VideoAre you hiding chickens at home?

In many cities in the US and Canada, backyard chickens are illegal. The Perennial Plate takes a close up look at some of the outlaws hiding them.

The post Video: Underground Chickens appeared first on EcoSalon.

A baker’s dozen of books to prep your lawn, balcony or fire escape for growing (and reap what they sow).  

We’re going to brazenly use the phrase Urban Homesteading here because not only is it perfectly descriptive (a perfect way to describe the pioneering antics of urban dwellers, who make up 80% of this nation, getting back to their agrarian roots, is it not?) but also because it rings true to the populist movement rocketing from city to suburb, and blooming at every fire escape in between.

To be an Urban Homesteader is to be the new American Gothic, except the old man farmer sports a hipster ‘stache and the spinster daughter is not a spinster, thank you very much, but a kick-ass and fully self-sufficient woman who can grow her own turnips and eat them, too.

Want to be just like her? Awesome. Except, how does one actually go about growing turnips? Here are 13 books on today’s fastest growing urban movement. Surely one of them will lead you to homegrown salad munching bliss.

The Urban Homestead : Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City is considered an essential handbook for urban gardeners and farmers. The authors Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen founded the blog Root Simple and are responsible for sparking territory disagreements on the electronic frontier by challenging the Dervaes family on their move to trademark the term “Urban Homesteading” and, effectively, the movement.

Urban Farm Handbook: City Slicker Resources for Growing, Raising, Sourcing, Trading, and Preparing What You Eat by Annette Cottrell and Joshua McNichols teaches city-dwellers how to wean themselves off of commercial supermarkets.

Urban Homesteading: Heirloom Skills for Sustainable Living by Rachel Kaplan and K. Ruby Bloom offers a comprehensive how and why to backyard DIY, including worm bins, rainwater storage systems, medicinal herbs and more.

The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading: An Encyclopedia of Independent Living by Nicole Faires promises to teach you everything you ever wanted to know about self-reliance, preparedness, survival, and sustainable homesteading. A rather encyclopedic statement.

In The Essential Urban Farmer authors Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal share their experience as successful urban farmers with practical blueprints.

Chick Days: An Absolute Beginner’s Guide to Raising Chickens from Hatching to Laying by Jenna Woginrich is about chickens. What more can we say? That’s deserving of an exclamation point: chickens! How to raise ’em, love ’em and (let’s be honest here) eat their eggs humanely.

The Backyard Beekeeper’s Honey Handbook: A Guide to Creating, Harvesting, and Cooking with Natural Honeys assumes a certain level of beekeeping experience, but gets into practical guidance on a back-to-the-earth beekeeping lifestyle and artisan cultivation of honey varieties.

Urban Farming: Sustainable City Living in Your Backyard, in Your Community, and in the World by Thomas Fox will, we quote,”walk every city and suburban dweller down the path of self sustainability” be it in a high rise apartment, community garden or itty bitty terrace.

The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City is an older book (circa the 70s) that is considered by many of today’s homesteaders to be the bible of the urban agriculture movement. It teaches readers to treat their homes as a mini-ecosystem for growing fruit and vegetables, raising chickens, rabbits and fish, recycling waste and heating with solar energy, all within a typical 1/8-acre city lot.

Mini Farming: Self-Sufficiency on 1/4 Acre by Brett Markham, on the other hand, is for urban farmers with just 1/4 acre of land to work with.

The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! might be geared towards more of a suburban or sleeper community homesteading audience as it even offers advice on how to keep a cow in your backyard.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Urban Homesteading by Sundari Elizabeth Kraft because sometimes an idiot’s guide is the only fence between you and an edible  harvest.

Food Grown Right in Your Backyard by the boys from the Seattle Urban Farm Company breaks edible gardening down into digestible chunks with case studies and photographic montages, more of a 1-2-3 than an A-to-Z guide to homesteading in your own backyard.

This list should be rather exhaustive, but if there are any books you think we’ve missed, please feel free to add to our library by leaving a comment below!

Image: Elaine Faith

The post Build Your Homesteading Library With These Must-Read Essentials appeared first on EcoSalon.

“Agriculture is our wisest pursuit, because it will in the end contribute most to real wealth, good morals, and happiness.”

Pop quiz, first question: to whom is that first quote attributed? The answer, friends, is founding father Thomas Jefferson who would probably spew corn kernels out of his coffin at the backseat American agriculture has taken to special interests and the (industrialized) food lobby. After regaining his composure, he’d probably tip his hat (had he worn one) to the pioneering brethren and sistren of today who are revitalizing agriculture from the comfort of their own backyards.

Urban agriculturalists Colin McCrate and Brad Halm are two such citizens. The founders of Seattle Urban Farm Company have recently come out with a book outlining pretty much everything you need to know about edible gardening (dare we call it homesteading of the urban variety). Using case studies of just about every type of urban and suburban lot, they map out irrigation solutions, design strategies, soil prepping and container gardening how-to’s.

We reached out to Colin with a few nagging, lingering questions of our own. Here’s what he had to say:

Where does one begin? Basically, what do I need to plant to get a decent edible garden going?

It’s easy to grow food at home…but it is even easier if you take a few minutes to plan things out before you get started.  Whether you are thinking about setting up a few containers on your deck or tilling up your entire backyard, there are a few basic things to you will want to address before putting your plants in the ground.

Like what?

Access to sunlight and water: Your garden must receive at least 6-8 hours of sunlight per day for healthy growth and productivity. Think about your options for garden locations and consider sun exposure as the number one priority.

Second priority is to make sure that it will be easy for you to get water to your plants on a regular basis.  It is easy to end up hauling buckets of water across the yard or knocking over pottery with an unwieldy hose, so take the time to figure out a watering system beforehand!

Bear in mind that vegetables are “heavy feeders.” This means that they absorb large amounts of nutrients from the soil as they grow. In order to produce a maximum harvest, each crop needs an adequate supply of plant food. Nutrients are supplied by compost and organic fertilizers, and both should be added to your soil before each season begins.

Make sure to follow the plant’s (or seed’s) recommended spacing requirement. Many beginning gardeners assume that, if they plant their crops closer together, then they will get more food per square foot.  But that’s not quite how it works. When crops are planted too closely together, they compete for sunlight, water and nutrients. When forced to compete, plant growth is stunted, production is limited and crops are more susceptible to pest and disease pressures.

Finally, choose crops that you are excited to grow. Certain crops give a higher yield per square foot of planting space, but it is also important to choose plants that you are really psyched about growing. It will make them easier to take care of.

What plants get you psyched?

A few of our favorite crops for small gardens are Head Lettuce, especially Deer Tongue, Flashy Trout Back; Arugula, Rocket and Surrey; Bush Beans; Summer Squash; Radishes, of the Cherriette variety; Cilantro; Basil; Tomatoes, like Sungold and Black Prince.

All of the above is basically pornography for our food writers. When should we start planting?

Planting dates vary widely depending on your climate and the crop you want to grow. In temperate parts of the country (much of the east coast, west coast and the Midwest), most crops are planted in the spring and early summer. For many gardeners, the majority of planting happens between early March and late May.

Most people don’t realize that it is possible to continue planting throughout much of the summer and even into the fall.  Planting a crop several times throughout the season is called “succession planting” and it allows the gardener to spread out their harvest over a longer period (its better to have 2 heads of lettuce per week all season than to have 20 heads all at the same time!) and to really make the most of the limited space they have available.

What’s the best coast for edible gardening?

Every region of the country has its benefits and drawbacks…The east coast has very hot summers which allows for rapid plant growth and huge yields, but that area also has some of the most prevalent pest and disease issues which have been known to frustrate many a beginning farmer. Much of the west coast has a temperate climate that allows for a long, slow growing season where certain crops can be harvested almost year round. On the downside, in the more mild parts of the coast, like our Pacific Northwest, cool summers can make some of the most coveted crops difficult to grow.

The incredible soil quality of the Midwest makes that region one of the best places in the world for food production…of course season-long droughts can shift your perspective on things a little bit…

What’s your favorite tomato variety and why?

Now that I have been living in the Pacific Northwest for almost 10 years, my expectations of a tomato plant have shifted dramatically. Given the nature of our climate, large slicing tomatoes (and sometimes even Romas) are difficult to ripen. They perform better in a greenhouse, but are more likely to encounter disease problems in those conditions. In the PNW, Sungold cherry tomatoes are without a doubt the best tasting, best producing plant you can grow. They are incredibly vigorous and healthy; and just about everybody who tries them gets addicted.

Generally speaking…I still think Sungold is the best cherry tomato for any climate, San Marzano are amazing Roma tomatoes, and the Cherokee Purple is my favorite slicer.

What’s the story with your cropping headquarters?

Seattle Urban Farm Company operates out of a house in North Seattle. The HQ is affectionately referred to as “Moonbase,” a title that attests to our location at the city limits and because we figure that our work is pioneering intensive gardening techniques that will be implemented in future moon colonies or something like that.

What crops do you recommend for vertical gardeners?

Vertical gardening can be as simple or complex as you want it to be.

The simplest vertical gardens are built with hanging pieces of string or wooden or bamboo stakes. If you have a spot that will work well for a row of tall crops, consider planting pole beans, cucumbers, tomatoes and winter squash like pumpkins or butternut.  These are all vine crops that produce better, have less disease problems and look great when supported on a trellis.

There are also some pretty cool perennial edibles that make great vertical elements in a garden like hops, grapes, kiwis, and columnar apple trees.

There are all sorts of more complex vertical gardening systems on the market today. Some allow you to plant in soil and others are set up as hydroponic or aeroponic systems. The concept of building narrow, tall planting containers makes a lot of sense for people with limited square footage of sunny real estate. I think we will see a lot of gimmicky and well-functioning vertical garden systems in the next few years, but it is important to do your homework on the products because some of them are very far to the gimmicky end of that spectrum.

What’s your take on the homestead naming controversy?

I think that putting a trademark on the phrase “urban homestead” was, at best, ill-advised. I believe that, if our society values the progress that is being made on sustainability and farming issues, then the people who work on those issues should be compensated (just like any other discipline). I think that, in this case, the move seemed more like a money-grabbing, overly-capitalistic strategy that alienated their community and potential allies instead of helping to foster a healthy homesteading economy. Based on my limited understanding of trademark law, “urban homesteading” is a wholly descriptive term and shouldn’t even be permissible as a trademark anyways.

Food Grown Right, In Your Backyard authored by Colin McCrate and Brad Halm is available for purchase now through Mountaineers Books. 

The post The Seattle Urban Farm Company Kicks Out Homesteaders for a New Urban Agriculture appeared first on EcoSalon.

The grass is greener (and prettier) on this side of the chicken wire.

Chicken coop design is a rather specialized disciplined, either the domain of dedicated DIYers or idealistic urbanites looking to spruce up their homesteads with modernist prefab-esque aviary dwellings.

Here are a few noteworthy models – egg-shaped, solar-paneled and all – that are in strut with the backyard chicken-keeping trend. Please note that “trend” is not meant to be taken flippantly. An increasing number of municipalities are relaxing regulations against urban and suburban chicken husbandry. Meanwhile, our eggs have never been so organic and home-hatched. It’s not so much a trend as it is a common sense renaissance, one that designers and architects are answering with innovation.

Hand-crafted in the UK, the egg-shaped Nogg can house two-four domestic chickens. Reinforced stainless door frame protects from the elements and a twistable, liftable glass top aids circulation. The Nogg is made from antibacterial cedar wood.

Bonus feature: Nogg egg cups, just because.

While not commercially available, the coop by Mitchell Snyder and designer Shelley Martin has been the envy of every urban dwelling chicken-keeper since it was hatched during the nascence of the chicken craze. It was built behind a 1924 craftsman bungalow in NE Portland, Oregon. Windows control ventilation and the roof features a planted terrain for rain water filtration and heat absorption during hot summer months.

The RAAD is a luxe chicken coop by a New York firm that has elevated chicken keeping to a “new standard in living that liberates the lifestyles of modern chickens.” It features floor-to-ceiling windows and a solar-powered fan.

Moderncoop is what you would describe as a “sporty chicken coop” made from recycled cedar. It is also mobile (allowing your yard to “re-cooperate”) with a look is altogether trailer chic.

Now for two truly innovative coops designed by Studio H, a public high school design/build curriculum. The first, called Chicktopia was made from one hundred reclaimed sticks salvaged from a tobacco farm.

The second, another reclaimed Studio H coop, the Chicken Circus.

Finally, there’s Breed Retreat from designer Frederik Roijée, an elevated hen house with private “rooms” and a glassed-in egg-laying area.

It’s an urban paradise, proving yet again that life is for the birds.

Image: The Nogg via Life of an Architect

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Gardening stories that had us wanting to intensify our green thumb.

The urban homesteading movement gained serious speed this year, proving that you don’t need to move to the suburbs to enjoy the simple pleasures of growing your own vegetables, raising your own chickens, and starting your own bee colony. And despite some groups’ best efforts to kill the momentum, it doesn’t look like the trend is disappearing anytime soon.

One great offshoot of the urban homesteading movement is the spread of new, innovative ways to grow things indoors. Forget standard windowsill planters; this is the 21st century. Here, a sampling of Shelter’s favorite herb kits, terrariums, and other gravity-defying, thought-provoking indoor gardening objects from the past year.

It’s a very small world after all in these mini moss terrariums made from vintage glass and upcycled objects. Michelle Inciarrano and Katy Maslow specialize in miniaturizing scenes, and they take custom orders.

The Plantable concept table/planter from JAILmake reflects on “the distance we place between ourselves and the processes involved in making our food.”

These gravity-defying ceramic sky planters use Slo-flo irrigation technology to minimize water use.

It’s a greeting card! It’s a garden! The City Postcarden is both, with a little water and tending, of course.

The Eco Orb Terrarium kit from Tend Living lets you build your own miniature glass orb garden from a Tilliandis plant, reindeer moss, sand, and accents.

The Zozio from Pousse Créative might look like a “standard windowsill planter,” but it is so much more. This eco-friendly planter doubles as a bird feeder and is ideal for vertical gardens.

The Miroir en Herbe from h2O Architects blurs the boundaries between nature and culture.

Grow your own herbs from the comfort of your kitchen with a selection of indoor herb garden kits and accessories.

Wine bottles get a second life with these Growbottle Upcycled Hydrogardens from Potting Shed Creations, available in Oregano, Chives, Basil, Parsley, and Mint.

And finally, with the addition of Mike Lieberman’s 2012 series on Urban Gardening, expect good harvesting ahead and get your garden planned out now.

The post 2011 in Review: A Good Year for Gardening appeared first on EcoSalon.

Is urban homesteading’s reputation of being a crowd-sourced and friendly philosophy for living being capitalized on?

I’ve had homesteading on the brain for the past couple of weeks and not because I’m raising chickens on my azotea (Quick vocab lesson: we live in Spain where azotea is the Andaluz way of saying roofdeck), but because I find things like manscapers, urban chicken sheds and nouveaux communes interesting, relevant, sometimes sexy, counter-culture and quietly revolutionary. Imagine my surprise then, upon discovering that the reputation urban homesteading has enjoyed over the past two decades, of being a crowd-sourced and friendly philosophy for living, is being capitalized, idealistically and literally.

No, all’s not right on the homestead and here’s how it affects the rest of us.

The Nitty Grits

In February of this year, the Dervaes Institute – the nonprofit arm of the family by the same moniker filed for and won the right to exclusively own the rights to the term Urban Homesteading and all of its incarnations under U.S. Trademark law. Armed with their new paperwork, they sent out a series of cease and desist letters to publishers, bloggers, a farmer’s market in Colorado, KCRW-FM, the Santa Monica Public Library, and several web pages. They followed up by asking Facebook to remove all pages and profiles that employed the words “Urban” and “Homesteading” in quick succession without using a big ® and those nasty capital letters I alluded to before.

Many feathers were ruffled, including those of Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, authors of The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City, and their publisher Process Media. Both parties are now being represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and have filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office to have the trademarks revoked.

The Dervaes Institute also hurled a rotten egg (that malodorous petition) to James Bertini of Denver Urban Homesteading who subsequently had his Facebook page, along with its 2,000 followers, permanently sheered from the social network. He, too, has filed a petition with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office.

Upon hearing about all the weeding going on, blogger April Alexander started her own Facebook Page, this one called Take Back Urban Homesteading(s), or TBUH. “I saw that this family was trying to own the words that define the urban homesteading movement by trademarking them,” she explained. “And I couldn’t sit idly by and let it happen.”

It has since become a vibrant community with over 7,500 members sharing photos, links, advice – basically doing what homesteaders do. To date, they’re about 2,000 likes shy of the Dervaes’ own Facebook presence.

Guarding the Homestead

The Dervaes’ claim to the phrase stems from their high-profile homesteading efforts, something they’ve been at in Pasadena, CA since the early 1980s. That’s a long time, and they’ve enjoyed their lot in the sun. They run several websites and blogs, were the subject of an award-winning film. Hot damn, they’ve even been on Oprah.

However, April Alexander of TBUH argues that Mother Earth News has been publishing articles on urban homesteading since the 1970’s. Moreover, the Dervaes Institute claims that Jules Dervaes is the founder of the urban homestead movement, which to April and her cohorts is as authentic as a ChemLawn.

“My family has been urban homesteading for generations.  My dad is the grandson of German immigrant farmers and his mother always had a large vegetable garden in the backyard of her Sacramento, California home, so I knew firsthand that the Dervaes family weren’t the creators of urban homesteading.”

Rebecca Jeschke, Media Relations Director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says that it’s not just a matter of which came first, the chicken or the egg, or in this case the blog or the term. It’s the principle behind it all, plus a few legal irregularities that stick out like wild dandelions.

“The trademark the Dervaes family received was for a narrow purpose. Educational services.” But even that’s not enough to hold water, they claim. The term has become too much a part of popular vernacular to be appropriated by any one claimant, and there are bigger considerations to take into account.

“The issue is that this kind of trademark abuse makes free speech on the internet really difficult. A big part of urban homesteading is sharing information and being in communities that discuss it. This abuse of intellectual property law [threatens to] shut down a vibrant discussion online.”

What’s on the horizon?

At the risk of alienating themselves completely from the community that germinated them, the Dervaes’ family has planted its heels steadfastly in the mud. They want that trademark, and for now, they have it.

On team TBUH, in the meantime, it looks like the damage done to the family’s reputation – generous, neo-hippy and inclusive – is irreparable.

Nevertheless, April adds, “The urban homesteading community is very giving and I really believe that if they would be willing to mend fences and be more neighborly” all could be forgiven.

Two emails and phone calls seeking comment from the Dervaes Institute have gone unreturned.

UPDATE: Per the US Trademarks Office, the Dervaes Institute has principal registration on the term Urban Homestead, whereas Urban Homesteading is on the supplemental register. As such the latter does not afford them exclusive use. Crave more details on the nuances of trademark law? Have fun!

Images: Roger H. Goun and ♥ Jaye

The post Bad Blood On The Home(steading) Front appeared first on EcoSalon.

Urban homesteading is more doable than you think.

At the risk of stirring up controversy for using The-Term-Formerly-Known-As –Urban Homesteading, I’d like to talk about the practice of achieving more self-sufficient, sustainable living in cities from a strictly aesthetic point of view. Who says keeping chickens has to be hard? Take a look at the Kippen House above, a modular, multifunctional and modern chicken coop designed by Seattle-based architect Traci Fontyn.

Kippen means “chickens” in Dutch, and the Kippen House is a combination of the designer’s Dutch heritage, her love of Scandinavian design and “curious interests with urban agriculture in the form of an urban garden chicken coop.”

The Vertical Homesteader

The amazing thing about gardening trellises is that you can repurpose them out of anything (from old ladders to headboards), and they provide much needed support for the urban or vertical homesteader with a taste for cucumbers, tomatoes, and other climbing produce.

This one is made by UK artist Clare Harris who constructs trellises, bath mats, waste paper baskets, and table mats out of natural and locally coppiced materials. The trellis seen here is made from hazel poles and willow withies.

The Knife-Wielding Homesteader

UK retailer Hen & Hammock claims that every gardener needs a good pocketknife, as well as a trug and some string. I’m going to trust them on that. Clicking through their site is a lot like paging through a J. Crew catalog: not only is every object a total lustable, the entire lifestyle is, too.

The Bee-Keeping Homesteader

The well-documented peril of bees is that they’ve been dying off at a staggeringly high rate for years. Our life cycle is connected to bees in many ways, both seen and unseen. The direct impact on homesteaders meanwhile, is they need bees to pollinate their crops. Enter the Bee Station, an innovative little refueling and nesting station you can stick right in your garden.

Does all this talk of urban gardening have you hankering to show us your gorgeous stems and desirable pots? Then give us a peek into your homestead. Send pictures to editor@ecosalon.com.

The post Making Homesteading Approachable appeared first on EcoSalon.

Buying stuff is out. Doing stuff is in. Everybody loves food and it seems like these days you can’t walk down the street without tripping over a self-identified “foodie.” No question, as we change the way we think about food, it’s taking on a new importance in our culture. Now it’s time to change the way we think about holiday food gifts.

This year, let’s lose the plastic wrapped gift baskets of packaged “gourmet” food items that are shipped from far away, gathered up together and then flung across the country in trains, trucks, and planes. All that petroleum and packaging just so some foodie can have yet another bottle of flavored vinegar or sickly sweet jam. What a waste!

Likewise, it’s time to lay off single use, gimmicky food utensils that exist solely to provide stumped gift givers with something to spend money on.

Experiences are more meaningful and memorable than things. They’re also more thoughtful, environmentally responsible, and supportive of local businesses. Some are even free.

Here are our best ideas for bringing the joy of real food to your family, friends, and community this holiday season.

1. Host a Canning Party You supply the jars and a case or two of something seasonal like apples, pears or citrus. Your friends bring the snacks and their willingness to work. Spend the afternoon eating and socializing while you all work together to produce apple or pear butter or orange marmalade. It’s a fun party and everyone gets to go home with a homemade party favor.

2. Host a Baking or Jam Exchange You supply the food and drink (or make it a potluck) and your friends bring a batch of either jam they’ve canned or a batch of goodies they’ve baked. Everybody trades. Everybody wins.

3. Host a Skill Share Poll your friends to see what skills they’d like to learn, and what skills they’d like to share. Ideas include yogurt making, sprouting, sourdough bread baking, sauerkraut making, meat curing, coffee roasting, beer brewing, jamming, or pickling. Match up learners with teachers over a series of Saturdays.

4. Give the Gift of Knowledge There’s been an explosion of affordable and interesting homesteading and eco-cooking classes and talks. Check into gift certificates for the DIY types on your list. Urban Kitchen SF hosts hands-on classes on butchering, fermenting, and more with local experts. The Institute for Urban Homesteading teaches cheesemaking, brewing, and beekeeping. 18 Reasons hosts talks, educational dinners, and a variety of creative food events. Look around in your local area for similar programs. Lest you think this is only applicable to the San Francisco Bay Area, note that The University of Utah offers classes in Urban Homesteading, and there’s also an organization in Denver.

5. Hold a Bake Sale for a Local Food Charity Want to help out a local food bank or soup kitchen? Why not get your friends together for a bake sale? What a great excuse to talk to passers-by and one another while raising money to help make sure everyone gets enough to eat.

6. Host a Potluck Movie Night Looking for a gentle way to get friends and relatives more engaged in food issues without being preachy? Host a potluck movie night and show one of the many excellent food documentaries that have come out over the past few years. If Food Inc. is a little too hard-hitting, try Fresh or Nourish.

7. Host a Potluck of Local or Foraged Foods Even if your local farmers’ market shuts down for the winter, you can still find local foods. Look for local dairy, egg, or meat producers. Also invite your foraging friends and ask everyone to bring a dish whose main ingredient is from within 20 miles away. The idea is for participants to be exposed to local goodies they wouldn’t otherwise know about.

8. Visiting family? Hit up a Farmers’ market or Farmstand You’d really like to get your family off the packaged food, but don’t want to nag. Remember that lots of people eat packaged food because they don’t know how to prepare fresh stuff or because what’s available in the grocery store fresh just doesn’t taste that good. Introduce them to the amazing difference in flavor between fresh from the farm produce and the grocery store offerings by visiting a farmers’ market or farm stand and cooking together.

9. Bake or Cook with a Child We’re doomed if we don’t teach our children to cook. So let go a little of your need for perfect food or a clean kitchen and get those kids in there with you. And keep it light and fun. Enough said.

10. Support a Local Farmer or Fisher for your Holiday Meal Want to directly support a small farmer or fisher? Consider special-ordering a heritage turkey or goose from a local farm or, if you live near the coast, buy some fish right off the boat from a fisherman. Maybe you can’t afford it every day, but for a special occasion, it’s a great way to make a direct connection with your food producers.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Image: L. Marie

The post The Green Plate: 10 Seasonal Experiential Food Gifts for Foodies appeared first on EcoSalon.

Something has always kept me from going to Maker Faire. Partially due to the fact that it’s in San Mateo and I’m in Oakland. And the fact that I just don’t feel cool enough. What can I say? I’m a blocked crafter and I feel woefully inadequate in the face of all these clever people who can create sculptures of felt, make things run with steam, and invent solar powered robots – all while dressed in Renaissance Faire meets Burning Man costumes.

But as the author of an upcoming cookbook called DIY Delicious, I figured I had to go this year. I resolved to make the trip, provided I could avoid driving a car to get there.

The website helpfully provided directions for biking from BART. All I had to do was get on the train in Oakland with my bike, stay there for 50 minutes until the final Millbrae stop and then bike five suburban miles to The San Mateo County Fairgrounds, where The Silicone Valley Bicycle Coalition would be offering free valet bicycle parking. The Faire also offered a $5 discount in admission for individuals biking to the event. Bonus points!

The Faire was different than I imagined. A little more Burning Man and a little less Mother Earth News than I expected. The home-oriented DIY activities – things like gardening, raising chickens, making food products, canning, herbal home remedies, etc. kind of got lost among the blingy fire and steam arts, art cars, and sculptures, but there were definitely some fun things to do for those with an interest in the arts of the home.

Here are a few of the highlights of the day:

The Homegrown Village was where those interested in living more sustainably and self-reliantly could go to learn skills. Over the two days, there were demos on yogurt, fermentation, beekeeping, sprouting, installing greywater systems and more.

On Sunday, I attended a bacon demo by Karen Solomon, author of Jam It, Pickle It, Cure It. She did a great job of demystifying the process, all while keeping the audience laughing. I especially love that she teaches how to do it without a fancy smoker. All you need is a small grill. The bacon was delicious, by the way. And she shares the recipe on her website.

Mini Mushroom Farms from Far West Fungi. These not only look incredibly cool, but also are especially wonderful for people with shady yards or no space at all.

Plants on Walls lets you grow food in tiny spaces, or create a living wall of greenery. They are economical and easy to install. The panels are made from recycled/recyclable materials, are non-toxic and water efficient.

Got a tool that hurts your hand, or simply doesn’t quite work right? Sugru is an insanely simple material for helping you hack things better. It’s brilliantly green because it extends the life and usefulness of things you already own. And it’s empowering to be able to take charge of making things in your home work for you. Check out the website. There are tons of great ideas for hacking things better.

Rock the Bike, a group of inventors and bike advocates in Berkeley, California, whose dream is to help spread the spirit of the bike into the broader culture, was powering a band called the Fossil Fool.

Harnessing the power of technology to help facilitate local economies and bring people together to share skills can absolutely lead to more sustainable lifestyles. I discovered two new technological tools at Maker Faire.

Local Dirt, founded in Madison but with a national reach, is a brilliantly designed online database to help farmers sell their products to local buyers and help buyers find local products they wouldn’t otherwise know about or have access to.

Consumers can search by location, venue, or product. Farmers can use a simple blog interface to add products easily. The key thing here that makes this tool different from other online ethical sourcing tools is that it scales up to large institutional buyers including schools, grocery stores, and hospitals. This is where its huge potential lies in rebuilding a more localized and regionalized food system on a larger scale.

It’s also a great business model that looks like it could be financially sustainable. Use of the site is free for individuals, buying clubs, farmers’ market managers, and small farmers, while yearly membership costs are scaled for businesses, larger farms, and distributors. It also makes small farmers lives more sustainable by freeing them up to farm instead of driving to numerous small farmers markets that take up their precious time and are often not cost-effective.

Unclasses is a site that connects people who want to learn something with those who can teach it. Anyone at all can add a class and teach it themselves. Users can also browse the site and join any of the numerous classes on everything from handyman skills to making a Persian stew. It’s a young site that is mostly San Francisco Bay Area focused because that’s where the founders are, but I can see it growing. Classes are free with some donations for materials.

When you sign up for a class or to teach a class you can share it on your Facebook or Twitter page so your friends can join too. The idea behind the site is casual learning. According to the website, “Casual learning is for people like us, who have hectic lives and struggle to find fun and interesting ways to satisfy their intellectual curiosity in the limited free time they have. Think of it as educational snacking, a low-touch way to explore topics that interest you.”

All ages, learning to knit.

All in all, I’m happy I went to Maker Faire. One of the coolest things about it from an eco-perspective, is seeing so many people with children at the site. Children were building things out of recycled materials, tinkering, sewing, knitting, and exploring a whole world of things that you can’t buy at a suburban shopping mall. And that’s the real beauty of Maker Faire – showcasing the ingenuity of us humans, while teaching our children and reminding ourselves that we can use what we already own to make something new and that great things don’t always come from stores.

This is the latest installment in Vanessa Barrington’s weekly column, The Green Plate, on the environmental, social, and political issues related to what and how we eat.

Images: Vanessa Barrington

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