Saturday May 7, ARCAM 16:00h

  ARCAM, Amsterdam Centre for Architecture

  Farming the City

  URBANIAHOEVE: The Shipwreck Contains the Ship

  SUPER FAST video of how we built the Shipwreck installation
  

Watering the Shipwreck with polluted and semi-salinated water from the Oosterdok

Foodscape Schilderswijk: kids initiating the planting of the Wellington Hof Plum Orchard

In the past year I started a foundation for urban agriculture in Amsterdam and the Hague called URBANIAHOEVE, Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture. URBANIAHOEVE, for short. We’ve been producing a gamut of projects (and pilots) that are working examples of the kind of urban agriculture that we want in our cities. Small but real food-system infrastructure, foodscapes built on existing green infrastructure by the existing social infrastructure.

Foodscape Schilderswijk: Planting a future foraging forest in the Wellington Hof

With locals, schools and organisations we are producing orchards and edible landscape architecture right in the public space of a Hague neighbourhood.

DIY Mmmmuseum of Oven Typologies: tamped earth ovens barely outta beta

After its successful pilot last summer, we’ll soon be implementing our playful and public urban kitchen infrastructure at 4 Amsterdam locations, complete with a monthly programme (this fall) that will introduce different constellations of folk to DIY outdoor oven technology.

DIY Mmmmusem of Oven Typologies: kids monopolizing and/or owning the ovens

URBANIAHOEVE’s projects, like all urban agriculture, require a huge amount of work produced by a devoted and almost indefatigable team, by numerous project participants, developed with, and supported generously by inspirational partners.

Foodscape Schilderswijk: Harvesting herbs in the public space

Though our work is ongoing, finally I can begin the satisfying process of reflection and reporting on what we’re doing. By ‘we’ I really do mean WE. The URBANIAHOEVE blog will report tersely in project copy in Dutch and English, but Culiblog will be the place where I can still dish the real dirt on urban agriculture.

• Foodscape Schilderswijk is an URBANIAHOEVE project developed in collaboration with Stroom, Hague Centre for Art and Architecture as part of their multi-year manifestation Foodprint, Food and the City.

To encourage success in completing difficult, unrealistic New Year’s resolutions (like daily blogging and yoga practice), I tend to spike my list with easily attainable, readily achievable, things that happen anyway. Usually these resolutions occupy the esoteric slash culinary realm, like learning to brew beer (2011), or the domestic slash procrastination realm, like learning to knit socks (2010: time consuming yet enlightening). Sometimes my resolutions even occupy a strange category of ancient and exotic craftsmanship, no longer of any real value in the modern world. (Yes, in 2008 I did in fact improve my handwriting, but only for that specific year, and in 2009 I resolved to quit this archaic practice forthwith.)

A recurring favourite, easy as falling off a horse, is the resolution to taste each new fruit and vegetable that crosses my path, somehow still unbeknownst to me. Not even two weeks into the new calendar and I’m already done. This year it’s the citron, bought from a roadside vendor here in Sicily. A bit of rooting around and I discovered that this variety is the Diamante not deemed fabulous enough for use as an etrog but delicious none the less.

The citron (citrus medica) has in the past been popular for all manner of pharmaceutical, beveragological, confectionary, and perfumerical uses, here il cedro is thinly sliced and sprinkled with white sugar, which draws out the sweet and sour juices of pith and pulp. After allowing time to marinate a bit you eat the slices for dessert. It’s the combination of the green melon-like fleshy pith, the citron’s ragion d’essere, with the hyper-aromatic essential oil infused outer rind, and the juicy sweet and sour pulp, that makes it such a refreshing pleasure to eat. Our friends here keep telling us that it’s heavy on the digestion, but I am learning to occasionally disregard the questionable culinary authority of vegetable torturers and obsessive compulsive pasta eaters.

And inadvertently it seems that I’ve made a blog entry, though I dare not utter which category of New Year’s resolution that this action occupies. 2010 was an incredibly busy year spent initiating the project of my dreams in the realm of urban agriculture. 2011 promises more of the same, but I begin yet again, with the best of intentions to afford myself some time each week to reflect and write about the work of URBANIAHOEVE; Social Design Lab for Urban Agriculture, which is hopefully interesting to the remaining readers of this blog.

Happy New Year!

(First published 13 September, 2009 under the title: Not piss-poor anymore)

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

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.