Do AND talk
May 6, 2011
Some folks are all talk and no do, but this last year, I’ve been all do and no talk. Apologies for my extended absence and may this post mark a movement towards striking a balance between the two.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
debra at 21:32 | Comments (1) | post to del.icio.us
The citron,
Il cedro,
Sunshine of my resolutions
January 12, 2011
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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.
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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.
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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!
debra at 13:51 | Comments (8) | post to del.icio.us
Pissin’ about, the re-blog…
September 16, 2010
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Didn’t go to the farmers’ market this Saturday
(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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
Online version of the Humanure Handbook by Joseph Jenkins, humanure expert
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The tomato that keeps on giving
debra at 19:01 | Comments (6) | post to del.icio.us
