Interested?

Are you interested in growing your own food? In food justice and food sovereignty? In urban farming? In designing a food-growing system from the ground up? If so, my spring course may be for you!

Here is the description of the course I’m teaching. I’d love to have you join us! Merritt College is incredibly inexpensive to attend - $46 per unit - and this is a 3-unit lecture and a 1-unit lab course. So, for under $200, we could spend the spring learning and transforming a garden together!

If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.

Change Everywhere

It’s that time of year again, when everything changes fast - the light, the leaves, the weather. We are enjoying fall colors (as much as we can in California) and the increase of ‘cozy’ with the early darker evenings. I’m baking bread again, weekly, and there are lots of hearty soups on the menu. Since it’s just me and Tom around the house these days, we keep it pretty simple when it comes to supper.

I’ve had a few folks ask me about the garden. I decided to plant the entire North section in cover crops, to help improve the soil. I’ve seeded both rye and crimson clover, and there are now other things coming up as well - cilantro, sunflowers, and also some tithonia. These are all seeds I put in over the summer and they never germinated. I just couldn’t keep enough water in the ground to support them. Now that we have cooler weather (and some rain - more on that in a minute), they are all popping up. It’ll be interesting to see what survives the winter frosts.

On the South side of the garden, I amended the soil, then planted: broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, snap and shelling peas, chard, kale, several kinds of lettuce, leeks, garlic, and spinach. Everything has germinated well (or was transplanted from our greenhouse plugs) and I expect slow growth from now until early Spring. Hopefully we’ll have some winter greens and lettuces, at least.

I’ve recently cleared out some areas in the ornamental beds that just weren’t working well, and have bought some new native plants to fill them. I’m especially excited to try our native California clematis - pipestem clematis - Clematis lasiantha - on our front fence by the driveway. We saw this lovely plant all over Mt. Diablo during our summer hikes, and it always looked amazing in the arid heat.

You may have heard a little something about the ‘bomb cyclone’ and/or atmospheric river we experienced here last weekend. In one 24 hour period, our weather station’s rain gauge recorded 5-1/2” of rain. For us, that is unprecedented. My folks in Orinda had 9-1/2” over that same 24-hour period. Crazy! In front of our house, there is a drain that takes all the runoff from about a quarter mile of road (our neighborhood was designed and built in the 1940s, clearly inadequate infrastructure for today). We (and our neighbors) are careful about keeping it clear of leaves and debris when it is raining, because we’ve had flooding in the neighborhood when the drain is clogged. Tom and I both took very wet and windy walks on the 24th, and enjoyed seeing all the little creeks near our house fill up and run at top capacity. In those conditions, it is easy to imagine the watershed the way it used to be before people lived here, with a broad river flowing down from the Mt. Diablo foothills.

As I’m sure you’ve heard, all this rain put barely a dent in our drought conditions. We need ten more storms just like this one (and frankly, that is highly unlikely to happen) to take us out of danger. However, these rains quenched all the fires in the northern half of the state, so that’s really great news.

As you know, I’ll be graduating in December with my BA in Environmental Studies, an accomplishment 30 years in the making. This photograph was taken from Merritt College, in Oakland. I’m proud to say that I have been hired as an adjunct professor in the Natural History and Sustainability department at Merritt, and I start teaching Urban Argroecology courses in January. Part of my position is a separate requirement to mentor students, particularly those that have been historically underserved by the academic community. I am super excited to get started, and also terrified - which I take as a positive sign that this is a correct new trajectory for me. I will be sad to leave my current internship with Friends of Sausal Creek. I have learned so much in my time with the organization, and forged relationships that I hope will last a lifetime. I still have two months with them, though! Between that, my school load, and gearing up for the new gig, I barely have time to miss my kids. Who, by the way, are both rocking it at their respective colleges. We sure enjoy hearing about their adventures in our weekly phone calls, and we look forward to having them back for the holidays.

How are your winter gardens coming along? I’d love to hear about your urban farming adventures.

The Sound of Chainsaws

The ongoing drought is starting to have quite an effect here in the Bay Area, and is especially evident in the Monterey Pines. Historically, these were planted with abandon all over the area, even though they really only do well near the coast. Driving down the highway, the brown, dead trees simply litter the embankments. The areas where we hike, even the reservoirs (where you’d assume the trees have stretched their roots to the water), are filled with struggling trees, mostly evergreen species.

The redwoods are starting to suffer, too. Again, they’ve been planted widely all over the inland areas, even though they are native to the coast and thrive on drippy, foggy conditions. The interior rarely gets fog.

And now we’re starting to notice the California live oaks, both coast live oaks and interior live oaks, are starting to succumb to the drought. It is getting very depressing.

Wherever we go, we hear the sound of chainsaws. Tree crews are out in force, trying desperately to stay ahead of the problem, but there are too many dead trees and not enough skilled arborists to stay on top of it.

In our own yard, we are watering less and less. I think most of the native and Mediterranean trees will be ok. But we have one Southern Magnolia (NOT planted by us, I hate it) which is starting to look a little peaked. I am thinking that it might be time to have it removed, and to replace it with something like a Desert Willow, which can thrive and look beautiful on far less water. Unfortunately, this means we will lose some shade on the house, but fortunately, it will increase the sun’s influence on our solar panels.

I think I will have to wait until the rains come and the tree companies are less busy. Right now, they have their hands full.

10/7/21 drought report from drought.gov

Native Plant Sale

This is the organization with which I am working at the moment, and this is their big annual native plant sale. One great way to garden for the future is to plant native species; they require less water, they support native pollinators, and they help give our gardens a sense of place. Let me know if you have any questions about the plants that are available for sale this year (though the website has a lot of helpful plant details already). I will be there loading orders into cars on Halloween! Hope to see you there.

We Are Alone

There’s a scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows where Harry, Ron, and Hermione suddenly disapparate (i.e. teleport) from London to a safe house (12 Grimmald Place) in order to escape the Death Eaters sent to kill them. Upon entering the residence, a ghostly Mad-Eye Moody (who is dead) rushes toward them, a sort of security measure he put in place before his death to protect the house. This is an unwelcome and scary surprise, so Hermione performs a spell (Revelio) to determine if there are any other frightening surprises (or persons) in the house. Nothing appears. The three teenagers stand in the entrance hall, which seems dark and menacing rather than the safe place it’s meant to be; the long dusty hall (and the unknown future) stretches in front of them. Hermione says, “We’re alone.” No one is there to help them. They are on their own, in an uncertain world.

That scene has been playing over and over in my mind these last few weeks, as Tom and I first traveled to Georgia to install our youngest, Rin, in their freshman year at Savannah College of Art and Design, and then again upon coming home, where we watched our eldest, Adam, pack up the car and drive off to begin his sophomore year at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo.

Since then, Tom and I have had trouble concentrating on work and school - well, on life, basically. Sure, we are a bit sad (we miss them both quite a lot), but we are also happy, as we have become (as my brother-in-law Andy assures me) “Successful Adult Launch Facilitators.” We’re worried, and we’re proud, and we’re hopeful. We are also curious to discover who we are as a couple, after twenty years of sharing our home with children. In short, we are feeling everything all at once.

Being of a certain age, lots of our friends are going through the same changes, and it’s been interesting to hear the various reactions. Some have reported feeling utterly liberated and free; others write of evenings spent crying on their child’s empty bed. We are somewhere in the middle - not delighted, but not bereft. We are, quite simply, alone. It will take some time for us to adjust to these new circumstances.