May, as it is.

This is a group of images portraying my homestead in rural Virginia. These images encapsule a moment, namely Tuesday, May 19th around 6:15pm. They are not curated, or styled, or filtered. They do not fit neatly into a before/after dichotomy (oh, internet,) since they are all after something and before something else. They portray the real, live mess of ongoing projects, the fury of spring, and the sigh of fading light. They show the moment when two springtime hands and two springtime feet stand before all there is to do, grow fresh calluses and curse the idle hands of winter, who did the devils work of wild ambition. But the curse is a laughing one and a loving one and our backs and shoulders and arms are waking up, stretching, growing stronger. Sometimes we stagger at all there is to do but have to remind each other of all we've accomplished in the first month of spring.

 Junk-pile spray-paint glory.

 clay and rust

 new sink holder born of a old restaurant booth, a sink from a dumpster, and the hands and minds of some rad friends who visited along their way from Nola to Maine. 

 the labyrinth, for full moon walks. 

 cherry babies

 implements.

 BONZO AY MAN WASS HAPPENIN' MAN.

 Three little pigs, and the difference between they pen they inhabit and the area they'll expand into, they have been busy.

 a lawn ornament.

 locust babe, I planted you.

A lovely place to come do some deep sneezing.

There it is, a day in May. Thanks for taking a peek, friends. If you want to come and visit, please do. Especially if you are handy with tools or plants. Especially if you're in a city and want to come out for some quiet, some work, some whiskey and fire.

Also, a little note, friends and readers, remember to check your selves, your partners, your kids for ticks. It's real out there!

Tricycle Gardens Headquarters

Eek! Lauren's first blog post ever. I've been thinking about this whole blog thing for the last couple months and how much I've been slackin'. Kate's African adventures look so awesome and inspirational!

I've been living in Richmond, VA since October doing an winter internship with an urban farm in the city. Below is a picture of the Tricycle Gardens headquarters located in the Church Hill community of Richmond, VA.

Tricycle Gardens has a diverse presence in the Richmond area; growing and sharing food with residents, engaging the community with open-door policies to their demonstration gardens, creating community garden spaces, and helping increase food accessibility. And what an awesome and empowered group of people driving these tasks: Sally, Danny, Isabel, and Josh are a four person unstoppable force.

One of the first days I got to Richmond I followed Danny, the organization's handy man, around headquarters pestering him with questions.

"We're all sort of amateurs at this, city people that have these ideas on how to grow food," he says as his long white hair blows in the breeze. Every time I see him he is wearing incredibly comfortable-looking knit sweaters. He has the look of an artist more than a farmer, but his appearance and demeanor, like most everything else at Tricycle, is simple, artistic, and disarming. Farming at Tricycle is not an overly complicated affair. There's no concern with soil cation exchanges and weather degree days. Rather, it finds its comfort in making food accessible by incorporating it into the Richmond cityscape in aesthetically pleasing ways.

Above, Danny works on building another pallet compost bin. In the city, pallets are ubiquitous and make great composting heaps. Pallet compost design plans are almost as plentiful. At Tricycle they are often lined with chicken wire on the inside and have removable fronts for easy unloading. Ideally, plant material should be composted at a C:N ratio of 30:1. This can be achieved by layering equal parts green with brown. Green material includes kitchen scraps, freshly pulled non-seeding weeds, grass clippings, etc. For the brown, Tricycle uses leaves raked from under the trees surrounding the property, although dead stalks and wood chips work, too.

The garden at headquarters offers a solution to a common problem in urban farming: working in small spaces with contaminated or otherwise unusable soil. Built on an old gas station, the tanks that once held gasoline are still buried below the surface. Though mulch and gravel line the lot, all planting is done above ground.

"I am really interested in small space maximization," he says as we walk around the garden, which looks to be sprouting the city skyline overhead. Noting the keyhole gardens (right, above), sub-irrigated planters, greenhouse, and experimental raised beds (center bed made from sand bags, above), I realize just how much this city lot has been transformed. Even the GoogleEarth photo has not yet been updated from the bare asphalt it showed years before. My head can't stop nodding in agreement.

Below on the left is a basic cardboard model of the greenhouse. I believe it was designed after Will Allen's Growing Power operation  in Milwaukee (www.growingpower.org), the Elliot Coleman of urban farmers. The floor is made of crushed gravel and covers pipes which carry solar-heated water through the floor for supplemental heating in winter. Danny reports mixed reviews on its effectiveness. Though the structure would probably still be stable using less building materials, I like the extra storage space created above the seeding racks (on right).

Here are other pictures taken around headquarters:

Inside office looking out

Thursday's Farm Stand

Inside Headquarters

More pictures to come soon from the urban plot located in Richmond's southside and from the healing garden at the Bon Secour's Memorial hospital in Mechanicsville, VA.

Guié: Part 2

Hello again, this post is the second in the Guié series- Here's the first if you missed it. I want to just delve a little deeper into the work there and share some of the function stacking and some analysis of their work and systems. 

First off, it's worth mentioning that I was very very impressed with the caliber of the people out there and their work. The Pilot Farm at Guié is a part of a larger effort - AZN- Association inter-village Zoramb Naagtaaba- which brings together ten villages (such collaboration is quite rare and took a long time to get off the ground) and whose work includes -in addition to the farm- an orphanage and centers for education and health care, as well as the directing of the organization and it's administrative side. Each day, visitors come from other villages and regions, Ouagadougou, and Europe and the world to tour the place and see how it's done. The staff is young, highly committed to their work and lots of fun to be around. 

My friends and me in our shared courtyard in the morning. These guys work in all aspects of the organization AZN.

Paul Kibsa looks pretty happy though he doesn't like washing clothes. He works with the young people here, training them in sustainable food systems and regular school subjects like math and grammar. 

The bocage stacks so many functions- soil retention, water retention, leaf litter and mulching, windbreak, timber, food production, aesthetics, temperature and carbon mitigation... that it's really more of a design paradigm than a design element. You don't hear the word "permaculture" daily here (though some of the staff is really interested in it) but a look at the systems shows a thoughtful observation and interpretation of natural systems, recreated to retain and accumulate energy, cycle nutrients, and self-regulate with flexibility. 

In the big picture, the folks at Terre Vert are working to bring back the vegetation that holds the earth and water together in this vulnerable landscape. This is to counteract the attitude of taking from the land without putting anything back. When you bring cattle to a place one day and leave it the next, you're not replanting what the cows ate, and that bare soil is easily washed away, leaving behind the lower layers which lack organic matter and the capacity to hold water.

so the desert spreads.

So the ethos at Terre Verte is one of stewardship and the daily work is revegetation. Another strong component is one of outreach… Each year, Terre Verte helps folks from the villages set up productive fields and potager gardens with gifts of fences, labor, and advice. They also offer a special discount to people from the ten villages at their wonderful plant nursery- in french, la pépinière - in an effort to encourage, share, and dissipate this concept of le bocage. 

Daily watering sets the rhythm of work à la pépinière

Blandine shared her plant knowledge with me generously and patiently answered my ten thousand questions.
One of four full-time employees there, she and her daughter Brigitte spend their days in the nursery starting seeds.

AZN hosts a contest each year- the village family with the most productive bocage/Zai field wins a motorcycle. I think that's rad. I'd like to see more motorcycles in the sustainable food realm at home… that is an edge worth working. 

Training young people in sustainable food systems: Here we are vaccinating chickens against Newcastle disease.

Apart from that, there are a thousand little details I could share. Each day something impressed me that I wouldn't have thought of. For example, when digging a trench to plant a haie vive, you put the top layer of soil on one side and the deeper, less rich layer on the other. But instead of putting it back the way they found it- like any good double digger- you put the rich topsoil on the bottom, and mix compost into the more sparse soil to form an even richer soil for the top. Why didn't I think of that? Keep up the good work, y'all.

Baby baobabs à la pépinière.

Terre Verte Guié- Holistic Systems Overview

Greetings from the Land of Men of Integrity (pays des Hommes integres.) I'm here at a pilot farm called Terre Verte (green earth) in a beautiful village called Guié in Burkina Faso, West Africa. This place is pretty amazing. Over the past thirty years, the Sahel has seen systematically worsening conditions of drought and dryness. The the folks at Terre Verte cite bush fires, overgrazing, cutting too much wood, and “mining agriculture” as factors that encourage the encroaching desert and make the landscape increasingly vulnerable... which leads to drought, loss of biodiversity to extinction, and famine.

Trench to plant a  haie vive, living fence

Here at Terre Verte, the main focus is on ways to conserve water and sediment in the landscape, preventing the erosion that accelerates the processes of desertification. This is done largely through the installation of mad windbreak hedgerows, or Wégoubri in the local tongue here called Mooré, or Le Perimetre Bocage in French. Almost every building, pathway, and garden plot here is lined with a row of Cassia sieberiana. I was shocked by the volume of C. sieberiana starts in the nursery, it's really a large focus of Terre Verte's approach. The concept haie vivre- living hedge- comes from Europe and was brought by Henri Girard, who started the farm here, but it goes along with the practices that were in place here before the period of "mining agriculture" began.

So now you're picturing large fields, each surrounded by a living hedge. They also have large berms around the perimeter to protect against and control brush fires, which can be wildly destructive. At the lowest point in every field, theres a small pond to retain water and  berms built up around it a little wider with the extra earth.  During the rainy season, the hole fills up with water and floods up to the berms, forming a stock that's used for watering until it's all gone. 

Diagrams credited to AZN

Okay, so now picture a row of trees running down the midline of the field. This provides shade for families working in the fields, where children can play or rest while parents work, and also helps prevent erosion. These trees are also productive: including Karite (which we know as shea, a la shea butter) fig, mango, guava, Moringa (an excellent tree which I'll probably post about) and tons of others. 

So, that should leave two large open sunny area's in the picture in your mind's eye. These are the main productive areas and are cultivated using a method called Zai holes. About a foot in diameter and half a foot in depth, Zai holes concentrate fertility and aeration for planting. This is a traditional method here in Burkina and the word Zai is Mooré but the technique has been widely adapted throughout Africa because it works. Composted manure is added to the holes well in advance of the rainy season. Then after a good rain, you can plant- usually millet or sorghum and about 3 seeds per hole. 

100 hectares is about 247.1 acres. It's critical to be
able to implement these systems at this large scale.

That is essentially the system. Weeding is minimal because weeds only grow within the Zai holes…but it's important. When the millet is about calf-high, we bring in animals, who eat down the plants and then they come back more vigorous. The grains are the first year rotation, then the second year, it's des legumineuses: sesame, beans or peanuts to fix nitrogen. (I'd always wondered about sesame the plant, I only hear about the seed and the oil. Photo on the right is the dried seed pod from the plant. I thought it was beautiful.) After the nitrogen fixing round, the third year the field is left fallow to rest and regenerate. Fourth year, back to grains. It's important to leave behind the stalks once grains are harvested, these provide ground cover and organic material as they break down- which you can see in the photo below. With each year's rotation, you add composted manure -fumier- to the Zai holes- to replace the nutrients you took from the soil.  Then during the dry season, animals come through added more nutrients and eating what they can- which helps because food gets scarce during the time furthest from the rains.

Mady and I moving electric fence for cattle in a millet field during the dry season.