Winter Gardening, Guerrilla Gardening

http://bit.ly/w0fBnz Master winter gardener Eliot Coleman grows year round in Maine, USA. UK, guerrilla gardener Chris Tomlinson secretly plants food. "HumptyDumptyTribe" warns global famine from climate change comng soon. Winter greenhouse interview from "Locavore," with Martin Ronda at the U. of Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming. Radio Ecoshock Show 111207 1 hour.

SHOW LINE UP - WITH INTERVIEW DOWNLOADS

1. "Winter Gardening with Eliot Coleman"

How to grow food in winter, even in Northern climates. Master gardener Eliot Coleman, from Four Seasons Farm in Bar Harbor Maine, grows (and sells) vegetables year-round, using inexpensive portable "hoop house" greenhouses, with no added heat source. Classic how-to interview, from Radio Ecoshock Show 111207 23 minutes 5 MB

2. "Guerrilla Gardening"

How to create an edible landscape on public and private lands. UK "Guerrilla of Love" Chris Tomlinson explains how he secretly plants food, perennials and trees, in waste lands, untended gardens, and even city streets. Fun interview on serious topic, as economy erodes. From Radio Ecoshock show 111207 9 minutes 2 MB

3. "Global Famine Starts in Texas"

From You tube, excellent rant and demonstration of Texas heat killing off ability of garden plants to set fruit. Above 85 degree F days, and without going below 68 F nights - no tomatoes, beans, mellons, nada. A portent of coming global famine as global warming develops, says this You tube poster "Humptydumptytribe". 9 minutes selected for Radio Ecoshock 111207 Global Famine Starts in Texas 2 MB

full video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-AEESU4k2dA

4. "Locavore: Winter Gardening in Canada"

Nuts and bolts of how to grow vegetables even in a Canadian winter, with no extra heating. Walter Garrison, host of "Locavore" on CFRU Guelph, Ontario interviews Martin Ronda in greenhouse of Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming. Excerpts for Radio Ecoshock 111207 18 minutes. 4 MB

EXTENDED SHOW NOTES:

1. "Winter Gardening with Eliot Coleman"

We want fresh, organic, local food. Now with a sour economy, and rising food prices, that all gets even better. But most of us buy agribusiness produce in the winter, when Nature doesn't exactly encourage growing our own.

Master gardener Eliot Coleman says we CAN grow food year-round - and you don't have to live in Florida or Southern California to do it. From his famous "Four Seasons Farm" in Harborside Maine, Eliot tells us how, in his "Winter Harvest Handbook".

A few notes from our interview:

1.1 Coleman uses a combination of plastic and fabric to keep plants from freezing in the Maine winters.

The first is UV-resistant greenhouse grade plastic over simple hoops made out of plastic piping. This outer "greenhouse" is light and portable. Later, Eliot explains why.

Inside, there is a second fabric cover over the rows of plants. This is "spun-bonded" fabric, sold by seed houses and other garden supply stores. It is easily moved off the plants during the daytime, to allow as much light as possible. But it retains the soil heat during the night, to keep crops alive.

2. There are no pots, and no tables. Everything is grown in the ground. See above.

3. The greenhouse is mobile because:

3.1 it can shelter warm weather crops, like tomatoes, to get the maximum, and then moved over the cold weather crops as needed

3.2 fixed greenhouses, Coleman says, tend to build up problems like insects or moulds. If the ground is exposed to the elements for part of the year, this is far less likely to happen.

4. Aside from heat, the critical element is light. Maine, he says, is on a similar latitude to Southern France. It gets as much light as northern Italy, where everyone expects fresh greens daily. There is enough light in the northern U.S., and southern Canada to grow through the winter. (See also the Guelph interview below). People have winter gardens in Norway and Sweden.

5. For sucess, select winter hardy vegetables. These include spinach, arugula, some lettuce varieties, carrot, beets, kale, scallions, swiss chard, and more.

6. Forget the focus on tomatoes! That is not what winter gardening is about.

7. Coleman used some extra heat for about 5 years, but found it was not necessary. Lately his greenhouses have no wood or fossil fuel heat at all.

8. Grow lights are too expensive to run, considering the value of the vegetables.

9. There is a commercial market for fresh winter veggies. They keep longer for restaurants, than those shipped from further South. The most important point is these cold-hardy vegetables respond to the challenge with excellent taste. People love the taste and freshness.

10. Eliot thinks vegetables from California and Florida will not stop coming. They are just so cheap, even if diesel fuel quadruples in price, it won't add all that much to a head of cauliflower.

11. Eliot lives with Barbara Damrosch, author of "The Garden Primer" and more. He started his "farm" in Bar Harbor, Maine in 1968. At that time, all he could afford was acreage with pine-type forest, not farming land at all. Over the years since, he has worked up the soil into prime shape, about 14 acres in production.

12. The new book "The Winter Harvest Handbook" is an update to his classic "Four Season Harvest" (still an excellent investment). The Handbook has more for commercial growers as well, if you hope to make some extra income from winter greens.

13. Coleman is fascinated by the Transition movement. He's glad to see it.

GUERRILLA GARDENING

All those public lands clothed in lawns and decorative trees, while people go hungry. Why haven't authorities clued into the rising cost of food and poverty?

We live in lost landscapes of the Victorian and Middle Class past. Chris Tomlinson and the "Guerillas of Love" are determined to change all that.

Actually, Chris confesses he is "the guerrillas of love". While there are lots of other guerrillas out there, Tomlinson needed a name to get a couple of grants to buy trees to plant. The Lush Cosmetics shops helped him with a few hundred pounds. Good on them.

So what is "guerrilla gardening"?

Chris looks for waste spaces to plant perennial food varieties. These may be close to where he is staying, so he can water them during the summer.

But his most successful plantings have popped up in people's front gardens, right on private property.

Chris also plants fruit trees in cities and towns. He may put on a jacket that suggests he is a city worker, as he puts in a new tree.

Occasionally, other city crew see them. A few got yanked out. Others were thought to be official, so they get mulched and maybe even get a railing or fence put around them. Success! More public food planted.

Since tree planting can be time intensive, Chris has also scheduled some activity "in the wee hours of the morning."

In Britain, the worst that can happen is a civil fine - no criminal offence. He's been rousted by a couple of cops. One of them was friendly, and had a garden in a community allotment himself.

Chris moves to different communities. He was in Nottingham for a while. Now he's moved on to places unmentioned.

Tomlinson said he became depressed, partly about the state of the world, a few years ago. "Gardening saved me" he says. Looking back, I think gardening might have saved me too, when I went back to the land (as polluting civilization drove me a bit crazy...)

Many, many people have found balance and satisfaction from gardening. Perhaps you would like to become a guerrilla gardener too? Try http://www.guerrillagardening.org/ for more info. That's Richard Reynold's site in the UK.

Our cities seem purposely hostile not just to nature, but to the citizens. We pave over as much as we can, to save maintenance costs. Then we plant the most boring ground cover, and trees with no possible help for the population. How did we get into such a situation?

When I was in Morocco, the avenues were lined with orange trees. Everyone had free oranges. When will we rethink the ban on creating an edible landscape?

As the economy tanks, Peak Oil kicks in, and climate spikes the food prices, I can see a new department of food and agriculture opening in every city.

With very tough economic times coming, we'll need the food, especially for the poor (which will be most of us). Plant now, and plant often.


GLOBAL FAMINE STARTS IN TEXAS

I was surfing You tube just this past week, and found a gem in the new uploads.

"Humptydumptytribe" (a.k.a. Hambone Littletail) says he is going to show us the first sign of the start of global famine, due to global warming.

He starts out with his frustration with the deniers in Austin Texas. Then I expect a tour of the dried out caked ground, maybe with dead cows, after the record drought in Texas.

Nope. Not about that. His camera stays on a lush green garden. Why?

On closer inspection, the plants grew big, there are lots of blooms, plenty of bees, and hardly any fruit.

For example, the first row of tomatoes planted in April grew tomatoes only on the very lowest branches, and nothing after that. The second row of about nine plants look grand, and have just ONE tomato.

Searching on the Net, for "poor fruit set on tomatoes" - he found out: if the daytime temperatures are above 85 degrees during the time of fruit set, and night temperatures stay hot (above 68 degrees) no fruit will be set.

This applied not just to tomatoes, but to his melons, and his pole beans. If Mr. Littletail needed this garden to survive, he would starve.

Austin, and all of Texas had the hottest spring and summer on record. This will be normal in the coming decades. Where these heat conditions apply, crops will fail in many parts of the world, becoming a global famine.

Countless scientific studies and food experts confirm and warn this is coming. In just one example, Lester Brown of Earth Policy Institute, a recognized expert in grain crops, said rice is within one degree of its tolerance. If the rice growing areas go up one degree of average temperature, they may not set fruit. No rice, or greatly reduced rise equals mass starvation in Asia.

On our current course, various experts and institutes warn, we are headed for a global mean temperature rise of at least 3 degrees C., maybe 5 or 6 C.

In the You tube video, Humptydumptytribe wonders if the 2010 record increase in carbon dioxide emissions is responsible for the heat and drought in Texas this year. It isn't proved, he says, but it looks like good circumstantial evidence.

In any case, a lot of studies have shown the U.S. south will get around three months of days over 100 degrees every year, or every second year, within a decade or two. Texas almost got that this year. Maybe it has come already?

Check out the video. It's excellent.

Find his video channel here.

WINTER GREENHOUSE IN GUELPH, ONTARIO

We end with this excellent recording about the nitty-gritty of growing veggies in the winter, unheated, in souther Ontario, Canada.

Here is some information about the original program, from the host Walter Garrison's blog.

"I host a radio program called Locavore! on CFRU 93.3 FM, based out of Guelph, Ontario. On this show I talk to farmers, processors, restaranteurs, chefs, retailers, brewers, winemakers, researchers, nutritionists, politicians, pretty well anyone who has an impact on the food system as we experience it.

Fifteen years ago I grew fruits and vegetables for a local restaurant in the Rocky Mountains in Alberta. Some people did not believe I could grow field tomatoes commercially in central Alberta. I did.

The Guelph Centre for Urban Organic Farming is located on-site of the University of Guelph. The farm provides a place for students from the university and the local school board to obtain practical experience in learning how to grow food. It is intended to be a trial garden for urban food production. Martha Gay Scroggins oversees this initiative. A few years ago, Dr. Ann Clark and a number of others on campus decided that they wanted an organic farm on campus. The university donated the northwest corner of the University of Guelph Arboretum for this project."

Martha Gay Scroggins at the University of Guelph has been one of the driving forces behind this experimental greenhouse.

The interview was posted on radio4all.net last winter, but now I can't find the original link. It was broadcast on CFRU on January 27th, 2011.

The guest is Martin Ronda. He laboriously dug up the compacted soil in the greenhouse, and hauled up many wheel-barrow loads of water from a stream, before a well was installed.

They get electricity from an extention cord from a nearby parking lot. The power runs two fans which blow air to inflate the two layers of plastic on the outside of the greenhouse. It is a fixed base building.

Like Coleman, Ronda uses a second sheet of row covering which can be drawn over the plants at night. Unlike Coleman, the Guelph crew use black water barrels to absorb heat during the day, and keep the temperature up at night.

Most of the same hardy vegetables are planted. There is good advice on timing in the interview. For example carrots and beets might be planted in late August, and then again in September, to give at least two crops. Planting of other vegetables might go on into mid-October.

During the winter, with less light, in fact during the 6 week around the Solstice, plants hardly grow at all. They need no watering at this stage. They they take off again as more light returns. You can still eat most of them right through the winter.

Ronda observes younger "teenage" veggies survive extreme cold better than mature plants.

There is a lot of down-to-earth knowledge passed on through this fine interview. Thank you Walter and Locovore for getting this info out.

Alex Smith
Radio Ecoshock

CLIMATE SOLUTION: FROM AIR TO SOIL

READ THE NEW ALEX SMITH INTERVIEW IN GRIST MAGAZINE.

Please pass that link, or this short link http://bit.ly/rxc5lj to all your email contacts, or post it in blogs. Add it to comment sections. Help get the word out, so we can get more listeners and more stations. Radio Ecoshock is broadcast on over 50 stations now. I'm working on extending it further, with more news in coming weeks. If you pass around this Grist interview you can really help!

THIS WEEK'S PROGRAM: CLIMATE SOLUTION: FROM AIR TO SOIL

No this isn't another Radio Ecoshock program of doom! Instead, we are going to look at one of several large-scale solutions available. This new/old technology can grab carbon out of the air, and store it back in the soil.

Short Description:

"Desperately looking for a clean way to remove dangerous carbon from the atmosphere, Alex interviews Allan Savory of the Savory Institute. His project to capture carbon into the soil, using intelligent herd management in Zimbabwe, is on the short-list for the Virgin Earth Challenge. We follow up with Abe Collins, a carbon farming leader in Vermont, USA. Plus organizing for local food in North Carolina (even in hard times) - Aaron Newton at ASPO 2011. "

More detail, starting with ALLAN SAVORY AND THE SAVORY INSTITUTE

In 2007, billionaire Richard Branson announced the Virgin Earth Challenge. He offered a 25 million dollar prize to the best method to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, with no harmful impacts. Out of 2600 submissions, Allan Savory and the Savory Institute survived to the current short-list of 11 technolgies to do it.

We talk with Allan Savory, the 76 year old pioneer biologist and agriculturalist from Zimbabwe.

Savory is an fascinating interview. He also won the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, for a world-changing technology.

Plus, futurist Seth Itzkan (who went to Zimbabwe to see for his own eyes) tells me old Allan went out into the African night with a large rifle, to protect the camp from a pride of lions that had taken a big cow the night previous. That's character.

Seth's Africa blog here.

Wanna know what it's like to sit out in lion country without a gun? Check out this short video with Seth and "Knowledge the lion chaser."

Yet, as you hear in this interview, Savory absolutely insists we need all the predators, from lions through hyenas to wild dogs.

The behavior of herd animals changes when predators exist. The herd bunches up, fertilizes the ground and works it in with their hooves, and then move on in a tigher group. This benefits the land, as Savory shows repeatedly on his large experimental farm in Zimbabwe, near Victoria Falls. The vegetation roars back, where neighboring lands experience hard packed soil and desertification. Even the ground water comes back, with year-round ponds appearing. His knowledge could literally transform the landscape of the world, if applied.

Forget what you know about animals and land management. Desertification is not what you think. A very old relationship between animals and grass lands could reverse the damage.

It may even be a mega-solution for climate change. In a classic interview, I talk with a world-recognized pioneer in natural land management, Allan Savory, founder of the Savory Institute.

Allan Savory was born into white-ruled Rhodesia. He became a biologist, a game manager, a member of Parliament. Savory resigned and went into exile over the racist policies of that government. Now the country is called Zimbabwe, and Savory has returned often, to teach and to test his methods of restoring water, life, and carbon to the land.

His best known book is "Holistic Management: A New Decision Making Framework" written with his wife Jody Butterfield.


In 2003, Savory won the Banksia International Award, quote "to recognise extraordinary individuals or organisations that have made, or are making a significant contribution to improving our environment on a global level."

Allan Savory & the Africa Centre for Holistic Management was the 2010 Buckminster Fuller Challenge Winner. "Operation Hope" showed a way for permanent water and food security for millions of Africa's poor.

In November 2011, Allan Savory topped over 2500 others to place in the top 11 finalists in the Virgin Earth Challenge. His project not only reverses desertification, but offers a global technique to removed vast amounts of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. It may be a low-tech way to stop runaway climate change.

Here is the Savory Institute You tube channel.

But if you read or look at only one thing about Savory's plan for the soil and the climate, this short paper is it. "A Global Strategy for Addressing Global Climate Change" It opened my eyes.

In 2007, I spoke with Peter Donovan, the publisher of a book by the Australian author Allan J. Yeomans. That book is "Priority One, Together We Can Beat Global Warming." Peter Donovan is now on a road tour promoting the Soil Carbon Challenge. The idea is to get farmers to measure their current carbon in the soil, so they can know what works to capture and keep more of it.

Then I got an email from a remote outpost in Zimbabwe, in lion country. It's amazing to connect with someone so far back in the bush. That's the new world we live in.

It was none other than Massachussetts futurist Seth Itzkan. Seth is and analyst and advocate for sustainable economic development. He's the CEO & Founder Planet-TECH
Associates. Itzkan went to Zimbabwe to see Savory's claims with his own eyes.
Seth was amazed by what he found. As claimed new water sources were appearing where the Savory management technique was used. Properly managed land was rich with
vegetation, in an area generally blighted by on-going encourachment by the desert. Hard, hard soil with a few scrubby bushes can be converted back to moist rich grasslands by natural herd management. Savory mimiced nature to recapture the land, and the carbon from the sky. It works.

SURE, I HAVE QUESTIONS ABOUT THIS...

The limitations to this technique are several. The main problem: humans need to change their conceptions of agriculture, their opposition to herd management, and the inate social demand to rid the planet of dangerous animals. And we'd have to re-educate millions of poor farmers. I'll consult a leading climate expert on the role of soil carbon in a coming program.

I have to overcome personal resistance too. I've been taught, as millions have, that over-grazing by animals is turning the world into deserts. Now we learn that is due to our unnatural way of raising animals, and killing off predators and the wild spaces they require.

Personally, I'm trying hard to become a vegetarian. North American meat is poisoned with anti-biotics and other chemicals. Red meat is know to raise cancer risks, especially of the bowels. The feed-lot meat production chain is just a giant prison for animals and their suffering.

But that is not at all what Allan Savory, and our next guest, are promoting. Their solution to climate change does involve animals, and meat eating - but it is the most Nature-based geoengineering plan out there.

Here is what these new agriculturalists are telling us: we don't need to darken the Sun. We need to manage grasslands, to use cover crops when growing grains and vegetables, and we need the help of animals and their predators to restore the carbon cycle.

My thanks to Karl Thidemann for pushing me to learn about Savory and soil. Karl's been gently emailing me for years, telling me to look into it. It only took four or five years Karl! I just wasn't ready, or I'm a slow learner.

I'm just glad we got Allan Savory on the air on Radio Ecoshock. You can download or listen to that 24 minute Allan Savory interview here.

I should just add the importance of grass fires when it comes to climate change. In the interview, Savory clearly explains how damaging slash and burn agriculture is. All over Africa, and all over the world, subsistence farmers burn the fields over to clear them. This releases more carbon than millions of cars. Some of it is recaptured by new growth, but the overall
impact of the black carbon, and the burst of carbon during fire season, further damages both the climate and the soil. I haven't said it as well as Allan does. Please listen to the interview.

PRACTICING CARBON FARMING IN VERMONT - ABE COLLINS

Then to Abe Collins, a farmer in St. Albans, Vermont. He uses methods to capture carbon with agriculture. Collins started out working with the Navajo in Arizona, applying techniques learned from Allan Savory, to reverse the deterioration of Navajo land. They all learned together how to use animals to reclaim desert land, rather than creating more of it.

Collins returned to Vermont, and converted a former dairy farm to a beef operation. He measures soil depth, and carbon content, to see improvements as they develop.

It takes nature about one thousand years to create an inch of soil. The modern farmers hope to do it a lot faster, without using a lot of fossil fuels.

The extra soil also helps with flood control. Vermont surely needed that, when tropical storm Irene flooded towns and wiped out roads. We discuss how proper soil managment can help with extreme rainfall events accompanying climate change.

We also talk about the "Keyline" system developed by P.A. Yeomans in Australia. His son, Allan Yoemans published a book in 2007 on ways to save the climate using agriculture. It's called "Priority One". You can order the book, or download it from this site.


Collins was part of a crew, including Peter Donovan, who attempted to get "carbon farming" recognized in the New England carbon trading scheme. Why pay big companies to off-set emissions, or even worse, fake green geoengineering, when farmers can capture carbon - AND feed us sustainably?

At the end of October 2011, Abe Collins kicked off "the Soil Carbon Challenge" in Vermont. Video here.

Or check out this: Part One of a five part You tube presentation by Abe Collins: "Presentations from the Quivira Coalition's 9th Annual Conference, November 10-12, 2010, in Albuquerque, NM "The Carbon Ranch: Using Food and Stewardship to Build Soil and Fight Climate Change". The rest of the talk will pop up on the right side of the You tube screen.

To keep up with the whole discussion of carbon farming, Abe recommends this site: managingwholes.com

Download the Abe Collins interview (17 minutes) here.

A MODEL FOR LOCALIZING FOOD, AARON NEWTON FROM NORTH CAROLINA

The program wraps up with a new presentation from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas conference in Washington D.C. in November 2011.

Aaron Newton is the Local Food System Program Coordinator for Cabarrus County, North Carolina. He tells us how to develop your local food-shed, even in hard times. And why the most important crop may be... new farmers.

It's a really helpful short presentation from Aaron. The ways the County used the tax structure to both keep farmers, and to fund community organizing around local food. Lots of good tips for localizing your own community. The Newton talk is dead-on for how to create a local food-shed getting ready for Peak Oil.

Our D.C. correspondent Gerri Williams was at the ASPO conference, and sends this recording. My thanks to ASPO USA for sharing the audio, and for getting localization on the Peak Oil menu.

Listen to/download the Radio Ecoshock broadcast of Aaron Newton at ASPO 2011 here.

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We'll be doing a second show on sequestering carbon in the soil in two weeks time. Next week, we look into a different sort of growing: winter gardening (and why extreme climate change may make you do it...)

Alex
Radio Ecoshock
http://www.ecoshock.org