Contentious Law Penalizes Gardener for Using Offsite Kitchen Scraps

Tara Kolla of Silver Lake Farms in Los Angeles, California, was cited because of a law on the books that states that “composting material must be generated on-site unless it is placed in a vessel that controls airborne emissions”. What this means is that in Los Angeles you can only legally compost what you produce on your property unless your compost bin is a “commercially approved” device.

I wonder how this affects Starbuck’s program of giving away used coffee grounds to anyone who asks.

Kolla had established a relationship with a local restaurant to fill a garbage can she provided each week with their vegetable scraps, which she would then haul to her half acre urban farm and add to her own compost bin. Sounds like a great relationship. Food scraps and the methane gas they produce via composting, are kept out of landfills and Kolla gets to make rich organic compost for her garden. It’s a win-win.

This illustrates what environmentally conscious individuals are striving for, a closed loop, reducing carbon emissions by keeping everything local, and reducing the amount of waste sent to local landfills. But the current letter of the law in Los Angeles states that if you take grass clippings, orange peels, or fallen fruit from a neighbor, you are in violation of the law and could be cited and fined.

This law needs to be rewritten to reflect the spirit of a time honored practice of recycling nutrients back to the earth in a manner in which they will do the most good. Gardeners and environmentalists have known of this practice for years, we need to educate our law makers.

This is also another example of local bureaucracies interfering in what happens in our backyards and defies common sense. Here’s the original LA Times article in full length detail. An official from the local waste management board stated that he’d like to see the law changed, but intending to change the law is still a long step from tangible changes. Also, bear in mind that your city may have a similar law on the books and that your current composting activities may violate the law.

If this outrages, or even mildly upsets you, you should be aware of the other areas that the government is trying to intrude on the activity in your backyard. Read here about efforts to track every backyard chicken in America with the USDA’s proposed NAIS. And on a positive note about government interventions, read here about Maryland considering a ban controversial food dyes.

Further reading:
National Animal Identification System
U.S. Court, FDA: Raw Milk Like Toxic Waste

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Starting is Simple, Keeping it Going is the Challenge

As the saying goes: “There is no better time to start than the present”. And so it is with home gardening. Many home gardeners grow their own food out of a love of just doing it, some others do it for the peace of mind that comes with knowing the food they take from their garden is not tainted with pesticides and chemical fertilizers. And of course there is the freshness that can come only from picking from your garden and having it on your dinner table the same day.

With our economy going the way it is, tightening everyone’s purse strings typically means more people are going to join us in the gardening world. If this is something you have never done, then the startup can be a bit overwhelming. I think back to when I grew my first vegetable, it was in a typically small space where some previous renter had previously grown something, so I was fortunate, and very grateful, that the soil had already been used for something other than grass. The one thing I did not know for certain was if the previous tenant used chemicals. I set aside my fears by reasoning that up until that point in my life I probably had already been exposed to chemicals in my food so worrying about what might have been was not going to stop me from planting. I knew I wasn’t going to add any chemicals, so off I went.

I was very much like every beginning gardener in that I chose tomatoes as my first crop. And as is typical of a first time gardener, I planted too many. Needless to say the neighborhood had fresh tomatoes for a time. I just know, as I write this, realized that even that long ago, just as today, very few of my neighbors had a home garden. But, as I mentioned previously, that will probably change. I do hope so.

I also grew some strawberries that first year. The crop that was produced exceeded my expectations and I was ecstatic at the sweet juicy berries we picked from those first plants. Ecstatic over the bounty of the strawberries and the tomatoes and ecstatic that I was actually able to succeed. That was a great confidence booster.

Experience, I have found, learned from your own mistakes and successes, will provide you with far better lessons than just reading about others’ mis-adventures.

The best way to start is to put something in the ground, even if it is unproductive the roots from that first growth will provide a starting point for bringing soil nutrients locked below the surface up to where future plants can take advantage of them. The most miraculous thing I have learned from gardening is that a plot of ground that seemingly will never support anything, such as hard packed clay, will grow healthy plants that will produce a monstrous harvest as long as you feed the soil.

Soil will quickly come to life with worms and microbes simply by tilling compost into it. By keeping the soil cool in the summer with mulch and maintaining a steady, somewhat constant temperature through winter, also with mulch, you will already win over half the battle of maintaining a healthy and thriving garden.

Worms work to aerate the soil and breakdown large chunks of compost into smaller ones that serve to keep the soil loose to allow air and water to pass through. This ‘looseness’ of the soil, called friability, will also aid plant roots in their search for nutrients. Worms and microbes basically keep the plot refreshed through their constant churning. As long as you feed them they will be there for you. The thing you don’t want to do goes against what may at first seem natural. You don’t want to over-till the soil. It is more beneficial to ‘work’ compost into the top few inches of soil with a pitch fork by gently turning over the soil. A mechanical tiller will tend to cut up the soil too fine and unfortunately cut up the worms as well.

Even if you will not live in the house you are in for very long, starting a garden will prepare the soil for the next person. Perhaps this will be just the encouragement that next person needs to grow their own food. Imagine for a moment if everyone was to do this with their current yard, before too long, grass won’t be taking up so much acreage on this planet, there will be a decrease in the amount of chemical fertilizers used to feed the lawn, and you will have helped in progressing the natural evolution toward a more organic world. After all, there is far more residential property than commercial property so each of us, when we start a home garden, will be increasing the total amount of farm land. Plus, every little bit you do adds to your knowledge base for when you do have space to grow that dream garden. Every new garden plot helps the global community.

Then, if you would post your results to your very own blog, or leave comments on someone else’s blog describing your experiences, both good and bad, you would be adding to the world’s knowledge pool and that is always much appreciated by the next beginner. Perhaps you will learn of a hidden talent that you can specialize in.

You really do not require a huge farm to grow everything you need. You can grow a surprising amount of plants in a very small space. If you have a neighbor who has a garden, ask if you can offer to help weeding or planting. You will gain valuable advice and perhaps even a few plant starts to get your own garden going. Gardeners are an endless supply of knowledge, some of which you cannot learn from books. And I have never met a gardener who does not want to talk about their garden or share advice.

Dig a hole in the ground, fill it in with store bought garden soil (compost can come later), stick a plant in the soil, feed it with non-synthetic fertilizer and watch it grow. You may not get a huge harvest from this first planting but, like every new undertaking, baby steps count. You will gain confidence to try something bigger next year.

If you don’t have a yard, use a container. Many plants do great in containers, you just need to feed and water them more often and make sure the container has good drainage.

Also, don’t be afraid to plant vegetables among your flowers. The added dimension and diversity will benefit both types of plants and prevent any bare spots that would otherwise invite weeds.

For more advanced tips on starting and maintaining a garden plot, see here.

I am willing to bet that once you gain a little experience you will want to continue growing your own food, even after the economy gets back on its feet and it is no longer a ‘necessity’ to grow your own food. So, if you do find you enjoy maintaining a garden maybe keeping it going won’t be such a challenge after all.

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Saving seed can get you sued

I don't mean to get too political here in the garden blog world but Monsanto is getting too invasive and the more we all know about it the better, in my humble opinion.

Here is an article, written by Tom Philpott of Grist.org, about Monsanto's latest tightening of their iron grip on our nation's food supply.

This is scary stuff and the implications of Monsanto's future influence on the home gardener should not be overlooked.

Please read, if for no other reason than to cast light on how a multi-million dollar biotech firm is suppressing our farmers right to save seed.

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Produce prices going up, grow your own

The headline reads “Get ready for $4 lettuce, broccoli and cauliflower”

I found this on the Project: Green Industry blog this morning and immediately accepted it as further validation for growing your own.

The Arizona legislature came up with this plan to force all illegal aliens out of their state, or to become legal, by enacting Arizona’s Employer Sanctions Law which went into effect yesterday, Jan.1, 2008.

The blog author predicts consumers will begin seeing higher ‘winter-produce’ prices within a few months, if not sooner.

The law has already survived two legal challenges and will be reviewed again on January 16, 2008 in Phoenix, where business and civil-rights groups are expected to present their case for blocking enforcement of the law.

The law enforces the use of a federal system, called E-Verify, to electronically verify employment eligibility of newly hired employees against a federal database maintained by the Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security. Employers that fail to begin using the E-Verify system risk having their business licenses suspended or revoked.

According to the Arizona Republic newspaper, farmers in the Yuma area provide 80-90 percent of the country’s salad crops from November through April and need an estimated 25,000-30,000 workers a day. Last year farmers estimated they faced a 20-30 percent shortage of workers. The shortage caused a price increase of a couple of dollars for a carton of lettuce.

Picking America’s produce has become the domain of illegal immigrants. Farmers have been forced to hire the cheap labor because Americans don’t want to do it and because demand for cheap food prices makes paying a decent wage cost preventative.

The farmers are not sure how big of an impact the new law will have on the availability of workers but they are already planting fewer acres, having workers work longer hours, looking at using the federal H-2A program and moving more production to Mexico.

Moving to Mexico? Oh no! The first thing anyone learns when going into Mexico is you don’t drink the water! That same water is going to be used to grow vegetables that are made up of a lot of water. The picture I am painting is not a pretty one.

Illegal immigrants concerned about the effects of the new law are already returning to their home countries or moving to other states. Some employers have already started to fire workers who cannot provide the proper documentation.

I lived I Southern California for twelve years and I can tell you that there are a lot of illegal immigrants picking our produce. The influx of these illegals into surrounding states is going to create problems.

Aside from the politics of the situation, the author states that Americans better get used to paying more for their food and they better get used to buying more imported food--especially “fresh” produce.

One thing that struck me about this statement is that the author did not even mention the option of growing your own. Is this a sign of how far away from gardening this country has gotten? What has happened to our self-reliance? Those of us who grow our own, of course, know all the benefits of doing so. I realize not everyone has the plot space or the time or the inclination to undertake our passion but one day the increasing prices for what we eat is going to have to be addressed more seriously.

Now, I am all for giving anyone who wants to work a fair shake and, hey, if Americans don’t want to pick our produce and someone comes along and says they will then we ought to let them do the job. It works out best for everyone involved.

I don’t really want to get into the politics of this law or whether it is the right way to handle the national problem of immigration but it does help bring to light the fact that we need to start seriously considering growing our own food.

So, gardeners everywhere, lets hone our crop growing skills and start spreading the word to our neighbors about the benefits of growing our own. We can all recite the benefits of being outdoors for the exercise and fresh air not to mention the better flavor or our own crops provide and the satisfaction that we grew them ourselves is immeasurable. Now we can add to the list the benefit of saving ourselves some money.

One of the reasons I have been given for people not growing their own is that they can buy whatever they need at the grocery store without the mess and bother of gardening. Well, this law, in my opinion, is an indication that surrounding states, namely California, will soon force their employers to follow Arizona just to handle the influx of illegal immigrants. This in turn will result in higher produce prices, not just in winter, but year round. As a result, politics is going to cost us even more in the very near future.

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A Gardening year: preparing the plot

For all of you who have felt the urge to start a garden, congratulations for rediscovering our agrarian heritage. That urge is rooted in a time when farming, for the sake of feeding ourselves, was once so necessary, so much a part of the fabric of our lives, that it would never occur to us that we would not ever have a food garden or farm. A backyard garden may be small but it is still a farm. With the proliferation of cheap, readily available food year-round from supermarkets and farmers markets, we no longer have to farm. The trade-off is that we have lost touch with our heritage.

Growing your own food, once a necessity and a chore, has become more of a treat. For the fresh taste that you simply cannot get from store bought produce. For the variety of produce that supermarkets cannot provide. For the sheer joy of creating life out of your own backyard, through your own toil and sweat. These attributes, experienced by home gardeners everywhere, cannot be measured.

Gardening is a pleasure for all your senses. Feeling the suns warmth on the almost silky smoothness of well-worked soil as it flows through your fingers, smelling its earthy almost sweet aroma, seeing the soil come alive with worms and other critters, tasting the freshness of vegetables and fruit that you have grown, hearing the wildlife that your efforts have attracted, all of these aspects make gardening worthwhile.

Just because we are surrounded by row after row of tract housing or stacked up buildings doesn’t mean we can’t grow something beautiful and/or edible.

Once you have picked and tasted the fruits of your labors gardening can truly consume you. You will end up spending hours lost in the Zen-like reverie of tending your garden that will force you to re-prioritize your place in this world. You will find a peace that you cannot find anywhere else.

If you are serious about gardening, you will soon learn it is as much about tending to your psychological well being as it is about tending to nature. One of the first things you need to do is put yourself in the frame of mind that it needs to be enjoyable. Once you have lost the fun factor then you may as well go find something else to entertain yourself.

Gardening is fun, but not in the way of anything else that offers the instant gratification that is necessary for some people. It is long term. After all, it is nature and nature is not an overnight proposition. It requires dedication, it requires patience, and it requires you to understand that there will be failures. Sometimes these failures can be of your own making, often times a failure can be attributable to mother nature herself. Do not take it personal. Nature has failed billions of times and yet its beauty can be found everywhere.

I think it is important to note that gardening is for more than just our health and enjoyment. We are creating a habitat for natures denizens. Insects, both good and bad, birds, both beautiful and not so beautiful, mammals, large and small, and of course us.

Now, if you are still here and still want to go forward with turning that boring and non-productive lawn into the beautiful and bountiful flower or vegetable patch of your dreams, then please read on.

You should decide now if you want to build raised beds or dig trenches around your plot. Walls and trenches are an attempt to keep the surrounding lawn from encroaching into your beds. If you dig a trench you will have to re-dig it every once in awhile, until you get tired of doing it and end up installing a barrier of some kind anyway. The advantage of raising the bed now and surrounding it with boards or concrete blocks is that the soil will tend to stay looser because there is less chance of you walking on it.

Turning your chosen plot of earth from lawn to garden is not something that happens overnight. After all, it took awhile for that lawn to fill in so it makes sense that any plants you put in will take awhile to thrive. You are going to need good quality soil, access to water and properly selected plants that will survive in the amount of sunlight that hits your plot.

Healthy soil is key to healthy plants. Whether your soil is ideal to begin with or if it has been laying barren for years, keep in mind that you will have to amend it every year. A combination of natural materials such as soil and compost, composted or aged animal manure, leaves, grass clippings, shredded newspapers, cardboard, and/or anything else that breaks down in the soil will go a long way towards maintaining that healthy soil texture that supports microbial life. Gardening is more about feeding the soil than about feeding the plants. Healthy soil needs to be loose enough to allow roots to easily pass through yet thick enough to support the plant so that it can stand up as it grows larger. Soil needs to also be able to retain water through periods of drought without having to water it every day and adding natural materials will keep this quality.

The plot you choose ideally should be no wider than three or four feet, so you can reach across it without stepping on it. Stepping on it compacts the soil, not good for growing things in. Some people place a board across the bed or stepping stones to prevent stepping on the soil. Outline the area with a garden hose, bricks, string, sticks, flour, spray paint or whatever to get a clear picture of the final shape of the bed. Nothing is really final in gardening, we all make adjustments as we go but once you have the layout identified the area needs to be cleared of all grass, plant roots, rocks and other debris.

Existing grass can be either removed or smothered.

To remove the grass, you will use either hand tools (turf edger and a square shovel) or a machine called a sod cutter. In either case you will be left with pieces of sod that you can either place in other barren areas of the lawn or throw onto the compost pile (lay them upside down on the pile to help smother the grass and expose the roots to the sun). After the plot is clean, break up the top eight to twelve inches of soil with a pitchfork. This tool is great for this job as you are not necessarily looking to dig up the whole area, just open it up so water and soil amendments can reach down into the substrate. You might be tempted to rent or borrow a roto-tiller but I caution you to resist the urge. Roto-tillers tend to more completely destroy the soil structure and there is growing evidence that soil just below where the tines reach can become a hard pan which is difficult for plant roots and water to break through.

Next, spread top soil mixed with compost or composted animal manure. What we are doing here is improving the soil texture. The manure is a great way to attract earthworms, the true workhorses of the garden. Spread the mix about 3” thick and then work it into the top six to eight inches of soil with the pitch fork. After digging it all in and leveling the plot, sprinkle the area with a gentle shower of water until just before puddles form. This allows the soil to settle, pushing out any air bubbles.

Smothering the grass can be done with clear plastic sheeting or newspapers. Use the plastic sheets in the summer so the heat of the sun bakes the grass until it dies (3-4 weeks). Use the newspaper method at anytime of the year by piling on 8-10 sheets and holding it down with soil until the grass dies (several months). The newspaper method is best done in fall and allowing it sit over winter. A way to speed up either process is by spraying Glyphosate on the grass first. Glyphosate is the active ingredient in many products on the market such as Hi-Yield and Round-Up. This chemical is considered the safest in that it will break down and become harmless within 10-14 days. I have used this method and it works great. After the grass is dead, the grass becomes a mulch and you can now pile on top soil mixed with compost or composted animal manure.

As the soil ‘ages’ you will begin to see earthworms throughout the plot, this is an excellent sign that you have the start of a fairly well balanced ecosystem.

When choosing plants for your new plot, pay particular attention to your growing zone and light/shade requirements. Full sun means at least six to eight hours, and more than this can be too much.

Be sure to follow growers recommendations for the proper width and depth of the hole. Then fill the hole with good garden soil and some fertilizer, time-released 10-10-10 is probably best.

Doesn’t it feel wonderful to know that you have taken the first steps towards bringing life up out of the ground and reconnected with your past?

Well this is enough for now. I’ll cover compost and mulch in another posting. So, until then good luck and have fun.

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