Mandatory Compost in San Francisco

'I left my heart in San Francisco. High on a hill, it calls to me.
The morning fog may chill the air - I don't care.
My love waits there in San Francisco
above the blue and windy sea!'
- Dean Martin

Though I have been away for a few years I still feel close to San Francisco. I left a lot of friends, my bike, my surfboard and my heart there. It is a city which represents the progresss toward the Ecotopia dream of my youth. San Francisco is a beacon of progressive policies and steps toward a sustainable relationship between humans and the environment.

Before I go beekeeping this morning I wanted to congratulate that great city on yet another step toward that ideal: This morning I read Gavin Newsom's June 23rd article on Greenbiz.com. He has signed in a tough new law that all businesses and individuals in the city must now compost their waste. All this in the interest of meeting the goal of zero waste by 2020.

'It will take time, but I believe mandatory composting will spread across the country -
improving the air we breathe and reducing our need for landfills.'
-Mayor Gavin Newsom

More Information about San Francisco Recycling Programs.

IFOAM Growing Organic Useful Composting Links page.

IFOAM Growing Organic Pages on Soil Fertility and Plant Cultivation.

Cory's Dr Green Blog Posts:
Small is Beautiful
Give Organic a Chance
Beekeeping
No Work Farming
Growing Organic

Visit Farmers for the Future

Climate Change Talks

I am writing this morning with a little bit of disappointment and frustration. The UN Climate Negotiations here in Bonn have just ended without much change to show for it. Representatives from 182 countries met for 12 days here in Bonn and pushed around a few agenda items. Nothing much happened, as you can see on the UNFCC website, with an issue that requires immediate and drastic action. As we know this is a turning point in history. Al Gore and Bill McKibben are working hard to spread the word and I feel inspired to do all I can to help.

This is an important time for us to stand up and tell these world leaders that we want to live equitably with the rest of the species that inhabit this planet. In today's news Mekong River Irrawady Dolphins are fast approaching extinction because the river they live in crosses through 5 different countries. The governments of Burma, Thailand, China, Laos and Cambodia are having trouble making decisions together and, though they are encouraged (by WWF Cambodia among others) to take unanimous action, are proving to be unable to stop the polluting of the river. This does not have to be the fate of these dolphins or the thousands of other species who will likely go extinct this year. We must encourage our governments to put environmental issues on the top of the agenda. Without a healthy, clean, biologically productive and rich environment we cannot hope to have peace or save our economies.

During the UN talks here in Bonn Yvo de Boer (UNFCC Executive Secretary) encouraged the NGOs to activate the membership 'out on the street' before the next talks in Copenhagen. This is an important time for us to make some noise - world leaders do not know what they are doing. Politics, bureaucracy, and money are serving as veils. They desperately need our guidance.

Al Gore.com is a place where a lot of information and opportunity for action is posted.

350.org has a new video that needs to be shown to as many people as possible.

Finally, the We Can Solve It Campaign is now over 2 million members strong and could still use more support.

Cory's Dr Green Blog Posts:
Small is Beautiful
Give Organic a Chance
Beekeeping
No Work Farming
Growing Organic

Pest Management at Home

I am talking a lot about using Integrated Pest Management in forests. Now I want to say little about pest management in the home garden.

Geranium plants, oil, and candles are a great solution. I also keep a lot of habitat outside and in for frogs, birds and predator insects.

The University of Maine did some research on beneficial insect habitat last year:
http://www.umext.maine.edu/onlinepubs/htmpubs/7150.htm

Farming in Germany

"We're only truly secure when we can look out our kitchen window and see our food growing and our friends working nearby." -Bill Mollison

Just a quick note during a sunny afternoon in Bonn.

This is a wonderful place for farming and gardening - although I have not done such a great job learning the language - I have been able to go around and make friends all over the Organic and Biodynamic farming community of Bonn. My friends and I have arranged to have a large plot of land on an organic farm outside of Bonn and have turned it in to a little Permaculture garden complete with a giant potato patch, oats, buckwheat, an Iroquis Three Sisters mound corn and squash field and companion plants of all varieties.

The farming plot is next to a small woodlot with a semi abandoned apple orchard and a whole lot of wild edibles.

The day is auspicious and I am sure to get some more sun, some more wild food and some more fresh veggies out of the garden.

More about Permaculture from Bill Molison's Urban Permaculture Guild.

Learn more about the Three Sisters companion planting from Renee's Garden website.

Learn more about companion planting from the No Dig Vegetable Garden.

More about biodynamic agriculture from the article Gardening by the Moon.

Cory's Dr Green Blog Posts:
Beekeeping
No Work Farming
Growing Organic

Wild Dinner

Last night I had an excellent dinner of wild greens and flowers.

There is a perfect little country road outside of Bonn where wild edibles grow aplenty. It runs beside an old apple orchard near 'Gut Ostler' and along a hill leading up to one of their fields. The road has at least three wild hops plants, numb nettles and loads of small fresh dandelion leaves.

We walked out there and picked to our hearts content last night - intending to feed at least two more people my friend and I picked many bags full of hops shoots and dandelion greens. On the bike ride home we picked the first few flowers of the Elderberry bushes along the bike path. The Hops shoots were parboiled and then fried lightly in garlic and butter. The dandelion greens were fried with bacon and potatoes, spiced with chili.

For desert I mixed up a simple pancake batter with buckwheat flower (eggs, milk, little sugar little salt) which an Italian Farmer left at Biofach in Nuremberg. The flowers were pressed into the pancakes while they were still wet on top and then the stems were timmed off quickly before the pancake was flipped.

Ecstatic to be eating from the wild.

Cory's Dr Green Blog Posts:
Small is Beautiful
Give Organic a Chance
Beekeeping
No Work Farming
Growing Organic

Springtime Gardening; Sunday Musings

I am back in Bonn and am subletting a well loved garden and apartment from a Botanist. - Life is good in these busy days of Spring. Every surface in the apartment is covered in plants and seedlings all yearning to go out and be planted in warm summer beds.

I am doing my best to be a good flower gardener. This is a new experience for me - ordinarily if i can't eat it then it has no use to me but I am softening. This morning I was sad to see one of the fritilleria was half eaten with the shining tell-tale markings of the slug all over the remnant petals. The fritilleria grows mostly in the wild here in Germany and has been carefully cultivated here in the garden - It's petals have the pattern of a chess board in purple and white. It is a top-choice for the bumblebees who have been buzzing around them for days waiting for a chance to climb inside and gather.

Because of this half-eaten fritillaria I had the tough task of killing slugs today. - Molluska is an amazing phylum as anyone who has ever spent time with a cephalopod will know. - I love mollusks of all kinds and the snails here in this garden are particularly beautiful. I'd never apply any chemicals to do away with the pest problem - even to the detriment of whole yields of lettuce and other tasty foods. Nonetheless, the slugs had to go.

The The first step to killing off the slugs was 'digging in' a mulch pile where the little molusks were doing all their breeding. I did a sort of double dig, first going through and loosening the soil in the center of the beds, watching out for all the giant earthworms, trying hard not to dig into any buried bulbs or trample any sprouted ones. I then mixed the mulch in to the top later of the soil - the many displaced communities of insects were running for their lives all the while.

The second step was to round up the remaining individual slugs and drown them in the water lily pond. That is better than crushing them - at least at this point in the season - later on I'll be busy enough not to take the extra step.

The epiphany for today is that I need a pet. A small flightless duck to keep me company, walk around in the garden and eat all the slugs. Feed the slugs to the duck and then eat the duck at the end of the summer.

Any idea where I can get one of those?

Cory's Dr Green Blog Posts:
Small is Beautiful
Give Organic a Chance
Beekeeping
No Work Farming
Growing Organic

Biofach 2009

Well, I have just returned and recovered from the Biofach in Nuremberg. Biofach is the largest Organic fair in the world - held each year in Nuremberg it is literally the center of the Organic Market Sector and the meeting place for people from all over the Organic World.

IFOAM among others has a strong presence there and does a lot of it's networking for projects and functions for members in the comming year. FiBL was there and with IFOAM were publicizing the recently published 'World Statistics Book'

During the Biofach, although I was extremely busy I met people from all over the world farmers and sales people, cheese and wine makers, researchers and non-profit workers. Everyone involved in organics was there.