A happy new year
for the fruit trees

February 10, 2009

Woodcut for the Jewish arbor day Tu b’Shvat, from the Minhogimbukh Amsterdam 1722, recently adapted by Scott-Martin Kosofsky, image used entirely without permission.

There’s nothing like a religious calendar sporting multiple ‘new years’ to remind us that we were once deeply connected to our food systems. Agrarian celebrations lace the Jewish calendar commemorating inventory and tithing, sorting and sowing, fasting, harvesting, slaughtering, and all manner of specialized and neurotic food preservation. Ancestors, be happy, you left an indelible mark.

Tu b’Shvat is not a biblical holiday but comes from the Mishnah, the Jewish book of case-studies, aka the ‘Oral Torah’. At that time (about 2000 years ago) a tithe of fruit and vegetables used to be paid to landlords as a form of taxation. This was the time of year when the fruit tree inventory took place and the age of trees was determined. Somehow the 16th century Kabbalists of Tsfat transformed this into a festival by accompanying their prayers with wine & fruit, and the Jewish custom of celebrating paying taxes in fresh produce was born. What, how do you pay yours?

By now Tu b’Shvat is about tree-planting and other big fans of diaspora like me will appreciate the ‘bloom where you are planted’ angle on this holiday. I’m thinking that a good Tu b’Shvat resolution for those of us lucky enough to have fruit trees would be to make sure that the fruit of our trees doesn’t go to waste. If you can not eat and preserve it all by yourself, there are organizations that will help you do so, either by turning it into jams, chutneys, leather, and pies, or by donating the fruit to folks that don’t get their recommended 2 cups of fresh per day. I’ve listed some of these orgs in the notes below this entry. And if you yourself want to engage in some ad-hoc leather and jam, in L.A. the artist collective Fallen Fruit has made maps of the city’s fruit trees that can be harvested either voluntarily or less so.

My New Year for the Trees resolution will be to make dang sure to design fruit-bearing FEMALE trees into the public space occupied by my urban projects. I hadn’t really thought about the fact that landscape architects the world over were primarily planting MALE trees in our cities until I read Thomas Leo Ogren’s essay in Actions: What You Can Do With the City. He writes, Male trees grow no fruit, seeds, or seed pods, and thus are considered “litter-free.” From a caretaking point of view they are “low maintenance.” The human health impact is that our cities are filled with highly allergenic pollen producing, sperm-spewing males. Considering that allergies now affect some 40% of all urbanites, the obvious solution to this public health threat, and one whose spinoff could create jobs and micro-economies, is not just to blame the males but to plan and plant fruit-producing female trees.

If Channukah is the Jewish holiday of Peak Oil, then surely Tu B’Shvat is the Jewish holiday of urban agriculture! In the coming period of New Austerity, I predict that Tu b’Shvat will reach unprecedented secular popularity, resonating even more than… Purim! Remember, you read it here first.

Woodcut for the month of Shvat, from the 1722 Amsterdam edition of the Book of Customs, now adapted by Scott-Martin Kosofsky, image used without permission

Tu b’Shvat according to the hive brain of Wikipedia. If nothing else, a good starting point before spiraling out of control.
I first encountered the Jewish calendar woodcuts through a Speaking of Faith radio programme about Chanukkah in which Krista Tippet interviews historian Scott-Martin Kosofsky. Kosofsky discovered a woodcut of a woman lighting a Sabbath candelabrum while paging through a Jewish encyclopedia first published in 1901. The source provided for the woodcut was Sefer Minhagim, which translates as Book of Customs. Between 1590 and 1890 dozens of editions of these books had been published, including one published in Amsterdam in 1645 that contained the woodcut and another edition published in Venice in 1593. The book was used as ‘a pocket guide to all the Jewish customs of the year’ and featured forty images: twelve of the months and their zodiac signs and twenty-eight of the major customs.

Scott-Martin Kosofsky’s The Book of Customs is a modern adaptation of the Yiddish Mihogimbukh, a guide to Jewish life originating in Venice, 1593. Included in Kosofsky’s book are original woodcut prints from several editions of the Minhogimbukh.

Scott-Martin Kosofsky’s newly adapted Book of Customs can be purchased here, here and here.

Kokopelli: Trawling for seeds? My favourite is Association Kokopelli, a non-profit organization in France, set up in 1999 to take up the torch of Terre de Semences which was forced to close down following the enforcement of a ministerial decree (issue by the French Ministry of Agriculture) imposing draconian conditions for the legal registration of heirloom vegetable varieties in a National List for Amateur Varieties. (What chutzpah!) Association Kokopelli is involved in the protection of biodiversity and in the production and distribution of biodynamic and organic seeds.

Village Harvest is a nonprofit suburban harvesting cooperative in Santa Clara Valley, California, which brings together neighbors and community organizations to provide food for the hungry, preserve our heritage and skills, and promote sustainable use of urban resources. But you can read about other organizations here and you can see a slideshow about urban gleaning here.

Artist collective Fallen Fruit were giving fruit trees away this last weekend, sorry I didn’t know about this earlier. Fallen Fruit maintain maps of urban fruit trees ripe and ready for picking in the LA area.

The Principles of Permaculture: Artists, designers, urban planners and (landscape) architects, there’s no time like the present to commit these to memory!

Want to take a certified course in Permaculture Design?
Here’s a list – for France anyway.

Wikipedia on Arbor Day in popular culture: Jews celebrate Tu Bishvat, the new year for trees, on the fifteenth day of the month of Shevat, which usually falls in January or February. Originally based on the date used to calculate the age of fruit trees for tithing as mandated in Leviticus 19:23-25, the holiday now is most often observed by planting trees, or raising money to plant trees.

At the Canadian Centre for Architecture an exhibition Actions: What You Can Do With the City is accompanied by a book of the same title, which presents original research and writing that further examines the exhibition’s exploration of how the design and experience of contemporary cities can be shaped by human actions. International in scope, the 30 essays are published for the first time and include personal observations by a range of activists alongside scholarly reflections on the positive impact these individual initiatives have on the city. The texts are interspersed with a selection of 34 specific actions drawn from the exhibition.

Introductory essays by the editors Mirko Zardini and Giovanna Borasi provide historical perspective and establish the curatorial framework for the exhibition and publication. Original essays are contributed by Jochen Becker, Vikram Bhatt, Katrin Bohn, Brendan M. Brogan, Coloco, Henk Döll, Fergus the Forager, Omar Freilla, George J. Grella Jr., Fritz Haeg, Tali Hatuka, Dan Hill, Sarah Hill, Ocean Howell, Hans Ibelings, Momoyo Kaijima, David Ker Thomson, Zoe Laughlin, Sonia Lavadinho, Nina-Marie Lister, Alejandra López, Thomas Leo Ogren, Emily Rauhala, Richard Reynolds, Debra Solomon, Yoshiharu Tsukamoto, Jeroen van Nieuwenhuizen, and Andre Viljoen.

Co-published by Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal, and SUN, Amsterdam, the catalogue is designed by Novak, Amsterdam. The 240-page, soft-cover book includes 70 colour and black and white illustrations, and features a folded poster as cover wrap. The volume is available as of 1 December 2008 at the CCA Bookstore in English and French editions for $42.95 CAD/USD ISBN: 978-0-920785-82-9.

Download the exhibition catalogue for Actions: What You Can Do With the City here. You’ll find an essay about Urban Agriculture by culiblog author and A10 author on page 188.

Allergy-free gardening: Thomas Leo Ogren’s website. A must-read for landscape architects and urban planners concerned with public health and interested in planting fruit trees in the public space.

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Cheerfully sipping from the
petri dish of life

February 4, 2009

A symbiotic colony of bacteria and yeast (aka SCOBY) fermenting a jar of sweetened tea into a healthy drink called kombucha.

Recently my possee and I attended a party at the opening of an Amsterdam design event. Free drinks were flowing because the party was heavily sponsored by a distilled beverage company whose name I forget since they don’t sponsor me. The music was rockin, the place was packed, and the lines to the free vodka cocktails were lengthy and full of elbows. More than once we had to give up on getting our group some drinks, way too much work, and we returned to our thirsty dancing.

At one point the possee went outside to evaporate and what should we find right outside the door and right in front of our noses but a bevvy of abandoned cocktails, some more, some less untouched. We looked at the glasses mostly full, mostly untouched, and the gears in our brains started to churn. I had already had a number of these vodka cocktails and I didn’t really want or need a whole one, so I reached for one of the glasses that was half full, thinking, ‘I only want a little, here’s a little, just the perfect amount for me.’

An entirely unphotogenic kombucha colony poses in the weak light of the northern winter.

Possee was shocked (as is everyone to whom I tell this story) and they prolifically wondered aloud why I didn’t just take one of the full drinks that was clearly untouched, drink a little, and leave the rest for the next Public Health Risk. I answered that I had no reason to believe that this glass was contaminated or posed any sort of threat to me. Maybe I trust the hygiene of design professionals too much, maybe I just trust my immune system too much, but I told that wall of worry lines that I felt my body was more than up to the challenge of drinking vodka out of a stranger’s glass.

One of ’em said, Where I come from we call that kind of behaviour ‘licking the pole’. Belly chuckles and guffaws all around, but that was all I needed, and done was done. No, I didn’t get sick, I never get sick, though that’s not to say this sort of behaviour is causal. And although I wash my hands with old fashioned soap when I enter my home and never touch my face with unwashed hands, there’s some part of me that thinks that bravely touching doorknobs and kissing moist-nosed Northerners 3 times on the cheeks as a greeting could be what’s keeping me healthy. Aided by my lacto-bacterial shield I just I love bacteria, and bacteria loves me.

Growing a kombucha ‘mother’ big enough to ferment 5 litres of tea.