Town of a Thousand Gardens

01/19/2022

It's always a weird disconnect to see a headline like this, because it's not surprising to see scientific methodology back up things that any yard-gardener has probably observed and known for years.
But this is a great reminder that it will take efforts on all levels and all sizes to avoid ecosystem collapse, and what you start in March or April could have a powerful impact by the end of the growing season.

Many urban gardens rich in pollinator-friendly plants and provide food all year round, find Bristol researchers

01/07/2022

Sharing good news when I see it, this time from England. With so much of humanity‘s carbon budget coming from the GHGs produced by industrial agriculture, this feels like it has wonderful potential. State governments should try this with individual homeowners (and offer these benefits to renters if the landlords are unwilling/unable to make these changes).

Nature recovery schemes are part of post-Brexit subsidies overhaul, but eco campaigners are sceptical

08/01/2021

Part of the reason to have a food forest, or really any alternative to conventional lawn, is because it creates habitat for insects. This article addresses agricultural pesticide use most directly, but the observations apply to any green space. It doesn’t need to be an exquisite pollinator garden - of course we need pollinators, but we need all the rest, too.

Bee ecologist Dave Goulson imagines a world without creeping things.

07/30/2021

This documentary “The Ants and the Grasshopper” is a part of the NHDocs film festival. It is an online screening.

The film looks at issues of climate change, food production, and gender equity from the viewpoint of a Malawian farmer. The film is on the festival circuit now so this will be, I believe, the first chance for US audiences to see it.

Anita Chitaya has a gift; she can help bring abundant food from dead soil, she can make men fight for gender equality, and she can end child hunger in her village. Now, to save her home from extreme weather, she faces her greatest challenge: persuading Americans that climate change is real. Travelin...

06/18/2021

Undoubtedly a good thing for the environment as a whole - but still very much a 20th century narrative about conservation: if we preserve enough nature in large parcels far away from home, then we earn the right to not care for our yards, our commercial and industrial land, etc.

Create a law requiring citizens in high tax brackets living in mansions on huge lots to have a certain amount of that space planted for carbon sequestration. Offer significant tax credits for middle class families to do the same in their yards. Every bit of square footage counts - even better when it’s something we interact with everyday.

Governor Ned Lamont today announced that his administration is awarding $6.2 million in funding to protect and preserve open space lands across Connecticut, including $5.5 million to support 29 grants toward the purchase of nearly 3,000 acres of land, plus an additional 5 grants totaling more than $...

06/03/2021

Presumably if you’re following this page you have some sense of urgency about the climate crisis. I believe headlines like the below are not for people like us.

While I don’t disagree with the content, this framing suggests to me that we need to keep looking for the silver bullet that will help offset our carbon emissions, as if there is one single thing we could do with enough resources that could accomplish that.

This is representative of a frankly outdated idea about climate conservation that needs to be left in the past. If we are conserving distant parcels of land but punishing the bits we walk on every day, then nothing changes fundamentally. And where do you find a parcel of land the size of China anyway?

Rather than thinking in large scale, the answer feels closer at hand by looking at replication rather than scale. Ten people each rewilding one tenth of an acre in their own spaces feels more attainable than finding a one acre parcel and doing it all at once. But the end result is still one more wild acre. Mix with agroforestry and you get both a habitat and food. This seems easier to fund as well.

The ‘decade on ecosystem restoration’ launches with a call for ‘imagination’ and action on never-before-seen scale

05/08/2021

Nice to see the concept of food forests getting more attention! Don’t you think Hamden should have at least one of these?

There are more than 70 ‘food forests’ in the US as part of a growing movement to tackle food insecurity and promote urban agriculture

04/15/2021

If you are looking to take some of the guesswork out of plant selection, and support a local CT business, check out CTSeedlings, a CSA for home gardeners! They're selling hand-grown, curated packs of seedlings in various themes!

a CSA for the home gardener exciting varieties lovingly grown seedlings expert advice A CSA just for home gardeners. We offer healthy seedlings grown with all natural and sustainable methods and materials. Our plants are thoughtfully curated into collections that are accessible for all experience le...

10/12/2020

One of the chief motivators of this project is biodiversity - but it can be hard to understand the significance of biodiversity unless if you’ve spent a lot of time observing within an ecosystem. This sobering report estimates that half of the world’s GDP depends on healthy ecosystems, which a majority of current business practices do not seem to account for. To us as individuals, it seems impossible to make an impact on the global scale of things, but if even at the town level a small percentage of residents approached their yard as a food forest, thereby creating micro-level climate shifts and producing sustenance for both them and native fauna, we would have more resilience against this kind of threat. This project is focusing on municipal property for now, but if you have interest in this kind of planting in your yard or green space, please get in touch!

Trillions of dollars of GDP depend on biodiversity, according to Swiss Re report

10/05/2020

Hi all - Take a look at the Beacon Food Forest, which has been running for close to 8 years. I had a great and productive conversation with Carla from this project, which is an open-harvest food forest in Seattle, WA. While they’re working on a scale closer to 2 acres rather than the mini-Food Forests this project is starting with, it was still fantastic and super helpful to talk to them about logistics.

We highly encourage sustainable transporation methods such as bussing. The Sound Transit Link Light Rail as well as King County Metro routes #50, #60, and #36 are all within walking distance to the Beacon Food Forest Site. Plan your trip with King County Metro Plan your trip with OneBusAway

09/14/2020

Who will take care of the gardens?

This is a common question I have received in a number of forms over the last few months of working on this project. It’s an understandable one; I’m talking about Food Forests, and permaculture, and a handful of other buzzwords that seem to fill people with some combination of terror, hope, and confusion; I’m talking about thinking of the span of 5-10 years instead of the summer annual gardens most people are used to; and sometimes, I’m talking about the bigger social specters that hang over this work, like food insecurity and climate change. To me, these last two seem like obvious reasons to commit to this endeavor. But I have no guarantee that you reading this will feel the same way, or will give you the time or energy to spring out of your living spaces and jump into a project like this feet first. That’s OK!

While trying to navigate the political and fiscal hurdles of this process, I am also thinking about stewardship. If you want a town with a thousand gardens, you need at least a thousand stewards of those gardens, to ensure they remain healthy and productive. How do you get there?

I am trying to secure funding for the formal creation of a stewardship program. This would help to train 1-2 dedicated stewards per location of the pilot garden program - paying them a small stipend to participate, as well as funding multiple workshops over the course of the first year, taught by experts in permaculture, urban agriculture, and experts in related fields. Stewards would also help to perform regular garden maintenance, and would hopefully be committed for a minimum of one full season of planting and growing. Stewards will finish the year with a wide survey of food forest and permaculture techniques, and hands on experience with a variety of gardening techniques and management ideas.

So in response to the first question - Who will take care of the gardens? The answer could be you!

08/29/2020

Perspective - a storm brings us a ton of downed trees and scrap wood. Do we view it as a nuisance, and lament the town’s inability to clean it up endlessly? Or do we use it as a resource for future planting?

Hamden CT, where we live, has been hit with two fairly major storm events over the last three weeks, both causing massive tree damage and power outages in Hamden and nearby towns. With the town in a...