Food Forest in Quad Cities is started! - one tree at a time

In January of this year, about 40 people from around the Quad Cities and the outlying areas gathered together at the Eastern Davenport Library to share a common vision. Food security and food and nature education were high on the list. The organizers had a vision of a public Food Forest where anyone could harvest naturally grown local food in a safe environment.

Food forests are perennial systems that consist of fruit and nut bearing trees, along with understory perennial and annual plants, such as blueberries and wild raspberries. When completed, the food forest would be free and open to the public, where all would be welcome to come learn about native plants and pick local pesticide-free food.

On Saturday, October 25th, about 100 volunteers and local government representatives took steps to make the vision a reality by planting the first 80 trees, including  pawpaw, persimmon, chestnut, and pecan. After an opening ceremony, Davenport City Arborist, Chris Johnson, demonstrated his method for planting trees. Volunteers planted, watered, mulched and added wire cages to protect the trees from rabbits this winter.

The land for the Food Forest is adjacent to an already established community park and gardens owned by the City of Davenport and will be developed under a no fee agreement between the City of Davenport and the Quad City Food Forest.

For more opportunities and pictures, visit the Quad City Food Forest Facebook Page 
 

The Farm Ecovillage

I first became interested in The Farm Community when I googled "ecovillage training". What I ran across was The Farm Ecovillage Training Center. I was nearby last year for my cob building course and stopped through to visit.

Last October on my brief visit I ran into Jason the Resourcerer.  I shared with him what we are working on at moonCat and my search for more ecofriendly transportation. Mostly this includes biodiesel with the Mercedes Benz 300D and the custom converted Mazda that Bud Wren had made an electric vehicle out of and was sitting in my garage waiting to be fixed up and back on the road again.

Jason said he could help me fix up the Mazda and get it going more efficiently and teach me even more about biofuels. Last April I apprenticed with him in biofuels and helped to support the permaculture apprentice program at the Ecovillage Training Center.

I really enjoyed all of the natural building and permaculture going on and felt there was a lot to learn from the community.  My home-schooled daughter Phoenix stayed with me for the last week and attended The Farm School. She loved it.

Largely on a journey of wanting community, but it not happening quite yet at moonCat, finding a way for Phoenix to thrive with other kids and a school that shares my vision of  what education should be, and an opportunity falling into my lap at the right moment . . . I found myself back at The Farm this September.  Helping at the Ecohostel, Ecovillage Training Center, and Farm School is teaching me many new things that I am excited to bring back to those interested back in Illinois.

Phoenix and I are now traveling back and forth each month between The Farm and moonCat, sharing knowledge, skills, love and much gratitude.  I am also really enjoying Nashville and the great natural building and farm/nature/music network there.

I will be sharing more on the blog about what I am learning and enjoying as we thrive among like minded individuals.

underwear from old Tshirts

Most of our clothing items I buy at the thrift store.  The best finds are usually in the city and we find comfortable, cute, and good quality clothes for just a few dollars. I know the clothing industry contributes a lot of pollution, and where do the discarded clothes go other than to the landfill (ok some really creative places sometimes, but not on the whole yet)? In my opinion it is just smart to get the items I can at the thrift store.

Some clothing items like good shoes, boots, and underwear I usually do not get at thrift stores. Boots, sometimes. Underwear, never.  Leggings, hard to find at a thrift store.  So I found that my last pair of leggings had worn out and Phoenix was outgrowing her underwear . . . aaaaaand I really did not want to go to the department store to buy these things, or to spend a lot of money online buying them from far away companies that specially made what I am looking for.  I thought that maybe instead of cutting up our tattered Tshirts into rags this time I could try to make our underwear from them. I also secretly hoped that I could cut up some of Jerome's college Tshirts and get him some nicer ones if I had a purpose to do so.

Underwear:

Tshirt jersey style material worked best. I made a pattern from an existing pair. This meant cutting at the seams and tracing onto the new material with chalk.  Eventually I traced the cut fabric pattern onto some cardboard form a cereal box and cut it out. The cardboard stays straight and cuts more quickly. I sewed elastic onto the top only and it worked well.

One pair I used non-stretch material for the front and stretch (Tshirt) material for the back. Phoenix thought this was so comfortable she would not let me put elastic on, and they stayed up well.  An overlock machine makes things go so quickly!

Leggings:

I have bought stretch material to experiment, but will soon be switching to bamboo fabric to be more suStainable. I watched a tutorial online that showed me how to cut the center seam, from one ankle, up and back down to the other ankle as one cut.  Then fold the fabric in half so the cut seams form the two edges and use as a simple and quick pattern.  I think I made my first pair with a perfect fit in thirty minutes. Each successive pair was much faster and I'm really looking forward to working with the bamboo.

Dresses:

I find for travel it helps to pack my seven-year-old dresses. This saves space and washes when I have one clothing item to pack instead of two (a top and a bottom).  Pants can be added or not and we're ok.  So recently I have been letting her pick scraps of fabric that she likes and sewing them onto some of her Tshirts to make dresses. She adores this and feels pride in helping create her own clothing, also, my travel packing is simplified.

Pictures and links to come soon!

Feeling blessed to be alive.

to work with sunrise behind me and purple clouds west

What a beginning to fall. I'm loving the change in weather. New tasks, new foods, new colors. Windy. I like the wind. Makes you feel alive when it flies in my face.

Oyster Mushrooms - second flush from store-bought box.

The mushrooms we tried at home worked pretty well. We started this box way back in August when Zoe and Ivy were visiting for the summer, but under non-ideal conditions and with traveling, we didn't get the first fruits until a month later. Not knowing exactly how or when to harvest, I think we cut the first few caps a little early. Then the rest of the fruit started to shrink so we ate it. But so far we've gotten 2 full flushes and a third, extra flush from more holes that I poked in the side that wasn't meant to be opened. Thanks Phoenix for keeping an eye on it for me in Tennessee.

Turkey for dinner!

When the ladies came back from Tennessee last time, I cooked up some turkey from the freezer. (Thanks Darrell). This bird was a good size! A breast and a thigh each went into the slow cooker and oven roaster. I tried the typical rosemary, sage, thyme and parsley in the roaster and new spicy Asian-style in the slow cooker with basil, ginger, garlic, onion, and cayenne. Both turned out great, but I especially liked the drippings from the new one!

Silver Maple (Acer saccharninum)

It's got a red stem, but it's not a sugar maple! The sinuses (indents) are deep and the lobes (points) are pretty pronounced. Silver maple! We welcome a million little seedlings as one of the great shade trees in our front yard has reached old age and has started dropping branches. The wood peckers are a sign that there's not much time left and luckily they're not too close to the house. Silver maples also turn yellow in fall while other maples (sugar, red) turn different hues of red. I guess the silvers are like the cottonwoods in that they like the bottom lands, feet a little wet, drop leaves early and turn yellow in fall.

Smiley Building getting a new (used) metal roof

The yellow barn, orange corn crib, or smiley building (so called because there's a smiley drawn on the side) had half metal and half old, rotting shake roof when we came to moonCat. Earlier this year and last year, we patched the Wick building roof that had fiberglass pieces blowing off.  I acquired a bunch of used metal siding from a co-worker a couple years back and it has worked great so far. Krystal, Darrell and I all pitched in for a little roof repair this fall. Here we're half done, but Krystal finished the last 3 or so sheets by herself! Also to our benefit, the existing screw holes lined up well with boards underneath this time, even if some of the old boards did need to be replaced.

While hauling metal around the farm, I stopped to say hi and welcome to this monarch. Not so much loving the thistle, but that's a worry for another day when the butterflies play.

Monarch  (Danaus plexippus) on Thistle - probably Bull Thistle (Cirsium vulgare)

And who should we find when re-doing the roof?! A gray tree frog. Funny story about them. They have two color phases - gray as seen here and green. Sort of like a redneck chameleon. Story: so we heard a raccoon on the roof of the house when we first moved in. Several nights they screeched right outside our window. But we never heard anything on the roof and never saw anything when we went out to investigate. But we did find tree frogs! Turns out they screech like raccoons, or so we think. Ever since we've enjoyed watching them catch bugs on the kitchen window and chill in the gutters and rain barrel. Ask Phoenix some time how she gives them water slide rides.

Gray Tree Frog (Hyla versicolor)

And no, I don't know the Latin for everything off the top of my head :) It's looked up for my education and included here for your pleasure! Cheers and happy fall.

Monmoth Food Forest Tour

This posting is mostly to keep my own notes, but why not share what I learned on a tour of a Food Forest? Enjoy and ask questions!

Gary Fernald started planting trees near Monmoth, IL in 1967. He was inspired by Pecans and they've become his expertise. He found there was a need to establish or re-establish locally verdant groves to nourish and thrill people. So he went looking.

Hazelnuts in the husk

Northern Pecans can be massive trees. Some were found on Adams Island near Clinton, IA. Also along Rock Creek and Pleasant Creek. These areas are closed in the fall (Sept. 15 to Jan) for waterfowl, but Gary was able to get a permit from Army Corps of Engineers and Fish and Wildlife to gather nuts to plant groves elsewhere in order to preserve and breed pecans. He planted groves north of Chestnut Mountain and by Muscatine, just by the lock and dam below the Gorham residence.

Gary has bred many trees and there are even some cultivars named after him for sale from tree catalogs. Two that we saw on our tour were Hark and Lucas.

Japanese Heartnut - this nut can be shelled whole.

More Notes:

The Hican (sp?) A cross between a hickory and pecan can occur naturally. Some pecans bear hickory (shagbark) traits. Not as productive as pecan, but can be more flavourful.

English Walnut

Regarding English Walnuts, they are hard to do. Some produce OK. They are also different (bearing) year to year. English walnuts are easier to crack and will fall out of husk onto ground. Chris Knows a tree that drops nuts onto a sidewalk in the Quad Cities and they just pop out of the shell! I should ask him for a graft...

Chestnut trees with their prickly husks.

Mulberry: Illinois ever-bearing might be one of the best species of mulberry – I need to graft this onto existing trees on the farm!

Pawpaw - unfortunately not ripe in time this year

Grafting: Keep grafts at 80F to “callous” use ~6” of scion (fruiting stock) with buds onto rootstock. Use a sharp knife or bench tool. Bench graft with pencil-sized stock. Bark graft several pencil-sized sticks into side of bark of 3-6” branch, trimmed of growth just above graft. Wrap with just about anything, electrical tape works well. Grafted (any) can produce in 3-5 years (walnut, pecan, etc.) Practice to get good at these techniques and let someone show you that knows what they are doing. Gary may have a workshop coming up! Butternut and English walnut can be grafted onto Black walnut!

Mosaic story floors

I started tiling last year when Sarah Haas came through and showed me what she leaned with Dan Phillips, other tilers, and then through trial and error of her own professional tiling efforts. She showed me how to tile with commercial thin-set mortar and grout with scrap tile. I decided that I wanted to complete the stairs with scrap tile and bottle caps. 

This year I started a new project involving bottle bottoms. I cut the bottom off of beer bottles with a tile saw and mortared them in.  To strengthen the bottoms (even though they are pretty flat) I filled them in with mortar as I set them. 

As always I had to try new things. I started with the thin-set mortar for tiles, but remembered how easily some of the tiles on the stairs had popped out pre grout. Instead, I grabbed a bag of premixed brick style mortar.  Once dry these tiles were not going anywhere. Thin-set mortar allows future changes if you may want to scrape everything up and try again, but after this much work with mosaic, I can't imagine wanting to redo the floor. 

I then mixed my own mortar for a bit, with local masonry sand from the quarry and a bag of portland cement. I found with this that sometimes there were still small pebbles that would make an uneven setting for the tiles and they would pop out. Next time I use this sand I will pre-screen.  Darrell, a contractor staying at moonCat right now, brought a bucket of fine sand scooped from a local property. Even though this contained a small amount of silt the mix held great, and this was my absolute favorite, until the cats found the bucket and made it into a litter box.

I did consider using an earthen plaster of clay, sand, starch, matrix material (such as straw, manure, etc.) and water. I decided against this because the house is in the ground. If by chance flooding occurred, I would need to redo the natural plaster and tile. With the amount of time I put into mosaic work, I think I will seek sustainability by using materials that will not need to be continually consumed, but will last for a long time (use of portland cement instead of natural plaster).

I did start with commercial grout, and decided to end with commercial grout, but recently spoke with a friend about mixing my own. My friend Michael (that I met at Earthships) recommended a fine sand mix very similar to the actual mortar I was making. He said mixing in the structural poly fibers used for cement may help prevent cracking. I may play with adding lime to the grout as well. At The Farm Ecovillage Training Center I had seen that the home Albert Bates was staying in had bottle caps laid in a lime plaster, but it did not hold well. Perhaps a mix of some portland and lime . . . and a little soaked sawdust?

I prefer to use natural or "waste" materials when possible. With this floor I used scrap tile from a mix of other contractors, the Habitat For Humanity Re-Store, and bottles and bottle caps that were being thrown away from local bars. I will admit that on one dark and frustrating night I decided to "Just finish it quickly!" by laying actual square tile bought from a store and did buy a couple of boxes of cheap tile.

I have come to realize that my tiling values include local material sourcing and waste/recycled materials as much as possible, but also there is a measure for my time and effort. I wanted to make the tree much larger with the bottle bottoms, but this is very time intensive.  I pushed myself for long days to complete the mosaic tile quickly and used all of my great TFH kinesiology pain releasing techniques to support days of statically bending over and mortaring in bottle caps and bottle bottoms. The tile portions go very quickly and are not quite so static. 

I can thank craigslist, local bars, and local flooring contractors for most of my tiling material! Thanks to Phoenix for all of her help placing bottle caps, and WWOOFer Chris Burke for hours of helping me to cut bottle bottoms.

I really enjoyed this project and have found it very rewarding. I am looking forward to more! As little girls at moonCat plot about who will own the house when I die I feel that my mosaic story floors can promote inspiration, creativity, culture beyond my lifetime. 

Farm Tour

This past Saturday we hosted a farm tour at moonCatlife. Jerome showed everyone around our beginning food forest and I took a turn showing building and retrofit projects. Phoenix showed everyone the kittens. I enjoyed making some new friends in the area. 

I have been hoping to project some movies in the barn and one of our visitors just so happened to have an old screen lying around. After connecting with a belly dancing instructor I am hoping to get some lessons going here along with yoga and meditation.                                   

We walked on our new paths that Darrell spent so much time mulching and looked at the new apple trees. The apple area also has a mix of herbs and some transplanted gooseberry bushes and wild grapes. I wanted to try a couple of hardier pecan and almond trees in this area as well so we planted them here.

The apples were planted next to a group of trees that grew over a large strawberry patch. There are mulberries, more wild grapes, rye, and some asparagus as well as other wild edibles of the area such as wood sorrel, lambs quarters, and milk weed (pods).  Clover and medic are growing throughout fixing nitrogen, drawing bees, and smelling wonderful.

This year Jerome has added a couple of pigs to our permaculture system and they are clearing the land for planting in our "pig tractor".  I added some swales for redirecting rain water.  We planted larger willows to boarder the farm that should have more stamina than smaller starts from the past. A path is in progress next to the willows now.

We enjoyed sharing knowledge and learning more tid bits about wild edibles and other natural ways of living from those who came.

 Here's to friends, nature, and innumerable possibilities.