Courtesy of: CityTownInfo.com

and: Gijsbert Koren

What are your thoughts on urban sustainability?

Celebrate this Earth Day by hosting a screening of Dirt! The Movie in your community – at your local library, arboretum, community center or church.

Now through April 22, we are offering FREE Shipping of any Community Screening Kit to anywhere within the United States.

Dirt! The Movie will inspire and motivate, you’ll want every day to be Earth Day, and you can have it! Give the gift of Dirt! The Movie. Discounted multi-packs are available year round, perfect for birthday and holiday gifting.

Source: http://www.ted.com/talks/pam_warhurst_how_we_can_eat_our_landscapes.html

A Free, Pick-Your-Own Orchard Takes Root in Los Angeles. Congratulations to Fallen Fruit!

http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/12/10/a-public-orchard-takes-root-in-la?cmpid=foodinc-fb

http://ridley-thomas.lacounty.gov/index.php/urban-orchard-in-del-aire/

https://www.facebook.com/FallenFruit

Vandana Shiva: Everything I Need to Know I Learned in the Forest

http://www.alternet.org/environment/vandana-shiva-everything-i-need-know-i-learned-forest?akid=9786.1076899.RGNxVV&rd=1&src=newsletter758412&t=21

20 uses for leftover fruit and vegetable peels

http://www.mnn.com/lifestyle/responsible-living/stories/20-uses-for-leftover-fruit-and-vegetable-peels

Wednesday, August 22: a Miami City dump truck the size of a small warehouse rumbles down the driveway to the prison gates. I wait outside, more than excited – for the delivery of its load was almost one-year in the making, an answer to the hard-fought battle of finding a solution to the gardens’ poor soil and fertility. Inside the truck was 40-yards of mulch, composted landscape debris from hundreds of residential Miami homes, chipped up palm fronds, cut trees and limbs that the city collects and composts from a facility on Virginia Key. For our gardens in prison this trash is gold.

Before the summer, the State Prison Authority had inmates remove all rocks from the compound. The gardens, which depended on an elaborate system of stone walls to hold up soil and kitchen waste, were now exposed to the erosive quality of wind and rain. The forty yards of mulch could be used to contain the exposed raised beds. The prison had “giveth” what it took away.

I wave to the driver, directing him to the North gate of the prison where deliveries are typically made. The sheer size of the truck invites attention. Inmates working at the mess hall or on work crews gather in groups and stare. They know at any moment they must vacate the large compound, which officers will put under “lockdown” for the truck to enter. Officers, along with the Major who runs the facility, approach. They search the driver, open its hood, scan below the chasis and rifle through the drivers seat. “It’s more than I possibly thought,” the Major says. “These piles could pose a security risk.”

There is a moment of uncertainty when I think the mulch would never make it past the gate. “Those piles won’t last,” I tell him. “My guys are like ants at a picnic. It will all be gone by tomorrow.” Past the gates I can see inmates evacuating compound one, as if we were carting in a truckload of hazardous material. The driver, having his body properly searched, climbed onto the truck smiling. “I deliver mulch all over the city,” he said. “But this is a first.”And with that, the heavy gates rolled open. The Major jumped on the side of the truck holding on to the outside of the door, as it rolled through – forty yards of composted mulch with a direct delivery to our prison gardens.

To put this into perspective: over the past 4 years I have bought and carried by hand an estimated 350 sealed bags (2 cubic ft) of soil and compost into the prison for use in the gardens. For all those years, the only soil used in the garden – and not made from crushed coral rock and kitchen waste – came from those sealed bags. Every bag had to be approved, and its contents emptied at the gate and carried through in plastic bags and rotting garbage cans. This one delivery equaled 600 bags, took 20 minutes to pass through the gate and dump its load at the garden; and through courtesy of the City of Miami and the manager and driver of the City’s waste and composting facility on Virginia Key, was free.

- James Jiler

Part of my week finds me in a South Florida prison building gardens. I work with ten men – all elderly and most serving life sentences, or sentences long enough that likely they will die there. The prison administration tolerates their work building a food garden, and apart from permission and a piece of prison ground to work with, gives little else in terms of support. And apart form their lack of tools – they fashion their own out of found items – sticks, rocks, coffee can tops, (a dug-up root system makes a functional rake) – a lack of seeds, starter plants, potting materials and a decent watering system, the biggest limiting factor to growing a garden in prison, is soil.  Anyone who has tried digging a hole in South Florida knows that after several inches of topsoil the shovel hits rock. It’s a geological result of land formation here – trillions of crustaceans exposed to thousands of years of falling and rising seas, their shells baked by sun, then solidified by pressure into what is know as oolitic limestone – or what locals call “coral rock.”

inmates dig planting holes through coral rock

Most Miami gardeners know, that initially, to be successful in the vegetable garden, soil must be bought – not found. In this prison, however, it must be made, and soil formation is the biggest task my students face in an effort to supplement a high carb, high caloric diet with fresh vegetables and fruit. Here, on the edge of the everglades where topsoil is practically absent, building and planting a simple 10ft by 4ft bed is a process that can take up to a year.

tools are fashioned from found items

First, the ground must be chipped away with a sharp instrument, usually the rusted top of a coffee can, a sharpened rock and a pair of hands that act as a shovel. The larger pieces of rock are used to make a wall. Smaller rocks are used as fill and mixed with whatever sandy soil is scratched from the surface. Next, food compost is smuggled from the kitchen. Dumped in the beds and covered with dead leaves and grass it will compost for the next month before it is mixed with the mineral substrate. Occasionally, the inmates smuggle in some Everglades silt from a drainage swale in back of their compound. This too is mixed in the bed. And, as the bed evolves a few seeds of papaya, lima bean or cow and pigeon pea, are thrown in to germinate. As it grows the papaya will spread its roots and slowly penetrate and break down the coral rock. The beans and peas will colonize the site adding nitrogen to a nutrient poor soil as well as biomass as a green manure to the soil-forming compost cooking beneath it. More plant debris is added as mulch. This protects the bed from erosion, prevents evaporation and helps with moisture retention. It is critical for the harsh conditions of heat, rain and wind which pound the site much of the year.

filled with organic debris, mixed with powdered rock and planted with papaya

After 6-months the product, in a typical bed is an ashen grey substance; it is chalky on touch and quickly breaks apart. It consists mostly of sand and limestone; well-drained and low in nutrients. It will take another year of kitchen waste to produce the sticky enzymes that binds particles together, holds nutrients and water, and makes soil able to sustain healthy plants in a productive garden. Until then, my students plant what they can in the intense summer heat – pigeon peas, okra, scallions and peanuts, the seeds brought in a few at a time – as they go about “doing their time” in the garden.

- james jiler

it takes a year to make a bed. Persistance rewards

Common Ground 191 is a large scale art project by artist Gary Simpson.  His vision involves creating a large series of 196 abstract panels created with a mixture of soil collected from 192 countries.

I asked Gary to write a few words about his project, Common Ground 191, and this is what he had to say:

“I began this art project in early 2002.  It involves collecting soil from each country in the United Nations that now total 193.  The plan is to mix the soil in a cement blend and place on 196 panels, each measuring 42″ by 42″.  Placed together in a square configuration it will measure 50′ by 50′ or side by side, 700 feet in length.   My recent visit to North Korea completes the soil collection phase of the project.  I am now busy working on a 1/14 scale model of the panels as the hope of production moves on.

I have been asked if I knew then what I know now about the work involved, would I have started?—the answer would be “probably not”. Many hours, many dollars and wonderful support leads me to say now–”what an adventure”.

Behind the physical fact that each piece will include part of each country, integrated into the individual complexion of the piece lays the foundation of my concept as a whole.  It is composed like the Earth itself, of visible masses floating off tectonic plates converging and diverging.  The magma on which they all rest is common ground.  The individual pieces will reflect the identity of each nation, but the implication of the whole is that there is underlying unity.  Just as plate boundaries don’t always correspond to continents, so too are national boundaries an artifact of human history.  And just as the geography of the Earth is changing through plate tectonics, this project expresses the necessity of change and unifying wisdom of the process. “

Here is video of Gary’s last soil gathering trip to North Korea.

You can learn more by visiting Gary’s website. Be sure to check out his links page, which will keep you informed and entertained for hours.

If you know of any artists who are working with dirt, please let us know.

One of the organizations we found is The Garden Project. This program gives ex-prisoners who have been released a place to continue working on a farm, similar to New York’s Green Team that was also featured in Dirt! The Garden Project is based on the success of The Horticulture Program at the San Francisco County Jail.

For a bird’s eye view of prison gardens around the country, including The Garden Project and The Greenhouse Project, please check out this excellent blog post by Rachel Cernansky. She gives a great overview of several prison garden programs, and describes how food banks benefit from them.

You can find more information about prison and therapeutic gardens at Therapeutic Landscapes Network. The Therapeutic Landscapes Network is a knowledge base and gathering space about healing gardens, restorative landscapes, and other green spaces that promote health and well-being.

And read Dirt! The Movie participant, James Jiler‘s book, Doing Time in the Garden: Life Lessons through Prison Horticulture

Publisher’s book description:
In his book, Doing Time in the Garden, James Jiler combines an engaging personal account of running a highly successful horticultural vocation program at the largest jail complex in the United States with a practical guide to starting and managing prison and re-entry gardening programs.

The Greenhouse Project gives horticultural job-training to male and female inmates at New York City’s Rikers Island jail system. After release, ex-offenders can intern with the GreenTeam, which provides landscaping and gardening services to community groups and institutions throughout New York State.

Jiler’s humor and heartfelt stories about prison community and clear explanations of what works broaden this book’s appeal to all social activists, especially those involved with at-risk populations.

Food for 9 Billion

by Jori Lewis

Marketplace for Monday, June 4, 2012

Transcript

Kai Ryssdal: We’ve been working on a big population and food project for the past half year or so geared around this question: With the United Nations saying there are gonna be 9 billion people on the planet by the middle of the century, how are we gonna feed them all? In Africa right now, a continent with one of the world’s fastest growing populations, a lot of farmers work the same way their ancestors did — no fertilizers or improved seeds. No fancy machinery or sophisticated irrigation systems. And yet they’re going to have to double the amount of food they produce by 2050.

Today on our series Food for 9 Billion, Jori Lewis went to Ghana to find out how they might do that.

Jori Lewis: For farmers, it all comes down to the dirt. I’ve come to Kumasi, in central Ghana, to visit the Soil Research Institute. Ghana sits due south of Spain, Morocco and Mali, and right now, is West Africa’s superstar. After discovering some 3 billion barrels of oil in 2007, Ghana’s economy went into overdrive. In 2011, it was the world’s fastest-growing economy.

It has one of the fastest-growing populations too — more than 20 million now. Kumasi is in the Ashanti region, where rolling hills and forests support corn and yam, cocoa and coffee. In the years to come, these hills will need to produce more than ever before.

Dr. Francis Tetteh from the Soil Research Institute is standing on the side of one of those hills now, showing me a deep pit. He’s uncovering the secrets of the dirt itself.

Read the rest of the conversation here.