A quick introduction to Permaculture
Permaculture is a design system which can help us make more appropriate choices. Permaculture was conceived of in the 1970s by David Holmgren and Bill Mollison, and its ideas have now spread around the world. Its name comes from the idea…
The cob oven at RootSimple homestead
Mr Homegrown of RootSimple shared this video of their construction process. He is part of the team, advising us as we plan how to build the cob oven at the Community Garden at Holy Nativity.
Building a Food Forest garden – cover crops
We’re designing a Food Forest garden, to be built later this spring. We’ll be tearing out asphalt, cleansing and rejeuvenating the soil, and recrafting the space as a community gathering area with a cob bread oven and food forest. Today…
Divest and Reinvest
What is “divestment”? You can think of it like “un-investment.” Or more significantly, investing your money in something else. In this case, we’re talking about divestment from fossil fuels. Coupled with reinvestment in clean energy and post-carbon infrastructure.
What would you do with $20 million?
What if you were given $20 million dollars? What would you do with it? And at the same time, you were told you had only 10 years left to live? That was the writing assignment handed to my daughter’s high-school…
How to be an activist based on Good Science
Within activism (particularly the GMO debate) it is common to hear one side dissing the other with claims of “bad science.”The truth is, there are “good science” studies on both sides of the GMO argument. Meanwhile, we activists have…
5 reasons that Fake grass is so Dead
Turfgrass doesn’t belong in Southern California. It’s far too water-thirsty for our dry climate. Plus turfgrass demands chemicals to keep it green, and most lawnmowers are highly polluting with both smog-producing particulate and global-warming carbon emissions. We need to shift…
Featured on the RootSimple podcast
Catch the conversation between me (Joanne P) and Erik Knutzen of RootSimple as we talk about the GMO-Free Zone in L.A., what it means, the backstory, and what happened in December. (I don’t talk about future strategy, intentionally, since I…
A community bread oven
Last Saturday we had the kickoff meeting for a new project: building a community bread oven out of cob. What’s cob? For us in Southern California, the easiest comparison is to think about the adobe bricks used for the missions;…
The Art of the Edible Landscape
Imagine a beautiful front yard — a sculpture in three dimensions — that you can walk through and enjoy, that will feed you luscious organic food! How does one design such a thing? This spring I’ll be teaching “The Art…