Updates!

We made a sign/walking path for part of the front yard plot. Of course we had to make it a rainbow. It was a wonderful Sunday.

Lots of things have happened recently! No update last week because it rained and we didn't do anything. We just sat tight.

Erica got white onions for planting in her Market Basket from Growing Power (perk of being an intern!) this week, so we had to plant them. We planted four short rows very close together for green onions, and  four small rows spread apart for large onions to dig up at the end of the summer. Some had already sprouted, so we used those for the large onions. In the middle, we planted some kale.

Erica planting white onions in front plot. She so cute!

We had to plant more kale because there was a mishap. Our window box seeded with kale and lavender suddenly turned into...

boooooo(b)

...red flowers and whatever in the middle. There were three hearty kale sprouts. We suspect someone took the initiative to beautify the front porch without realizing the sprouts weren't weeds. Oh well. On a positive note, Jo is reminded that she's learned a lot and probably would have made this same mistake a year ago.

Additionally, we have begun labeling things:

Onions! and JoJo cleaning up shop!

Erica seeded a bit of basil, all of the swiss chard gifted by One Seed Chicago (stingy), and some bull's blood beets while Joanna mixed all of the colors for the "Garden" sign. Jo had artist's block around making the purple, so Erica had to take over for her on that front. Good work, Huggies.

Foreground: spinach mustard. Background: beets. Far background: sneakers.





The beets, spinach, mustard spinach have shot up in the last two weeks. Today was super sunny and warm and I swear to you, the sprouts grew a quarter of an inch this afternoon.

Mustard spinach reminds us of butterflies.

We seeded Ruby and Oakleaf lettuce in the remaining empty space in the backyard. We're experimenting with small-plot seeding practices, so we scattered the seed, rather than planting it in rows. Hopefully the plot will be full of bi-colored crunchy leaves in a few weeks.

No comment.

We also seeded a pot of Thai Chile peppers (hott), and another with regular basil, since our potted lime basil and peppers were destroyed by Cats and Cold.

We hope that our robin friend and hir soon-to-be babies will not eat too many of our worms. Joanna will continue to sing-song hello in the morning, but hopefully without continually freaking hir out...

Front porch pals.

We hope your gardens are also growing well!

Real Food Fellowship Essays

Joanna got me a new-used spade shovel because the one we were using is flat shovel. This came in handy tonight. I am so lucky!

We haven't done much garden work this week. The weather dipped down to near-freezing last week and we've been busy. Jona had some fly problems because of the compost I mixed into some pots. As the sun set this evening, we turned the compost bucket, double dug the remaining bed in the backyard, and seeded bloomington spinach, mustard spinach, and parsley.

Joanna's abandoned worm bin makes a nice outdoor mini compost bin. The brick on top somehow deters beasts from breaking in. 

Three weeks ago, this was a pile of smelly, anaerobically digesting food scraps. After Erica intervened by turning and adding lots of compost, it finally begins to look something like soil. Though it still smells. Jona is working on it!

I (Erica) submitted an application for the Real Food Fellowship, a 9-month program for young leaders from around the country to network, build communications and leadership skills, and create media projects. Fingers crossed!

Our cute backyard garden so far. Not much going on!

Here are some my answers for the application:

Who or what are the most importance influences in your life? Why? We invite you to include positive and negative influences on your life, struggles that you have overcome, your hopes and inspirations.

In the spring of 2008, when I was a sophomore at Grinnell College, thirty-two of my classmates received homophobic hate mail with phrases such as “God hates fags, we hate fags.” For the first time in my life, I feared walking outside alone at night. For the first time in my life, I began to understand my actions and identities as political, not exclusively personal. I realized that someone could assault me, physically and mentally, simply because of my sexuality.

My college community joined together to respond to the hate crimes. We cried, hugged, held rallies and forums, wrote love mail, made art, and chalked the campus in affirming messages. To help me pro-actively process the events, I produced a half-hour documentary archiving students, faculty and administrators’ responses. Organizations on campus continue to screen my film for new generations of students. However, the college failed to institutionally challenge homophobia (and other oppressions). After more than four years of student pressure, as well as continued threats and assaults directed at the queer community, the administration finally instituted a hate crimes response policy.

The hate crimes of 2008 made me fear for my personal safety, but they also made me feel invincible as part of a fierce community of queers and allies. I gained a deeper capacity for sympathizing with other oppressed groups and learned the importance of creating institutional change in challenging oppressions.

Erica double digging the second bed in the backyard.

Describe your community (the places you grew up and/or where you currently live). What does it look like and what do you love about it? What do you want to change about it? How is your community impacted by the current food system?

This is a hard question for me because I belong to many communities: born and raised in Kansas City, MO, attended college in Grinnell, IA, and currently reside in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood. I’d like to address the queer community, though it’s not necessarily geographically defined. Things I love: our struggles for the right to love, feminist bookstores, flannel, our campy puns, artsy posters, and radical potential. I truly believe that the queer community has a critique to offer the world and I know we’ll make unimaginable progress in my lifetime. However, I also know the profound disappointment that inevitably follows profound hope. As an incredibly diverse community, we also have a lot of internal issues: racism, classism, transphobia, sizeism, ageism, violence, and yes, even sexism.

The queer community is also a part of all communities, so we experience all aspects of the food movement, from Whole Foods to food deserts. We are snobby queers who feed only organics to our children, and we are teenagers who pop into Quick Trip for our daily Cola-flavored slushy. Most of my friends see the food justice movement as well-intentioned, but boring and bland. I want them to see themselves as having a stake in the movement. One of our major challenges is learning to organize ourselves across identities and food traditions so that we respect all choices and cultures but still organize for food justice.

Baby beets growing in spite of the cold!

What motivates you to work towards social justice? Why is it important to you to change our food system?

I recently saw a theater production about violence within the LGBTQ community. One of the characters received hate mail that threatened violence. They looked towards the audience and asked, “But it’ll never happen to me, right?” Every part of me wanted to shout, “No! You are a brilliant, fierce, young genderqueer person who makes the sky shine, who makes me excited for the future of this world! Everyone can see that!” I was ashamed that my realistic answer is more like, “Hopefully not.” I want to create the world in which I don’t have to prepare my community for violence, invisibility, and tokenization. I want to create the world in which we are all celebrated. The momentum from this experience extends beyond LGBTQ organizing and into other anti-oppression work. I am responsible for dismantling all systems of oppression/privilege, including ones I benefit from.

The queer community struggles with the industrial food system around health and embodiment. The food system tells us what we should eat, what “normal” bodies look like, and what/who we should desire. Simultaneously, we work within the system to eliminate “normal” bodies/sex, build bodies that empower us, and build/recover food traditions.

Food is inherently an act of celebration. It is literally and metaphorically the stuff that becomes our minds and hearts. It is a tool for creating power. Food needs to be a major part of our revolution so we can take our bodies back from industrial agriculture and the systematic oppression of our families.

More Erica double digging.

Sprout People

"Try to imagine you are a seed in this Easy Sprout. You've been sitting in a bath for 12 hours. You want to rinse off. Feel the fresh water showering down on you. Turn off the shower when you feel good and clean."

"I hold my Easy Sprout thusly."

Hilarious!

Two-Thousand-Eleven

Happy 1st of May!

This month, Erica is vegan and Joanna is going to try very hard not to feed her gelatin-filled vitamins. Oh wait, that already happened. Last night, we fell asleep looking at Johnny's Selected Seeds and the Seed Savers Exchange catalogues. We had a busy day today making vegan sausages, banana-granola waffles, and (soon) a wicker basket.

Back yard at Jona's house - pre-expansion. The bed is now twice as big!

Today, J-Kale and E-den achieved the following:

• Purchased seeds and soil from Gesthemane Garden Center in Andersonville
• Seeds from Botanical Interests: Kale (red winter), Lavender (purple ribbon), Catnip, Beets (bull's blood), Basil (italian large leaf), Pepper (chile thai hot), and Spinach (bloomsdale), Sprouts - Mung Bean (for Erica to eat while she's vegan - Botanical Interests)
• 2 40-liter bags of soil with fertilizer (brand started with a B?)
• Seeded a window box with kale and lavender
• Seeded a small pot with cat nip (for the cats...and maybe for tea?)
• Buried some compost junk under the SW corner of Jona's front yard bed
• Dug up weeds, found some rocks, discovered lots of tree roots

We also made a garden plan for Jona's house! Note the dirty finger prints on the left side...

Robins came to say hello. We maybe saved a worm's life by burying it. But it already had a gash in it from the robin, so who knows.

Update on other plants:

• Large pot seeded with basil (lime, saved from last year) around beginning to mid-April, now have a few small sprouts (indoors)
• Large pot seeded with 4-colorful-bells pepper mix (seeds from last year), Olds Seed company (one small sprout) ...placed next to the radiator, but they probs just need warmer soil even now
• Small pot of last year's lime basil, planted probs in Feb - ha! - which has several large but lanky plants holding on for dear life
• Small pot of merigolds around beginning to mid-April, looking good, several sprouted
• Detroit Dark Red Beets (Weeks Seed Company, a year old) in backyard after double digging the area and topping of with a very small later of potting soil (will need to amend soon). They're doing well, lots have sprouted in spite of being lots of rain and lots of coldness. We love beets. They're little beasts!

Geraniums to the left, lime basil to the right. Neither is getting quite enough sun, but they're hanging in there. This pictures is a couple of weeks old.