Good morning folks.

The video for today is from Ted Talks, an online video collection from annual lecture events that I highly recommend. Like almost all of the videos there, the lecturer in this one took some of our most troubling issues and looked at them with fresh, intelligent eyes and reviewed an active solution. How we obtain and process vital resources as a species – our energy supply, our food supply, our water supply – is unsustainable on almost every level. Thankfully, there are alternatives, and they are better every way.

This video is about a fish farm, but it is also about how we must approach our basic resource challenges in this new century. Study nature. Emulate nature. Create local solutions, not mega-corporate solutions. Produce smart, grow smart, and you can enjoy a mighty tasty fish.

Remember everyone, buy local or grow it yourself!

Love to all,

Millard

Good afternoon folks.

The posts have been a bit sparse here lately, primarily because I have been putting together a new business selling garden boxes. While the business has steadily grown, there is a ton of work to from administration and marketing to making the boxes themselves, and streamlining the process along the way.

I truly feel that growing a portion of our own food at the home and the community level is a very important part of food sustainability, which I believe is synonymous with food independence. While it is impossible for most of us to grow even a majority of our own produce individually, our garden boxes and vegetable gardens do contribute significantly to undercutting the power of our corporate food delivery system.

The cornerstone of food independence though will be consumer support of food producers who are local and organic. As responsible consumers we have to know where our food comes from, and understand the all of the costs associated with transporting food long distances from massive corporate farms.

This concept can be very easily overdone. There are some foods that can and should be imported, particularly regional specialties and luxury foods. Trade is a vital component of a sustainable community. What is important is that the majority of our basic food staples originate locally, and that all of our food is produced responsibly.

I am going to be going back to posting regularly, so please check in often.

Remember everyone buy local or grow it yourself.

Love to all,

Millard

Good morning folks.

I was beginning to think that I knew a lot about sustainability, but Introduction To Permaculture opened a whole new world for me. More than anything, it deepened my appreciation for the quantum intelligence of nature.

For a design professional who has studied and worked hard to learn as much as possible so that my designs would have depth, it is very humbling to learn about Permaculture, because I realize that compared to nature, all of my clever little ideas are nothing. The beauty of permaculture as a method for developing homesteads and communities is that it works in line with the natural order, not against it. It takes all of the elements of traditional agriculture – annuals, perennials, vegetables, fruits, trees, livestock and aquaculture – and arranges these these elements so they are interacting with each other to maximum effect. The book is not just for farm owners though. It is for anyone with any land, even apartment dwellers, who wants to make the most of their space in an organic, sustainable fashion.

Maybe the most attractive part of permaculture is the relative ease by which a developed system can be managed. While there is intensive energy and labor involved in creating a permaculture landscape, the end result can be a fully self sustaining food forest that provides for you, your family and some extra for the market. Now that is old school, and that is the way it should be done.

The author Bill Mollison first developed permaculture ideas in the late 60’s. The movement now has an institute devoted to its study, several books and many case studies. I can truly say that I have no idea why this planet is not following these principles already. Permaculture solves so many problems at once, not the least of which is how to make money. The end of the book provides some great ideas for making money through what is produced on your land.

Introduction To Permaculture is a great idea book, and I highly recommend it for everyone who is interested in sustainability.

Remember everyone, buy local or grow it yourself!

Love to all,

Millard

Good afternoon folks.

I have been blogging about sustainability in food for the past few weeks because that is where I am at in my life right now. I am transitioning the habits of myself and my family to food sustainability, and I have found that it takes a lot of effort to climb out of unsustainable ruts. The good news is that the ruts are mostly psychological and the long term benefits are worth the effort.

I blogged earlier about square foot gardening, as this is the method I am using to grow my food. A key element to keeping the ongoing costs low in square foot gardening is to be able to supply your own compost, as this is the primary nutrient supply and must be replaced after every harvest.

Lucky for me, composting is easy! I’m happen to be pretty lucky actually in this regard, because the house my family is renting has a rather large backyard, and the area has a semi-rural feel to it. My throwing up a compost pit was not only allowed by my landlord but encouraged.

Some people may have more or less challenges than me between them and composting, but if growing your own food is the greenest thing you can do, composting is the essential fuel of your garden. In the near future as I work on moving to a zero waste household, I will be starting worm composting, which will enable me to use all of my food waste for composting. Right now though I will be limiting myself to basic composting of yard clippings and scrap vegetables and fruit. The main reason is that it is way simpler.

So what do you need to to compost? All you really need is an area in your yard to pile up your plant waste! If you want to keep it contained just buy buy 15′ of 5′ high wire fence, form a circle with it, and start putting your waste green in there. If you live in an apartment, you can buy a composting bin and operate on a more modest scale, but in either case I strongly encourage everyone to do it. The trick is to keep the pile not too wet or too dry, but moist, and to turn it regularly. The more you turn it, the quicker you get compost. If you are able to turn your compost over daily you can have a fantastic soil amender in two weeks, all from yard scraps, kitchen scraps, pennies of water and five minutes a day with a shovel or a pitchfork.

The picture at the top of the post is of my little operation. Yeah, I got a little fancy with a concrete block lined pit, but it does not need to be this involved. The blocks just happened to be laying around the yard. The property comes with a gardener, and every week he clips about 4-6 trashcans full of green waste. All I have to do is take the cans and dump them into the pit. It almost feels like I’m cheating it is so easy. Now the operation is only a couple of weeks old, but I can already see it is going to give me all the compost I need to grow my vegetables and them some. Below is a picture of the yard I get all of these wonderful trimmings from.

To speed up the process I may buy a yard chipper, which will turn all of the branches and leaves into a fine mulch. I saw one used on craigslist for $175, and a new would cost around $500 and up. It is definitely worth it for a larger yard.

For apartments and condos you do not have to be limited to your kitchen scraps. You can easily get some yard waste from the gardener of the complex, and this can be used in the square foot garden on you balcony or patio.

The bottom line is there is no excuse for not doing this. Food sustainability may be the most important facet of the whole sustainability picture, and no matter what your living circumstance you can do it. Grow your own food. Compost your plant waste. Save our troubled species. Repeat. This stuff is very easy, and it will help so much.

Remember, buy local, or grow it yourself everybody!

Love to all,

Millard

Good morning folks.

I really love everything about this video. Programs like this weave so many sustainable techniques together rather than just isolating environmental issues and attempting to address them piecemeal. Ideally programs like this need to be ongoing to to generate the real shift we are looking for.

The very greenest thing you can do, is work together with your neighbors to grow and provide for the basic necessities of life: food, water, energy, clothing. This is even better than doing all of this yourself, because real community building based upon working together to solve essential needs, will be the cornerstone of the new era. Not survivalism. Not corporatism. Not some government solution from on high. We all need to practice Neighborhoodism, and we need to start now.

Buy local, or grow it yourself everybody!

Love to all,

Millard

Good afternoon folks.

It is hard to know where to begin with Anastasia. The book is a very fun read, but the central question throughout is: Is Anastasia real?

The Ringing Cedars series consists of nine books written by a Russian businessman. The series documents his encounters with a very unique and gifted girl in a remote forested area of Russia. What the businessman, Vladimir Megre, discovers is that the stunningly beautiful Anastasia was raised in the woods, and is able to communicate with and issue orders to animals. This is only the beginning. Anastasia is exceptionally intelligent, and despite having been raised in such an isolated Siberian location, has very informed and thoughtful opinions on our modern world. In addition to being a stone cold fox, Anastasia does not not wear clothes very much, and never sits down to eat proper meals, but snacks throughout the day on berries or nuts brought to her by her animal minions.

Strange? Yes. Unbelievable? Maybe, but I don’t really care. What I care about most is if there is any usable information there that can contribute to a more sustainable human species.

Now I have to admit something here. I have always been drawn to the strange and fantastical stories. I love how these stories stretch your horizons and ask you go against the grain of common wisdom. Frankly common wisdom is too common sometimes. As I have gotten older my attraction to stories like this for entertainment’s sake has not diminished, but I have seen weird before. I have been there and done that. What I want to know is what I can take away from it. The translator describes the series as a cross between Star Wars and the Bible, so what are the profound nuggets we can take away from The Word According To Yoda?

I believe there are many. More than anything else Anastasia shows us what we can become once we free ourselves from ourselves. I am fully convinced that this is the insane asylum of the galaxy, and the doctors have pretty much let the patients run wild to cure themselves, or not. As a species we are struggling with all of our might to do it, but we still think it is an acceptable plan to get dressed in funny green outfits and go and kill total strangers. We still allow our dreams to die inside of us while we work in boring jobs in boring corporations because everyone else is doing the same thing. If anything Anastasia’s story highlights these facts by sheer contrast.

It may be stretch to think that going to the nearest forest, shucking your clothes and engaging in a telepathic conversation with the first squirrel is a recipe of happiness for most of us, but I do not think that is the moral of this story.

We live on a living being, Earth, who has provided us with everything we have. Everything. This incredible planet has sublime and breathtaking life systems we are only beginning to comprehend. Our technological gizmos are toys by comparison. When our creativity and inventiveness work in line with these systems, we touch infinity, but when we ignore nature we tend to run into a few snags, like for instance being strapped to a dirty, messy, polluting, inefficient, antiquated energy delivery system, or cataclysmic wars to control aforementioned antiquated energy system. (For you chickees and daddy-o’s who are not in the loop, Hitler invaded Russia to get to the Caucasus Oil fields. Rommel’s North Africa campaign? Two pronged assault, baby. Japan’s entire war strategy in WWII centered on the Dutch controlled oil fields in Indonesia. I could go on, but you get the picture. We suck.)

This book was written in Russian, and has inspired millions of Russians to to leave the city and establish eco-villages in the Motherland’s vast hinterland. Small, private gardens account for 54% of the nation’s agricultural output, and this is on 7% of the total land used agricultural area. Food independence is efficient and very possible, and as I stated in my square foot gardening review, I think it is the greenest thing you can do.

One of the more interesting passages relays that seeds can be charged to restore health and taste fantastic to a particular human if that human places the seeds in his mouth for at least nine minutes. I do not know if this has any validity, but I will in a few months. I planted my veggies yesterday, and darned if I didn’t give every one of those seeds a saliva soaking. Like I said before, I don’t care if it’s weird. I just care if it works.

The mystery of whether Anastasia is real or not enhances the allure of the book, but it is ultimately an aside. As fact or fiction, Anastasia is a valid and timely call for all of us to detach ourselves from the corporate teat, reconnect with the rhythms of nature and enjoy self sufficiency.

Good afternoon folks.

I really love today’s blog, because it records my first real step in becoming a consciously sustainable person. I don’t mean becoming eco-friendly or environmentally conscious or any other nebulous phrase that suggests some effort at environmental awareness without really being concrete enough to define a measurable standard.

I have taken tentative steps before, but now that I have done my research, I know what true sustainability is, I know that is our highest goal, and I know how to get it done. I chose to start this journey to full sustainability by starting to become a producer. Yes, of course I will still consume, and for right now there a lot of holes in my game, but I am becoming a producer as well, and it feels pretty damn good.

I bought All New Square Foot Gardening because I had heard good things about it, and I wanted to start growing my own fruits and vegetables with the least amount of hassle. I happen to know that hydroponics is the most efficient way to grow anything, but it is a pretty complicated place to start. Square Foot Gardening seemed to be a good simple solution from the outside looking in. But would it deliver?

After reading it and buying the materials for starting my own square foot garden, I have to say it truly does provide a very easy way to start growing your own food. Among the many fantastic things about this method is that it can be done in any living setting, even an apartment balcony. I strongly recommend this book to people like me who do not want to deal with the hassle of gardening. The author Mel Bartholomew provides a step by step process for building your planter box, mixing the perfect soil, planting, growing and harvesting. No fertilizers. No pesticides. It is good stuff.

Below is a picture of my freshly planted 4′x4′ square gardening box.

It took me less than a week to read the book, purchase the materials, put the box together, mix the soil and plant my veggies. The author does not mention costs, so I am going to list my costs for materials right here, for your benefit:

• Heirloom Seeds (more on heirloom in my next blog): 8 packets – $23.25
• Lumber: (1) sheet of plywood + (2) 2×6 redwood – $28.59
• Soil Mix: vermiculite + peat moss + compost – $80.93
• Grid: 5/8″ x 1/4″ trim board – $14.98
• Total cost: $147.75
• Work Time: roughly 8 man hours

This was more than I expected, but most of the costs are one time. The only ongoing costs are for compost and seeds. If you compost yourself, that line item is eliminated. With Mel’s technique, seed use and waste is significantly reduced in comparison with tradition row gardening, so seed packets can last as much as five years.

So what is the payoff?

I will have to wait and find out for myself, but according to the book, here is an example harvest from a 4×4 box:

• 1 cabbage
• 1 broccoli
• 1 cauliflower
• 4 romaine lettuce heads
• 4 red lettuce heads
• 4 leaf lettuce heads
• 4 salad lettuce heads
• 16 scallions
• 5 lbs. of sugar peas
• 8 swiss chard
• 9 bunches of spinach
• 32 carrots
• 32 radishes
• 16 beets

I priced out this theoretical harvest at my local supermarket, and it came to over $115.00. If you have two growing seasons per year (this is typical), you will be in the bonus after the second harvest.

You have probably heard a million times about “getting back in touch with nature”, so I’m not going to bore you with that crap. What I do want to say is that the project is a lot fun, it is a fantastic way to beautify your yard, it has endless possibilities for adaptation and creativity, and it is one of the greenest things you can do. Sometimes I think green can be summed up in one sentence: make it yourself, or buy local. That is the long and the short of it.

The book is far more detailed and complete than this little summary suggests, so I strongly urge you to buy it, read it and make it happen in your garden.

There are a few other items I would like to mention before I sign off that I will be expanding upon in future blogs.

As I mentioned before, my researched has determined that hydroponic agriculture is the most efficient, and I love the idea, but it does require more upfront cash than a square foot garden.I will be pursuing this in the future though, so stay tuned.

One technique I will be testing in future growing is living water. I am not doing it in this first season, so this first yield can be considered as a control in my little experiment. For those of you who are not familiar with the work of Victor Shauberger or Masaru Emoto, water can have amazing regenerative and vitalizing properties given the correct energetic charging. As with hydroponics, I will elucidate in the near future.

OK, one last near future note. One method which is outside of the square foot gardening book that I did experiment with is the seed planting process mentioned in Anastasia, the first book in the Ringing Cedars series. I am late to this party, having just finished the first book, but all I can say is wow. That book has already contributed mightily to the shifting of the paradigm and the material is great, but I am not going just take it at its word. I will review that book in the near future, and let you know just how effective the practical advice in that book is based upon how my crop turns out.

That is all I have for now. Happy Passover, and love to all,

Millard

Good morning folks,

I came across this video and thought it was a very timely one. Corporatism as it is practiced today is the antithesis of sustainability, yet many people and products that claim to be green are just “greenwashed”. I use the term with a lot of compassion though, because I am miles from where I want to be with regard to making real sustainable changes in my life. The fact is going green is not easy. I know in my heart and in my head that the vegan local organic diet is the most sustainable, but how do I give up meat when it tastes so darn good? Taping feathers to your backside does not make you a chicken, so I just have to figure out a way.

I want to point out something now that I will mention again and again here and in my book: the only vote that corporations listen to is your pocketbook. We are feeding the beast. If we suck it up and make real changes in what we buy and consume and produce, we will have the green revolution we are looking for. It is never going to come from Congress or the president or Corporate America. I strongly believe that after the initial challenge of getting the ball rolling, there is a much saner happier world waiting for us on the other side.

I am in the middle of reading All New Square Foot Gardening right now, and that will be the next review. It is also inaugurating the first part of my personal green makeover, so I look forward to being able to blog about my “Victory Garden” soon.

Love to all,

Millard

Good morning folks.

One of the regular features I would like to have in Source Green is a review section, focusing on sustainable books and videos. Every book and video that is here will be read, viewed and reviewed by me personally. There is a lot of fantastic information out there, and I can’t wait to dive into this stuff. To kick off the review section, I give you Food Inc..

Food Inc.

Must see. MUST SEE. In case you weren’t paying attention when you read the first two sentences, you must see this film. What I love about this depiction is that the current state of our food industry was not presented as the result of some fiendish plot to control the world, but rather as a food revolution fueled by America’s appetite for fast food.

There is a fast food restaurant on almost every corner in America, providing inexpensive, tasty food. There is a supermarket in virtually every community, stocked with an incredible variety of food. Behind this bountiful facade though is a very purposefully hidden assembly line system that has a lot of questionable means that are ultimately justified by the end of feeding the world. What Food Inc. does best is examine the costs of this system, not as a judge, but as an interested party just looking for the truth.

Here are the primary “questionable means” that Food Inc. examines:

• The unhealthy concentration of power in the hands of a few large multinational companies, and what that has meant in terms of toothless regulation, lax legislation, and “food libel” laws.
• The nonlocalization of of the industry and the resultant transportation and refrigeration costs
• The “assembly line” jobs created by an assembly line industry, and the resultant exploitation of “illegal” immigrants
• The omnipresence of heavily subsidized corn in every major product category in the grocery store
• The gross maltreatment of the animals that become our food
• And last but not least, genetically modified food crops…this may be the scariest one of all

This movie completely changed the way I look at food, and is essential knowledge for everyone, not just green freaks like me.

Love to all,

Millard