Raspberries & Avocados

Today was one of those ideal Southern California days.  Hudson, my son, and I took a walk to Armstrong's and browsed the Hass Avocado trees.  We found a five footer and made our way to the front register.  We passed the raspberry section and picked up four Heritage Red plants.  They should be called sticks, cause that's what they looked like.

Remember the other day, when I told you Fred was taking pride in the front flower beds?  Well, he did a great job transplanting the current flowers, but it needed a little something more.  Hudson and I proceeded to glance over the seed packets.  That's when we found the perfect thing!  So, when we got back to the Sustainable Urban Farm we kind of broke the rules and planted non-edible flowers.  I know they'll be pretty!  Photos to come, oh course.


We also picked up a few other seed packet, of which I'll give update once we actually plant them.


January has been a glorious month.  The heat, the rain, then more heat and rain.  If anyone out there in southern California has been thinking of doing some gardening, this January has been ideal.  There's been days of perfectly sunny opportunities to plant, then days of cool rain that were followed by warm sunny spells, and then another blanket of free irrigation.  Making a short story a bit lengthy... because of all the rain, the soil is quite like the consistency of the black rich stuff I came to know and love in Illinois!

On a side note, the fruit trees are blooming like crazy!  Peach on the left, and apple on the right.  Just think.  Some day all this work might just pay off!  Ha ha!

 

Nada Mas

Any Spanish Buffs out there?  Nada Mas means, Nothing More.  It was one of those rare days that I wasn't able to do any farming.  I did walk the farm in the morning and right before I came in for the night.  All is well.

Free Labor

Yesterday got a little crazy and I wasn't able to blog. No worries, I'll fill you in on two days right now.


Yesterday was a gorgeous day. I was out to the Sustainable Urban Farm pretty early and decided to edge trim the grass in front of the auto repair shop. While I was working, I smelled a foul smell. It reminded me of the trash cans at a fair ground bandstand, overflowing with mostly empty beer cups. Half way down the block I could see three guys walking toward me. My whole life I had heard the expression "Drunk as a Skunk", but that moment was the first time I fully understood it.


They looked like they had a rough night and were still coming down. Right then, they noticed me working. The shortest one of the bunch came running over and took the sidewalk edger out of my hand. He tried to communicate that he'll work for me. I agreed to let him work, but I made it very clear that I was working for free so he will definitely not get paid. There was a long pause, but in order to save "face", he said not problem and began to work. The other two guys jumped in with a shovel of mine and proceeded to take turns.


Since I was doing nothing, I decided to stretch my back for a second and look around. The guys from the auto shop didn't see or hear the negotiation so they thought I had a crew with me and began to laugh. I waved and smiled, but felt like I needed to do something too. Well, my Ma and Pa raised me to work, and by this time I was till without a tool. The overly eager drunken gentlemen were busy edging the walkway, so I ran back to my workshop and pick up a rake and a broom. The playing field had been leveled, four guys with four tools. We worked for an hour and knocked that sidewalk OUT!

Manuel, Speedy, Marcos, & Me.

Today, I mowed the grass where we did the edge work and something very cool happened.  One of the guys, Fred, from the auto repair shop started weeding.  They see me out there almost every day taking pride in their shop and today, Fred decided to take a little pride himself!

Last week, I asked the gardeners at my building to cross the street and dump the grass clippings in the planter boxes.  With that said, there was a ton of grass that needed to be mixed in with my kitchen scraps and soil.  So, I turned the organic mixture over for fifteen minutes or so.

Another cool thing that I'm thinking about is community.  My neighbors are starting to talk.  They've seen what I've been doing and are interested.  One lady told me that if I ever need help, to go ahead and ask.  Which got me thinking about what I could use help with.

Soil.  I'm still very low on dirt.  How does a Sustainable Urban Farmer get quality earth to plant crops in these days?  I know it's a longer process than paying a truck to deliver it, but I couldn't stop thinking about every body else's kitchen scraps.  There are sixty-two people that live in my apartment building and my family of four generates about a bucket full of scraps a day!  If I include the surrounding buildings/community and help build relationship through Sustainable Urban Gardening, wouldn't the world be a better place?  I think so.

Living Off the Street is going to be bigger than just my family, I can feel it.

Raspberries & Rain

I woke up this morning and took a walk through the little Sustainable Urban Farm.  The weather was perfect with blue skies and a warm breeze.  I decided to put my other 4ft x 4ft planter box out and the box for the raspberries.  In a matter of ten minutes, 96 square feet of planter boxes were ready to be filled with dirt.  In this picture you can see the 4ft x 20ft planter box on the left.  That's where the raspberries will be planted later on this week, hopefully.  I have yet to paint the box, it'll be the same color as the rest.  On the right, the sidewalk looks a little dirty because grass/weeds had grown out over the dark spots.  I tested out the new sidewalk edger and it works great!

By the time I finished working, that warm breeze turned cold and clouds rolled in.  The rain started coming down around 2pm.  I think we might be in for round two.

Cinder Blocks

Today was a big day.  I'm tired.  Andrea and I went down to Home Depot and picked up 45 cinder blocks and an edge trimmer for around $80 bucks.  I know, I know.  I can't believe I spent cash too, but I needed to finish a couple of projects.  Finishing the planter bocks was very important for me because I found a guy that will deliver free soil if I have the room to put.  Now I officially can handle the dirt.  Here's a before picture with a fresh stack of cinder blocks on the left.

The guys at the auto shop told me that they don't want to lose any street visibility, so I decided to plant the raspberries elsewhere.  The tops of the cinder blocks will be filled with compost/soil and brightly colored flowers will be planted.  In the bed itself will be perennial (year after year) all male Washington asparagus.  Yum!  Here's an after shot.

Let's rewind a little. Remember the reason why I asked the owner of the auto shop if I could take care of this little strip of land?  Don't worry, pop quiz over.  I asked if I could take care of it, because no one was.  There was trash and abandoned shopping carts laying around.  I decided to take this land and make it everything it could be.  Well today, I feel like I received a sign... literally.  There were four signs in fact.  I was digging the foundation for the planter box when I came across these four wooden signs.  They just sort off formed a sensible word in front of my eyes and it became my motivation.  Elevate or L-IV-8, any way you look at it, that's what I'm doing to my Sustainable Urban Farm!

15.  That's the number of cinder blocks I had left over.  Not wanting to give them away or take them back to the Deep (Home Depot), I decided to build an unusual planter box.  There's a weird pit just underneath the poster my kids made for the orange tree.  The neighborhood has decided to dump random bits of trash down there.  Since my lemon tree isn't bear enough fruit to make lemonade, I made lemonade out of the pit.  The extra cinder blocks stacked perfectly in front of the pit.  I will fill them with good soil and plant some dangling tomatoes or something beautiful and delicious.

Another Great Day!

Today, all the neighborhood kids came by again!  I didn't have any cinder blocks, so I thought we could build some planter boxes for the office window next to the orange tree.  While I did the measurements, I told the children that they could design their very own work of art framed in a sidewalk square.  Needless to say, it was a hit!

The planter boxes turned out alright too.  Now, I just have to figure out what is going to go in them.  Edible?  Non-Edible?  Tough call.

After a fun day of playing/working hard... it was time for a little spaghetti.

Rain? What's Rain?

So, the rain stopped and the sun is blaring down again.  Perfect weather is... you know what I mean.

Today, was a great day!  Words can't express how clear it was.  I walked outside to take in the fresh air and catch a few morning rays when I noticed the 3rd St. Promenade Clock Tower.  I know it's not that far away from my Sustainable Urban Farm, but whoa!  There's usually so much smog, I can't see past 26th street.  If you look close, or click on it and make the image full size, you can even see the Pacific Ocean.  Gee whiz, I love California!



Now here's the real test of clarity.  It's rare when the mountains behind Los Angeles are visible, but today it made my wife cry.  Remember when I said I love California?  This is one of the many reasons why!!

Since the sun was shining and...  well let's be real for a second, the sun hasn't shown it's pretty face in some time.  We decided to give a tribute to our old friend and build a sun dial.  After cutting down all those planks for the planter boxes I built yesterday, there was more than enough scrap wood laying around.  Don't get me wrong, we hit YouTube for a little personal instruction before we attempted making our own solar guided time keeping contraption.  Turns out it's deceptively easy, yet difficult simultaneously.

If one were to pull of a three sixty, that would me a full turn.  Well, the Earth pulls a 360 everyday.  From noon today to noon tomorrow the Earth will rotate 360 degrees in 24 hours, which is 15 degrees an hour.  All you have to do is get a protractor, printable for free online, and measure out 180 degrees in increments of fifteen onto a flat surface.  Then figure out what your longitude is and place a perpendicular object along the 90 degree line angled to your specific longitude.  Oh, remember when I said deceptively easy, yet difficult?  Forget easy.  Ha ha.  Long story short, here's the final product.  We met a couple of neighborhood friends in the process and they hung with us for the rest of the day.  FYI, the photo was taken at 12 noon.

Once the sun dial was finished, we needed to kill some time to see if it would keep up with the clock on my cellphone.  I asked the crew if they wanted to paint a planter box and they all said yes!  I checked in on them from time to time, but while they painted, I mowed.  It's amazing how a torrential downpour will push all brown-ish colors completely out of the color spectrum.  Green.  Very green.

A quick game of Duck, Duck, Goose broke out!

Then some running.

Rosemary Flower

Hippy Flower Princess

Check in on the Sun Dial, and it works!!!

Counting tree rings.

This stump was once the only tree on this block.  I think it was destroyed during a storm in 2004.  Oh, times are changing.

Rain Powered Factory

News flash!  It's raining in Los Angeles.  Yeah, I know this information isn't new, but today feels like the heaviest rain yet!  I mean, the tree in front of my son's school fell over and was blocking the sidewalk.  That's gotta count for something.  Seriously though, it has rained harder today than any other.

The nice part about all this rain is that we were in a drought, I think we've caught up.  Heh heh.  More good news, I've been in the wood working mood.  I don't really feel like finishing the cinder block wall in the rain, so my workshop has had a lot of company from me lately.  Today, I milled down the wood Ardavan and I picked up.  The rain is so relentless that I just kept working and working.  After a few hours of cutting and drilling, I took a step back to snap off this shot.  It looks like I'm running a planter box factory.

The planter boxes in the above photo are 4ft x 4ft, but I have a spot for another planter box that needs to be much bigger.  How big?  Glad you asked.  4ft x 20ft!  I know I sound crazy, but I came up with a good plan.  The 4ft x 4ft boxes sure are easy to pick up and walk out to the Sustainable Urban Farm.  A 4ft x 20ft box would not be so easy, or even possible for that matter.  Legos.  Yes... Legos were my inspiration.  They don't really look like Legos and they're wooden, but the panels fit together great!  I built eight of them that are five feet long.  That's four panels per side for a grand total of twenty feet.  Once they are all put together, I'll cap each end with a four foot panel and a couple of supports just like the 4ft x 4ft planter boxes.

Now, the total size of farm-able planter boxes is 144 square feet!  Throw in the cinder block structure which is going to be 11ft x 5ft & that bumps the grand total up to 199 square feet.  That's crazy!!!!

Doth Mine Eyes Deceive Me?

After what has felt like an eternity, the clouds have parted and the heavens have revealed their beauty, for now.


The family and I ran out to the Sustainable Urban Farm as fast as we could to snap this shot.  The temperature dropped about five degrees in the short time we were there, which makes me think we are not out of the woods yet.


Earlier today, I met up with my good buddy Ardavan and we hit up a couple construction sites.  The first one we went to had a ton of cinder blocks, but the foreman didn't like us.  I think he was in the middle of something and was in a bad mood.  No worries, we'll check back when the sun is shinning and maybe have Ardavan whistle the theme song to "Happy Days".  That might put the foreman in the giving mood.  Heh heh.



After hitting the proverbial brick wall, pun totally intended, we headed over to a different site.  We went to the building I had hit last week to see if there was anything else to save from the landfill.  My pal Manny was manning the helm and he remember me!  Yes!  He let us drive down into the bowels of the subterranean garage and have at it.  There was so much plywood.  We loaded six 24 inch x 72 inch panels, a ten foot long 4 inch PVC pipe, and a bunch of small, but long metal pipes and bolts.  All in all, it was a very good day.  I'll be able to build three more 4ft x 4ft planter boxes.  Now all I have to worry about is finding more dirt.


It's only been an hour since I took the above photograph.  Weather update... torrential downpour!

Ice, Buds, & Box

Today it actually hailed.  Ice fell from the sky and hit the side walk.  Obviously, it melted as fast as it blew my mind.  Yes, my mind was blown by hail.  Remember, I was building that cinder block planter bed, with my shirt off, just a few days ago.  I wish I could show you a photo of the hail, but I was unprepared for such an opportunity.

The rain slowed enough for me to run our compost out to the Sustainable Urban Farm and I noticed the apple tree.  Wow!  It looked like a dead twig the day I planted it, but now it looks like it can't wait for spring.  You can also see the water in the ring.  That's free water from above!!

Let it Rain!

Well, today is the first day back after the long weekend and the rain is coming down! Los Angeles is an amazing place when it comes to weather. It's either perfectly sunny and gorgeous, or perfectly storming. Check out the street I cross everyday to get to my Sustainable Urban Farm. You can see the cinder block wall that I've had to put on hold. Ha ha.

Since the rain is so bad, I've been spending a lot of time in my workshop building planter boxes. The amount of wood I have found, will keep me busy for a long, long time. The rain is a blessing that is two fold.  First, for the plants and secondly, it's forcing me to focus on indoor projects.


Being curious, I decided to check the weather to see how long this storm will last. It's going to be wet for awhile.  The video at the top of today's entry has been weighing on my mind.  That is a massive amount of run off!  Rain, in theory, is cleaner and more pure than municipal water.  Why are we not using all this precious water.  All the water is really doing is scrubbing the oil and grime off the streets and running the toxic sludge into the Santa Monica Bay.  If I could somehow store the rain before it left my property, in essence it perfectly usable for almost anything, like watering an Sustainable Urban Farm.  Ha ha ha.  Seriously.


OK.  Let's see how practical this would actually be.  I water the plants every day or so, using a 2.5 gallon bucket that I fill two to three times.  That's 7.5 gallons times 365 days which equals 2,737.5 gallons per year.  The average American uses 80 to 100 gallons per day. (http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/qahome.html#HDR3)  That's 29,200 to 36,500 gallons per person per year!  CRAZY!!  The amount of water I'm using on my farm doesn't seem so bad now does it?  Especially once you figure the number of people that will be able to eat from this urban farm.


Let's go back to run off.  My apartment building is approximately 200ft by 100ft and all the water that hits the property is funneled out through gutters.  I found a site online that says for every one inch of rainfall per 1,000 square feet, 561 gallons of water accumulates. (http://rainwater.sustainablesources.com/)
My building is approximately 20,000sqft with an annual rainfall of 14 inches.  20,000sqft divided by 1,000 equals 20.  20 times 561 gallons equals 11,220 gallons per inch of rainfall.  11,220 gallons time 14 inches of annual rainfall equals 157,080 gallons of wasted water per year.  And that's just my apartment building.


The bright side is that I'm not using any water on my garden this week at all!

Kitchen Compost

Real quick.  It's a Saturday and I've taken the day off from farming, but I wanted to give you a tip.  Andrea and I keep a Tupperware on the counter and just fill it with the scraps we create when making dinner.  When it get's full, I empty it in the compost.  I hear it's great for the soil.


By the way, these are Yams that are being peeled.  Some people say sweet potatoes, I guess it depends on where you grew up or what your grandmother called them.

JACKPOT!!!!!!!!

It is way to early to say this, but today was the best day ever!  Let's get serious,  none of the trees are mature and we haven't eaten a single thing from the farm yet.  With that said, today I hit the jackpot!


I got an email from a woman I met on FreeCycle.org and she informed me that her driveway was full of good soil.  Without hesitation, I loaded up my shovel and a bunch of buckets and was off.  Holy moly!  I don't know how much soil weighs, but my back feels tired.  Take a look at this load of dirt.  It was just enough to fill the second half of the green planter box!

On the way home, I decided to swing by the construction site where I scored all that free wood.  There was a guy named Manny just hanging out and smoking a big fat cigar.  He looked at me like a bouncer looks at nerd trying to get into a club.  I immediately got the vibe that I was not welcome and he was gunna prove it.  Right then, I notice a pile of beautiful pallets laying next to the dumpster.  I smiled and said, "Hey.  Are you going to throw those pallets in the trash?".  His guard went down and he happily offered them to me.  As I loaded the pallets, I kept asking questions.  Do you have any broken concrete?  Do you have any plywood that might get trashed?  Next thing you know, I'm getting a personal tour through the construction site.  I'd point at something and Manny would nod yes or no.  Long story short, he said I could drive my car on to the site and load anything I wanted.  Unfortunately, I was out of room after loading all that dirt and a bunch of pallets.

I went back to the little strip of land and unloaded pallets and dumped the dirt in the green planter box, then went back to the construction site.  I know I keep coming back to the same old word, but jackpot!  Yes, I got all this wood and these cinder blocks for free!

As I'm unloading the loot, my neighbor Lisa came by and blessed me with an AWESOME lawn mower!  Talk about sustainability, this thing runs on human power!  I really don't know how it happened, but for some reason my wife became driven to mow.  She pushed that thing all around and ended up making the grass look very nice!

Inspired by a plethora of free gardening booty, I decided to tackle the cinder bock planter box.  It sure felt like I was going to have enough blocks, but as you can see I might need to FreeCycle till I find another free source of cinder blocks.

Here's what the wall looked like at the end of the day.  Not bad.