Recently in general Category

I moved into this house in November, with my sweetie, excited to be in a new community and excited about having a yard. Somehow, as the economy continued to crash--and crash--and I started to read more blogs about sustainability, I become interested in doing more urban homesteading, following a diet closer to Nurturing Traditions and Weston Price's theories, growing vegetables and making more of our food, or trading for it.

At the same time, I became fascinated with permaculture, the study of environmental and agriculture systems. There are some great Yahoo groups around permaculture that I have been reading and I've tried to put some of what I learned into practice.

Here's what my goals are for this spring and summer:

• Recycle/compost food scraps
• Cut down on using bags and plastic of alll types
• WALK MORE, DRIVE LESS (this is a pleasure)
• Establish and maintain an herb garden we can cook with
• Develop a worm bin and keep it going to we can use the compost
• Build a series of container beds w/ fresh potting soil, manure, and gravel/stone(the bottom layer)
• Plant vegetables: sow carrots, radishes; plant tomatoes, squashes, peas and beans
• Keep the lettuce, chard and aragula happy; plant more of it
• Plant vines along the fence: japonica, jasmine
• Establish the lemon tree and keep it alive so it fruits
• Establish a pattern in trading for eggs--offer marmalade(it is coming out great), cake, soup, cornbread, all of which I make really well)
• Get involved  more with fruit foraging and with Forage Oakland-I love what they are doing.
• Start going to the East Bay Permaculture Guild meetings and learning more by doing with others
  
• Have fun with the above, this is a marathon, not a sprint, as we say in start up land.

Meanwhile, there is so much to read, and to learn; I have to remember this is change for the long haul, and it can't all happen at once.

The amount of work people around the Bay area are taking on in terms of helping neighbors create gardens with food to feed themselves and their communities, foraging fruit trees to share and redistribute unused food, offering meals and prepared foods as fund raisers to create operating funds for organizations and so on is amazingly powerful.

Here in Oakland, we have a set of community gardens and food justice/community empowerment programs--City Slickers, People's Grocery, Oakland Roots Garden--among them. There's also the amazing and wonderful Forage Oakland, which is dedicated to locating and redistributing local, unused fruit, and the fascinating and knowledgeable permaculture community, not to mention many people with their own gardens.

There's also lots of equivalent activity going on in San Francisco, which I am less aware of, but equally eager to learn about.  18th and Potrero is a local group in SF that is creating a garden and will grow and share food there; sfglean is redistributing fruit; the free farmstand is a blog--and gardener--driving much of this great activity.

For me,  who works with the bits and bits that ultimate connect people, issues around food, neighborhood and commuity are very compelling, that's why I started this blog.

The rainy, Sunday morning, early spring breakfast:

• Lemon Ricotta pancakes made with 1 tbl evaporated cane sugar, vanilla, whole wheat pastry fluour, raw milk.
• Rhubarb-strawberry compote
• Bueberry-apple conserve
• Home made chai
• Sectioned fresh grapefruit and naval orange

Much joy

Pancake recipe here, with my modifications: Ricotta-Lemon Pancakes (originally published in Williams-Sonoma Essentials of Healthful Cooking).
Makes 10 pancakes

1 cup part-skim ricotta cheese
1/4 cup raw milk
3 large eggs, separated
2 tablespoons evaporated cane sugar
1/3 cup whole wheat pastry flour
1 tablespoon grated lemon zest
1 tsp fresh lemon juice
Pinch of cream of tartar
Organic butter

Place the ricotta in a large bowl. Add the milk, egg yolks, vanilla, and sugar and whisk together until blended. Add the flour, lemon zest, and 1/4 teaspoon salt, and using a rubber spatula, fold until just blended.

In a separate bowl, combine the egg whites and the cream of tartar and, using a whisk or a handheld electric mixer set on medium speed, beat until soft peaks form. Using the rubber spatula, carefully fold the beaten whites into the ricotta mixture just until blended. Stir in the lemon juice.

Place a large nonstick griddle or frying pan with low sloping sides over medium heat until hot enough for a drop of water to sizzle and then immediately evaporate.

Brush the surface with butter. For each pancake, ladle 1/3 cup batter onto the surface. Cook until small bubbles appear around the edges of the pancakes and the bottoms are lightly browned, 4-5 minutes. Turn and cook until the other sides are lightly browned, 2-3 minutes longer.

Serve with any or all of the following: maple syrup, honey, jam, stewed fruit, nuthin'.

I've been a part of three principal communities in my life so far: the poetry world, the online news/media world, and the tech/social media world.  In each case I can point to a phase where I read and studied and met people and planned and experimented and got completely absorbed, and then my life started to shift. 

There was that moment I got out of college and started working for a poetry non-profit and teaching Poetry in the Schools, then the one where I went from a print journalist at Scholastic to creating one of the first education online communities and one of the first consumer web sites, then the move to Advance and New Jersey Online and then to Netscape and into the product development/tech world.

I feel like am heading to a new place again, but this time the obsessions are making our cities sustainable, food justice, urban homesteading, permaculture and a host of related things, including supporting access to Web 2.0 tools and making sure we have free media and multiple viewpoints online.

What I am doing about this interest right now is reading, thinking, learning, and, slowly, talking to people. Soon, I will also be taking action, as I'm going to do the following:

• Create a composting system in my backyard and build a worm bin to do vermiculture
• Plan a food-focused container garden
• Sheet mulch and remediation plant the dirt beds I do have
• Plant that garden, tend it, and have food to eat/share/put by
• Trade for eggs; try making my own bread, pickles, jam
• Follow more of the eating principles in Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon and Real Food by Nina Planck; i.e., less industrial protein and more pastured, free-range, grass-fed, all organic eggs, (raw) milk, dairy, no or little soy
• Create a space to grow food in front of my house and see what happens when I plant it
• Work with the Public Media Collaborative and interested people to teach every mission-driven organization in these categories of interest (and others) how to use social media tools to promote their events, campaigns, and programs.

The outcomes I want to have are to be less reliant on the current infrastructure and to get to know my neighbors and make deeper ties with people living around me.
 
So, Oakland Homesteaders starts as a place for me to chronicle this journey from a newbie to, hopefully, a practitioner. I may not post here more than once a week, and I have no idea how these plans will turn out, but I'd like to document my learning, my successes and my failures right here.

SIDE NOTE: This could be a group blog.  If you are an Oakland/Berkeley/East Bay resident involved in urban homesteading, sustainability, foraging, greywater, rainwater harvesting, bike transport, peak oil and/or transition teams, or related topics, and you're interested in posting at this blog as a group member please contact me at s mernit  gmail
.
People who want to post ads for their services, or relink back to their own blogs as promotion are not what I am looking for as group members, but if you send me info about your product in this category I will look at it. 

If you already have a blog you'd like me to add to a blogroll (I am building one), please send me that and I will try to include you. There are some wonderful blogs in Oakland, and I'd like to point to them.