Our new front yard, part 5: Constructing a meadow community

...our money is going to a worthy non-profit. So, that’s the end of my excuse-making and complaining. Lets look at a what a meadow community consists of: First, there are layers. As I mentioned my previous posts, Planting authors Rainer and West encourage us to plant densely, but intelligently. The plants are not crowded, but no space is wasted–as it is in nature. As simpleton humans, the best way to approximate the abundant intelligence of natural s...

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Gathering of Community Gardeners

..., it is open to all interested parties. You don’t have to be a member of a community garden to attend, just interested in community building and gardening. There will be workshops and discussions on topics such as vegetable gardening, composting, native plants, beekeeping and even a workshop on urban chickens co-taught by yours truly, Homegrown Neighbor. The entire day Saturday is free, but a $10 donation is requested to cover operating expenses....

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Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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Our new front yard, part 3: design

...ative insects particularly, by planting food sources for them. Designing a community Rainer and West emphasize that a community is built in layers. They want close planting. They point out that a natural meadow, or even a vacant lot colonized by weeds, will host hundreds of species on one patch of ground. Compare this to the paltry biodiversity of our typical yard, where the number of species can often be counted on one hand. To get this kind of d...

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Putting Your Civic House in Order: How the Young Members of the Family Help

...created in them a desire for a beautiful home. For the larger family, the community, the gardening contest proved the dominant factor in city improvement work of the year. To be sure, the community went ahead with the regular improvements arranged for. To these projects the efforts spent on the individual homes and waste places gave the needed finish–the final touch of beauty. The use of non-producing land increased the community wealth. The remo...

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