Rainwater Talk Friday April 24, and Demonstration Saturday April 25, Sierra Madre

This will be essentially the same talk I gave on Monday, but with an emphasis on Sierra Madre's water issues. If you missed Monday's class, this is the best way to make it up. You are welcome to come to the demo on Saturday, but we will have to do a quick turnaround to get to Garden Garden in Santa Monica.
Details at Native Sanctuary

Link Goodness: Water etc.

Recent water links:

• Almonds in California: They use up a lot of water, but they deserve a place in California’s future.
  California's wealthy lagging in water conservation - LA Times

• California Urban Water Use Restricted While Regulators Give Oil Industry Two More Years To Operate Injection Wells In Protected Groundwater Aquifers | naked capitalism
  
• Climate change and the growing risk of “megadroughts” in California and the southwestern United States
  
• Dew collecting greenhouse to fight water and food scarcity in Ethiopia : TreeHugger
  
• Half of urban California’s water is used to water the grass - MarketWatch
  How you might be contributing to California’s water woes - The Washington Post
  
• In California, a Wet Era May Be Ending - NYTimes.com
  
• Nestlé has been pumping water from a national forest with an expired permit for over 25 years
  
• Nestlé’s despicable water-crisis profiteering: How it’s making a killing — while California is dying of thirst - Salon.com
  
• This roadkill map says a lot about California’s drought | Grist
  

   

  Compost and other links:

• 42 Flowers You Can Eat : TreeHugger
  
• Beyond Compost: 5 Ways to Get Your Soil Ready This Spring by Peter D'Auria and Miles Schneiderman — YES! Magazine
  
• Compost tea calculator includes recipes and guides for brewing your own fertilizers : TreeHugger
  
• Compost Tea Recipe
  
• From Watersheds to Mountains, What If We Based Our Borders on Nature? by Rachael Stoeve — YES! Magazine
  
  
• How to Grow Oyster Mushrooms at Home (and Get Plenty of Flavor and Protein for Free) by YES! editors — YES! Magazine
  
• Plant this with that: The science and folklore of companion planting — Homestead — Bangor Daily News — BDN Maine
  

Greener Gardens Reading List Weeks One and Two

Overview of Sustainability and Gardening:

 Small Is Beautiful: Economics As If People Mattered, Schumacher, E. F., ©1973 Blond & Briggs. This classic inspired much of the current thinking in sustainability. Although it does not relate directly to gardening, it explains the basis of the idea of natural capital. E.F Schumacher Society website: http://www.smallisbeautiful.org. Their resource page is comprehensive.

 The Natural Step Story, Robert, Karl-Henrik, © 2002 New SocietyPublishers. Not a gardening book, this book details how Robert obtained general agreement on ecological change in Sweden, as well as a statement of the four conditions of sustainability discussed in our first meeting.

Lazy-Bed Gardening: The Quick and Dirty Guide, Jeavons, John and Cox, Carol, ©1992 Ten Speed Press. A more accessible book than Jeavons’ “How to Grow More Vegetables: etc.” Written by pioneers in the U.S. of Biodynamic French-Intensive gardening, it tells how to create fertility on a closed-system basis, that is without inputs, by growing both calorie crops for humans and carbon crops for compost.

The Contrary Farmer, Logsdon, Gene, ©1995 Chelsea Green, and The Contrary Farmer’s Invitation to Gardening, ibid. How to garden (and farm) with the least effort and inputs possible, by someone who has been farming all his life, and fighting big ag at the same time. All of his books are excellent.  Gene has a blog at http://thecontraryfarmer.wordpress.com/.

The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural, Wendell Berry, ©1981, San Francisco North Point. This prolific writer and farmer articulated the problems of the loss of small farms and the tragedy of large ones while ag policy was changing to ‘get big or get out.’

Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods, Nabhan, Gary Paul, © 2002, W.W. Norton. One of the original books on eating local which inspired many others, including Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Vegetable Miracle. All of his books are worth reading.

Eat More Dirt: Diverting and Instructive Tips for Growing and Tending an Organic Garden, Sandbeck, Ellen, © 2003 Broadway Books. This small book tells how to actually accomplish the act of gardening, including how to use tools, how to move big rocks, and why herbicide doesn’t work on concrete.

Square Foot Gardening and All New Square Foot Gardening, Bartholomew, Mel, © 1981 Rodale and © 2013 Cool Springs. Not an overview book, but specific instructions for small-space gardening.

Sustainable Landscaping for Dummies, Dell, Owen, © 2009 For Dummies. Dell has been telling the truth about the impacts and inputs of gardening for a long time. 

A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil, Astyk, Sharon and Newton, Aaron, © 2009, New Society Publishers. Explores the world food crisis and why
big conventional ag can't solve it.

Braiding Sweetgrass, Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 2014 Milkweed Editions. Kimmerer, a Native American biologist, weaves together two ways of knowing the earth. Also, Kimmerer's article on Yes! Magazine, Nature Needs a new Pronoun.

Mother Earth News: The Original Guide to Living Wisely, Periodical, Ogden Publications.

Grist.org, Environmental news website. Mostly policy.
Treehugger.com  Lighter environmental news, fun gadgets.
Yes! Magazine Stories of positive change.
Orion Magazine Deep thinking about nature and environmental issues.

 

 

David's Background Bibliography for Sustainability

Deep Economy, The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, McKibben, Bill, ©2007 Times Books Want a dose of hope? Here. McKibben has delved into a variety of alternative choices to find examples of human civilizations that actually approach creating a viable economy and lifestyle that considerably reduce man’s impact on the world.  Like most of the books following, this is not strictly a book on sustainability, in the main, - however, this is one of the MOST hopeful books that brings some of these issues to light.  One thing rings through out this book:  community is key to many of the answers of the future.

Easy Green Living, Loux, Renée ©2008, Rodale Inc. Breeziness belying a difficult resource book that will help you shop through the sustainable hype. A compendium of little helpful hints (the Heloise of our time?) and deciphering clues of labels and claims. She covers everything from the bathroom to light bulbs and beyond, helping delineate what the labels mean with all those fifteen syllable words on them.  However, this book like all the other books in this vein are limited by what we know today - the solution we learn tomorrow may well contradict the solution we applaud to day.  Still, we have to start where we are now - we really can't start anywhere else! 

Kitchen Literacy, Vileisis, Ann, ©2008 Island Press, Along the lines of the Pollan books, Vileisis brings us back to the knowledge every cook had in days before we let the ‘experts’ and the government tell us what to eat and why. Turns out it was better for us and for the earth.  This book is the history of eating dinner in America.  It also reflects on woman's role in society and the evolution of that role by virtue of how our lives have changed as regards to eating and effort of putting food on the table. 

Out of the Earth: Civilization and the Life of the Soil, Hillel, Daniel,

© 1992, University of California Press, There has been a recent spate of books on soil in the past ten years.  Preceding this glut by almost ten years, Hillel wrote the best of the lot - all the others are second rate.  Not to say they don't have a story to tell, but Hillel's book is not only science, but reads at times like poetry and his love of the subject is steeped in a deep knowledge that encourages affection and respect.  There is no other book on soil that teaches so much about soil with a deep spirituality and yet is science-based and science driven.  I truly love this book and it has been an inspiration for many years.

The Unsettling of America:  Culture and Agriculture, Berry Wendell, ©1997, Sierra Club Books,  Anything by Wendell Berry is worth reading.  Everything from Wendell Berry can be life-changing.  Wendell Berry, quirky and profound, looks at the world with a lens many of us only aspire to.  His writing is eloquent, his thinking eclectic.  Of the authors that have been instrumental in bringing me to where I am today, Berry is the one whose ability to see a much larger picture is the most constant and his range of vision deeper than anyone I can name at this moment. 

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Kingsolver, Barbara et al © 2007 Harper Collins, When less is really more. Kingsolver and her family agree to eat only foods produced within 100 miles of their West Virginia home (everyone was allowed one exception and her husband chose coffee marking him as a sensible man) for one year. The story of how they did it and the results they achieved makes delightful reading and food for thought. One of the easiest books to read on this list, not only is it inspirational and a harbinger of hope, there are some passages that I recall as being some of the funniest stuff I've read in a while.  I still can be doubled over by someone with a thick Italian accent saying, "the seeds, senora, are in the squash!"
 
The Live Earth Global Warming Survival Handbook, De Rothschild, David, ©2007, Rodale Inc. A lot of statistics that just overwhelm a person, but a viable list of Things To Do Today and beyond. Probably one of the more easily digested books of this contemporary genre. The most sustainable thing to do, however, is to get it from the library.  (That holds true for all these books.)

The Lost Language of Plants, Buhner, Stephen Harrod, ©2002 Chelsea Green Publishing,  Humans getting well should not get the earth sick. This is the ecological ‘why’ of alternative medicine, but be warned, you will never look as a fashionable layer of mascara the same way again either! Buhner's message is critical and crucial.  This work shows that how we think about the earth and our relationship to it absolutely needs a comprehensive overhaul in ways most of us have yet to imagine.  I think Buhner's writing is a little obtuse, but he is the only one out there with THIS message and it must be heard.

Reading List Week Two: Books About Sustainable Design Principles

Principles of Ecological Design, Ludwig, Art, ©1989 Oasis Design, oasisdesign.net. This short manual gives rules for ecological design that are both simple and profound. An excellent companion to his other books which deal with greywater and water storage.

Gaia’s Garden, Hemenway, Tony, © 2000 Chelsea Green. This is the most accessible book about Permaculture for gardeners, especially for the West Coast. Directly applicable.

Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, Holmgren, David, © 2002, Holmgren Design Services. A more theoretical approach to sustainable design concepts.

Permaculture: A Designers' Manual, Mollison, Bill, © 1988 Tagari Publications. This comprehensive book is the textbook for the Permaculture Design class. A reference for those who have already been introduced to the principles, as well as a dual duty doorstop and blunt instrument :-). It is on this list for the sake of comprehensiveness, not because we expect you to read it. Mollison's out of print Permaculture One is much more accessible.

Design with Nature, McHarg, Ian, © 1982 John Wiley and Sons, Inc. This book is more a lanscape-level and regional-planning book, but has beautiful graphics and exposition about where to site projects. This book addresses the too-rarely asked question, “where is this project?” when designing.

The Power of Limits: Proportional Harmonies in Nature, Art and Architecture, Gyorgy Doczi, © 1981 Shambhala Publications, Inc. How the Fibonacci sequence and other aspects of the golden mean underlie proportions in nature, and how this has been used historically in good design.

Fukuoka Farming Bibliography

One Straw Revolution, An Introduction to Natural Farming, Fukuoka, Masanobu ©2009, a reissue of his 1978 classic, Fukuoka's first book on his extensive work in Japan. Decidedly with a Japanese bent (his main crop is rice and barley), he still presents a lovely description of his farming efforts that began as a reaction to the Western idea of agriculture and more that began to infiltrate Japanese society in the 1930's. His work continued until his death in 2008 (at 95).  His grain raising techniques became THE grain raising techniques in permaculture.

The Natural Way of Farming: The Theory and Practice of Green Philosophy, Fukuoka, Masanobu © 1985 Also out of print. And expensive. ($61, used on Amazon) Can be downloaded as a PDF, I had success at this site, but I do not warranty it to be 100% safe from commercial interests. 

The Road Back to Nature, Fukuoka, Masanobu © 1988 Out of print, but you can find copies reasonably priced on eBay, used copies are almost $70 from Amazon. From the back cover: Fukuoka's reflections on his trips to Europe and to America, his sense of shock at seeing the destruction wreaked in the name of agriculture. A collection of his lectures, articles and essays which outline his thinking on nature, God and man and his underlying optimism that good sense can still prevail and we can still turn it all around. This is a collection of articles, lectures and essays recording his impressions as he travels the world talking about his revolutionary 'do-nothing' agricultural methods. There is a spiritual side to a lot of his thoughts and an optimism that a change in lifestyles and farming methods could yet heal the Earth's wounds.

Fundamental Realities, an article by Hazelip, Emilia was found at the Fukuoka Farming Website – but as of this writing that website is no longer in existence.  However, You Tube has several videos with Hazelip describing how she has adapted Fukuoka's principles to a Western market garden.

Greener Gardens Syllabus 2015 **Revised**

Course Name, Units Greener Gardens: Sustainable Garden Practice, 4 units

Req # 2455538

Course Number X498.10

Quarter, Year Spring, 2015

Course Information:

Location: Classroom, The Learning Garden, 13000 Venice Blvd. campus of Venice High School (enter off of Walgrove Avenue);

Dates: Monday, March 31 – June 09, 2014, Mon, 6:30-9:30 PM

Field Trip Dates: Saturday, April 18, 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM

Saturday, April 25, 1:00 PM to 4:00 PM

Saturday, May 09, 9:00 AM to 1:00 PM

Instructors:  Orchid Black and David King

Instructors Information:

Name: Orchid Black/David King

Email: >>>redacted<<< (available in class) 

Email Policy: We will have no set office hours, however, we will be available by phone and by email. We are willing to meet with students by appointment.

David King is a noted Los Angeles food gardener with over 40 years of experience. He has served on the board of the American Community Gardening Association and the California School Gardening Advisory Board. His first book, Growing Food In Southern California is due out later this year. He is the director of The Learning Garden and the Founding Chair of The Seed Library of Los Angeles, and co-founder of Seed Freedom – LA, the group spear-heading the anti-GMO ordinance in Los Angeles.

Orchid Black is a garden designer and owner of Native Sanctuary which offers native plant consulting, habitat creation and sustainable design services. Orchid’s gardens have been featured on the Theodore Payne Foundation’s garden tour. Orchid writes and lectures about native horticulture, water-saving strategies, and sustainable gardening.

Course Description:

Sustainability is today's buzzword and many people seek to create a lifestyle with a more favorable impact on the environment. From home gardens to school and commercial sites, our gardens present the perfect place to start. Designed for horticulture students, gardening professionals, educators, and home gardeners, this course focuses on turning your green thumb into a "greener" garden. Topics include composting, irrigation, water harvesting, water wise plants, eating and growing local produce, recycling, and moving towards a sustainable lifestyle when choosing materials and tools. Includes weekend field trips to the Los Angeles River to see our relationship with water in the L.A. Basin, as well as a native garden with sustainable features, focusing not only on California native plants but also on water-conserving planting design. Students also visit the John T. Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies at Cal Poly Pomona, which advances the principles of environmentally sustainable living through education, research, demonstration, and community outreach. This course will enable students to understand and appreciate the changes we will need to make in our gardens to achieve ‘sustainability.’ A multitude of differing strategies will be presented allowing students to choose the extent of their involvement with more sustainable gardens and, ultimately, a more sustainable life style.

Course Objectives/Learning Outcomes:

At the end of this course, students will:

• Understand the concept of sustainability and its relevance to the modern garden.
• The reasons to consider sustainability.
• Be able to use the concept of sustainability in the creation of a garden and its maintenance.
• Understand and be able to present to others the concepts and ideas of sustainability and the myriad of alternatives to an overly consumptive garden style.
• Learning Objective

Course Resources

This course will not have a text. There will be an extensive bibliography from which the material presented has been gleaned; some books more practical, some theoretical, while others present our current situation and the problems that affect our daily lives and the gardens we grow.

Course Overview

This course is designed to be practical. Upon completion, students will be able to employ many different strategies to reduce consumption of water and oil-produced products and create beautiful and productive gardens that comprise a much smaller carbon footprint than most contemporary gardens.

For this course we will utilize a blog page (lagardennotes.blogspot.com) to post handouts and extra material to the class. There is an RSS feed that sends each posting automatically to your email so you can have access to handouts whenever they are posted. This approach is most handy when dealing with field trips because links to maps can be posted and any last minute updates are easily available. If this technology is new to you, another classmate or David will guide you through it. It is not difficult.

Those of you on Facebook, there is the “Greener Gardens” group. While not specifically composed of UCLA Extension students, it includes students from David's classes with some talented professional contributors. Handouts are posted there as PDF files. Occasional job offers and other items of interest are posted as well.

Course and Extension Policies

Grading: All grades except Incomplete are final when filed by the instructor of record in an end-of-term course report. No change of grade may be made on the basis of reassessment of the quality of a student's work. No term grade except Incomplete may be revised by re-examination.

Refunds: Refund requests will be accepted until the close of business on the final refund date, which is printed on your enrollment receipt.

Changes in Credit Status and Withdrawals: Students may petition the Registration office for changes to credit status, or to withdraw from classes, prior to the administration of the final examination. (After the midpoint of the course, a change in credit status to one requiring assessment of student work will be permitted only with the endorsement of the instructor-in-charge.) Under no circumstances may a change in credit status or withdrawal be approved for a student who has sat for a final examination.

Cheating: UCLA Extension students are subject to disciplinary action for several types of academic and related personal misconduct, including but not limited to the following enumeration promulgated under Regental authority.

“Dishonesty, such as cheating, multiple submission, plagiarism, or knowingly furnishing false information to the University. Theft or misuse of the intellectual property of others, or violation of others' copyrights.”

Sanctions may include Warning; Censure; Suspension; Interim Suspension; Dismissal; and Restitution.

Absences: If you must miss class please notify us as soon as possible. Make up work will be penalized as late. More than 3 absences in a quarter may result in a failing grade.

Your grade will be predicated on class participation and your choice of one project (or a combination of one of each for extra credit should it be needed or desired) or one paper of no less than 5 pages on aspects of sustainability; topics and project possibilities will be discussed in class. We encourage students to use their own area of interests when choosing their project or topic.

Grading:

Your grade will be based on the following: Your grade will be calculated using the following scale:

Component		Points
Attendance		25%
Participation		35%
Final Project		40%
Total		100%
Grade	Percentage Scale
A	100-93%
A-	92-90%
B+	89-87%
B	86-83%
B-	82-80%
C+	79-77%
C	76-70%
D	69-60%
F	59%

Miscellaneous Information:

The room where we meet has no reliable source of heat therefore we suggest you dress in layers. It is wise to carry a flashlight as well; the lighting leaves somewhat to be desired.

There is no place to purchase anything drinks or snacks nearby. We will have coffee and/or tea if desired. Classes held at the garden in the past have enjoyed a range of homemade snacks from the instructors and/or other students.

Schedule:

Session + Date	Topic	Notes
30 March	Introduction to Sustainability
06 April	Design for Conservation of Resources
18 April	Lyle Center for Regenerative Studies	Field Trip with Lyle Center Faculty
13 April	Soils	Bring soil sample from your garden.
20     April	Water I: Water Conservation	Preliminary discussion of paper/project choice
25 April	Garden/Garden and The Learning Garden	Afternoon Field Trip
27 May	Water II: Water Harvesting
04 May	Sustainability of Front Yard Food
09 May	LA River	Field Trip
11 May	Sustainable Planting Palette	Project completion benchmark
18 May	Habitat and Hardscape
01 June	Sustainable Gardening: The Next Frontier

david

LA Marathon Tomorrow!

Tomorrow is LA's Marathon (in this heat!).  This year's marathon will not impact the class directly, but I thought I'd post this here as a public service.  Note that freeway travelers remain unaffected by the marathon so a very good action plan in LA on Marathon Sunday is to get on the freeway as soon as you can and exit closest to your destination.  

More info at this link!  

See you tomorrow with our guest instructor, Katarina Eriksson! 

david

Time Change!

Hello students...

Want to remind you that the powers that be want our clocks to go forward this weekend!  So make your changes or you'll be late to class!  

We will stay with grafting and I will move the California Native class to the last week; this week still bring your knives (we'll also resharpen them!) - we will at least graft one apple - maybe two.  It looks like our east coast trial varieties won't come until AFTER class is over.  I'm not sure what I want to do about that.  Perhaps those that choose to can purchase their own root stock and once I have the scions, come by and pick them up and graft them either with me or on their own.  We'll discuss in class what would work the best for you all.

That's a scion in my mought,
I did not take up smoking again!

Notes on seed starting and flower morphology will be post tomorrow I believe.  They need cleaning up before posting and I've been so swamped!  (It's all good!)

david - more soon!

Whetting Your Appetite For Some Apple Grafting

Those of you who made it to the CA Rare Fruit Growers meeting on the 14th got a real treat.  Several grafts were demonstrated with many talented and good experts in attendance.

A word in defense of the Swiss Army Knives that the one grafter was so adamantly against: both the current president and past president of the chapter swear by the Swiss Army knives as much as I do.  If any of you go into grafting professionally you might want to consider a more expensive knife, Tina is a good brand name, but expect to pay up to four times more for a Tina than a Swiss Army knife and not one has ever closed on the fingers of any one I know.  Although I do love the Opinel knife as well - and while it does have a wonderful locking mechanism, I have found it broken many times when I have loaned my knife to someone who does not appreciated that feature.  They've been able to close it, not on their fingers, thank God, without too much difficulty.

As in all things, "your mileage may vary."

A Good Interview 

As we learned on Saturday, this is a less-desirable graft
that is usually found on commercially produced trees.

From Seed Savers Exchange, here is an interview with their head orchardist for their heirloom apple collection.  

http://awaytogarden.com/antique-apples-dan-bussey-seed-savers-exchange/

In Other News
I was able to order about $50 worth of "Warm Season" Apples from the east coast.  Some of these ought to do well here while others will be somewhat unhappy in our climate.  But, we won't know until we try. SO, the great experiment is on!  Each of you will get to graft one or more "regular apple" - from my howling deficit a couple of weeks ago has come a plethora of varieties.  I have a couple of Braeburns and Fugis, I have a bag of Gordons and I have a bag of White Pearmain.  From those, each of you will make two grafts - you may choose which kind of grafts you make - they must be different.

And then I have these from Big Horse Creek Farm, from which you may choose one and take that one home, if you are able. It would please me greatly if you would send an email reporting on the tree once in a while - especially if the tree does really well!  I also want to know the ones that don't do that well.  We are building a database on these trees. You may use the grafting tool on these if you wish.  Look up their descriptions of each apple on the web site (above) and make a couple of choices - there will only be ONE scion of each variety listed below.

The List: 
Brushy Mt. Limbertwig
Carolina Red June
Cauley
Cranberry of North Georgia
Crow Egg 
Horse
Keener Seedling
King Luscious
Mattamuskeet 
Summer Champion 
Whiter Winter Permaiin (we have 12 more of these)
Yellow Bellflower 

We will be grafting on March first.  Seeds are this Sunday's topic.

david

Addendum 18 February 2015:  This is some excellent reading to add to your list, A Radical Orchardist?  A little off our topics, but definitely worth the time to read!