10 Ways to Prepare for the Success of Your Yardshare Garden this Winter

From @dreamstime

As gardeners of all stripes will tell you, winter is the planning season. Stuck inside, with little chance to get your hands dirty, it is the perfect time to pause and reflect. What will your garden be? Who will you bring into the project? What are your hopes? How will you get the resources together? What will you plant? What worked last year and what did not? There is a lot to think about, and when the days get short and the night long – dreaming is the best thing to be doing, because come spring you will be very busy.

1. Start Finding Partners NOW. It can take a while to work out agreements and plan for a substantial garden. The sooner you start the more successful you will be at finding the right folks and planning for your yardshare. Call your friends who live in apartments or your grandmother who knows a thing or two about growing food in your area…Make it a family affair, or a way to gather some folks you don’t get to see often enough. Or bring up a yard sharing project at your house of worship. Perhaps your faith community would be interested in growing fresh food for the hungry this spring? It pays to start now. Healthy groups and good agreements take time to develop!

2. Start it off with a party! Once you have found some people you would like to garden with, have a potluck party and celebrate your new community! Getting to know people over a shared meal and music sets the proper tone for real community. It above all should be fun and light. Save the substantial discussions for another day. Light candles to brighten the winter dark, play some good music, talk about your dreams for the garden or gardens and break bread together because this is the beginning of something wonderful!

3. Read up. Get a copy of The Sharing Solution by Nolo Press. Read it!  For those that are more risk averse and have some anxieties about how to share without encountering legal bumps this is the place to start. I am not a lawyer, so I suggest everyone with these sorts ofconcerns consult my favorite legal eagles – Nolo press. Make a list of other books that are useful to your yard share group. Will you use permaculture methods, bio-intensive or no till? Bring everyone up to speed! Tons of great books are available in our hyperlocal Indiebound bookstore or you can create your own little library.

4. Create your online home. Once you have found your yard share group start your private pod on hyperlocavore to share planning, documents, videos, pictures, links and jokes! Teach each other what you know about how to grow in your zone and create a place where new members down the line can catch up on all the ideas and wisdom you’ve gathered. Documenting things will help you evaluate what worked and what did not in terms of what you tried to grow but also in how you chose to organize the project. Imagine the yard share going on for many seasons, plan for success by sharing knowledge from the start.

5. Have an expectations discussion early. Get your worries and how you will address them on the table. Do this online so people can flesh out their concerns, people can respond and agreements can be documented. If things get tense, have another potluck – and work it out over something yummy. Face to face builds real community, online tools can support it but doesn’t substitute for it. Start asking these sorts of questions…When is it OK to be at the home/yard of the host yard – and when is it NOT OK? Will you compost collectively? Is it a strictly organic garden?

6. Involve the Kids. If kids will be part of the garden share, make sure they participate in the planning and expectation setting. If they are involved at the start they are more likely to enjoy participating. Here’s a list of garden activities for kids. Work some kid centered fun into your plan. A garden is one of the best hands on learning experiences a kid can have. If you have any biology geeks in your group – maybe they can hold a lesson now and then?

7. Have a resource gathering. Gather together and make a list of all the things you hope to grow. Research what works for your zone and pull a kitty together and order your seeds and starts. Some heirloom and specialty seed houses run out of stuff before spring. some things like garlic starts go quickly. Take an inventory of who has what tools, seeds, transplants, cuttings and a list of the items you will perhaps need to buy. Plan for storage of tools and make sure people know where everything goes at the end of the day. Make sure people’s time, knowledge, and commitment is valued, money shouldn’t be the only currency you acknowledge. Be aware that many people are coming to the yard share project with a need to save not spend heavily. Get ready to bargain hunt and browse all those spring garage sales. It does not need to be an expensive project.

8. Talk to your neighbors about what you are doing. Introduce them to your new friends. Let them know about hyperlocavore, maybe they want to start their own yard share. Think about how this sort of project can revive the neighborhood.

9. Visit hyperlocavore.com and ask questions of folks that are already yard sharing. Share your ideas and concerns. Maybe someone has already worked through it. The forums are built for just this sort of sharing.

10. Plan for harvest, storage, success and failure. Some things you try will have fantastic results. Other things you try to grow will fail. Set your expectations with this in mind. Will you can or dehydrate the excess? Will you need to plan to purchase some tools for this as well? Will you seed save for swapping next year?

Let me know if this is helpful in the comments – and please add your own suggestions!

Happy Digging!
LizM

Hyperlocavore Book Club – The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins

Welcome everyone!

Read about the book club and our first choice – The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins.

Introduce Yourself

Intro and Chaper 1 Discussion Began December 7th, 09 Ongoing

Chapter 2 – The View from the Mountaintop December 14 – ongoing

Podcast Interviews with Liz McLellan aka @hyperlocavore

Podcast Interview with hyperlocavore on Vox Civitatas

Podcast interview with hyperlocavore on About Harvest

B is for Beef Borscht…Soup

As some of you know the reason I started growing my own, is that deep down I am a person with champagne tastes on a beer budget. So I cook and I garden. And when I cook, I cook for an army and freeze what I can. I was raised in part by a man from a family of Portland foodies. We love to cook because we love to eat, and love eat really well, even more.

It’s Fall, and so my thoughts turns to soup and sweets. This is my on the fly recipe for beef borscht. I am an improvisational cook. I have many hits and a few misses. This is a hit. Take time to enjoy the colors! Make a lot and freeze it!

Beef Borscht

1/2 pound of beef. It’s soup, don’t splurge.
6-8 beets
5 cups beef broth
2 cups chopped celery
5 cloves garlic (more if you like)
1 cup tomato paste
1 large red onion
1/2 head of red cabbage
3 bay leaves
1 tsp dried marjoram
1 tbs olive oil
3 tbs fresh dill or 3 tbs fresh parsley
plain Greek yogurt, sour cream or crème fraîche
salt and pepper

Peel and cut beets into medium pieces.
Cut the beef into bite sized pieces.
Chop celery, onion, garlic and cabbage.

Over medium heat in a large thick bottomed soup pot, stir in beef (seasoned with salt and pepper), after a bit add garlic, onion, bay leaf and marjoram. Brown the meat. Add the broth, the beets, tomato paste. Stir. Let simmer for 30 minutes. Add chopped cabbage and celery. Simmer 10 more minutes. I like the vegetables to be crunchy. You can simmer more if you like.

Serve hot with generous dollop of sour cream, crème fraîche or yogurt and fresh dill or parsley (or both). Some may like more salt and pepper, dill or cream on top, so I always serve those on the side.

Takes 1 hour
Serves 10

Nice with a crusty bread with butter on the side…but what soup isn’t?

Banana Bread with Pecans and Chocolate Chips

There is a special rung of hell for people that let bananas go bad, because for most of us they come from so very far away. This is why we have banana bread. When your bananas start to go brown make this moist and spongy treat!

Makes 2 loaves.

3 cups over ripe bananas
1 tbs fresh lemon juice
2 eggs
1 cup vanilla or plain yogurt
2 cups crushed pecans
1 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips*
3 cups unbleached flour
1 cup wheat flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1 stick softened butter
1 cup brown sugar
1 tsp fresh ground nutmeg
1 tbs vanilla extract

Pre-heat oven to 350 degrees.

In a mixer blend bananas, eggs, butter, yogurt, brown sugar, nutmeg, vanilla and lemon juice. This is easier if you crush with a potato masher first. Mix well. I used thick Greek vanilla and honey yogurt for this and it was wonderful.

In a large bowl mix the flour, salt, baking soda, chocolate and nuts. Mix well.

Combine all ingredients in large bowl and mix very well.

Oil two 9 by 5 baking pans.

Pour mixture into both pans splitting evenly.

Bake for 1 hour. Test for readiness with a toothpick. The toothpick will come out of the bread without and mixture on it when the bread is ready.

Let sit 20 minutes to cool. Then pop them out of the pans and serve!

*not required but very tasty.

10 Reasons Becoming a Hyperlocavore is a Positive Climate Action

Having a positive effect on climate, is not the reason I made these changes in my life. So yes, a bit of the old bait and switch here. I made them because I wanted more pleasure incorporated into my daily grind. Having a positive effect on my ecological footprint, was the icing on the very tasty cake my life has become through growing a good portion of my own food. But for Blog Action Day ‘09 I will re-frame my reasons in climate terms.

And with no further ado, my list.

1. Distance to plate.

There has been a bit of confusion added to the discussion lately about locavore eating strategies actually being a negative if the only measure is distance to plate, that food miles are actually increased. Of course, distance to plate is only one of about 100 reasons being a locavore makes sense. Depending on how you access the growers in your food shed, what you use to get to where your veg is, it all depends on quite a few variables in your own life, your city’s infrastructure, your community…The arguments I have seen are very strangely skewed in ways that I will save for another post.

However, you cannot convince me that an efficiently delivered but tasteless tomato from 2000 miles away is a winner no matter which way you slice it. The distance to my plate is about 10 feet, because I grow my own mouth watering fresh vegetables.

Growing my own heirlooms is much cheaper than buying them by the pound. They don’t travel well. So you can’t really get this unless you do it yourself or get to know a very local grower, at least on my limited budget. Life must be worth living or why save anything… yourself…the planet…Who cares if everything tastes like cardboard? Kill me now!

Before you call me an elitist, please note I live on very little money per year. We all have choices and priorities to make. These are mine.

2. When I am gardening I’m not watching TV, using the computer or game station.

Though some gardeners use some plug in tools, most of the time I am using my human power and a hand tool. Don’t get me wrong. I love my computer, my Battlestar Gallactica, Glee and So You Think You Can Dance as much as the next boob tube addict. Still, I do less of these energy intensive activities now that I have a gorgeous garden to tend. My garden feeds me and my spirit in return for my attention and time in a way that no toy can.

3. Factory meat is grown in a factory-like setting which, is generally a semi automated system dependent on cheap oil.

Though there are a few farmers out there that are closing the loop with methane powered energy storage systems, and I salute them, they are in minority. Maybe someday these systems will become the norm.

A back yard chicken coop doesn’t use electricity for much at all, unless you live in a place with four seasons and need a heater. I don’t have my own flock yet, but I am definitely thinking about it. There are a lot of climate related reasons to forgo meat, but for me the jury is still out – however I do need the manure!

4. Efficient though oil dependant food systems constantly shed and de-skill workers while at the same time suck more from the energy grid to replace them with expensive machinery.

I’m not a Luddite, nor am I anti-efficiency or anti-science. But I do question the wisdom of creating a world where so few of us have profitable meaningful work. There are nearly 7 billion people on the planet, only a small number of us have good work. Localizing means that much more needs to be created and distributed locally. The crafts of bread making, beer making, wine making, honey making, guitar making, candy making, soap making and vegetable growing are having a resurgence. Some of us know the price of food is tied intimately to the price of oil, and oil in the long run has no where to go but up. Localizing goes a long way to help many issues, including the cost of food, re-skilling a de-skilled work force and keeping money in the hands of people in our communities.

A localized economy doesn’t ship in goods from halfway around the planet unless absolutely necessary, like coffee, otherwise known as “my dark master.”

5. Growing my own vegetables means I am likely to eat a lot more of them.

Eating meat regularly has a higher impact than driving an SUV. I’m not a strict vegetarian, but I do eat less meat now that I have a productive garden.  Having a super fresh garden 10 feet away means easy means I don’t have to think much about it – just walk outside, see what’s ripe and pick my dinner. When I was living in NYC and eating out a lot,  the easiest thing was to simply pick what was immediately appealing, which for me usually involved meat- which I used like a reward for a harried day. Again, your mileage may vary.

6. Growing my own and having a decent pantry means I go to the grocery store about once a month.

Once a month? Yup. I do sometimes have to make a trip for things I have forgotten, but that’s my error. I’m getting a lot better at keeping a full pantry and making good lists. A full pantry means that whipping something up from the yard is not at all taxing. To make full use of a great garden you need a well stocked pantry.

Being conscious of simple strategies like building a real pantry and making lists mean that I don’t have to put a lot of energy into feeding me and mine.  I do know that all of our lives are different. And this may not be a choice you make, but I’m on the other side of eating out all the time – and I am really enjoying myself doing things very differently.

To get into the cooking groove check out these fantastic sites:

• foodgawker.com – feast your eyes…
• tastespotting.com
• rouxbe.com – don’t know how to do something in your cookbook?
• tastebook.com

7. I am fitter now that I am growing my own.

Benefits beyond feeling better about my climate impact include being much fitter, less depressed, having better skin and feeling generally more resilient and capable in my life.

Being fit means that my moods are even. I am less inclined to look for things to distract me from the general state of anxiety I experienced when working for a corporation and being handsomely rewarded. The hidden cost of my higher pay check was a great deal more anxiety and stress brought on by long commutes, expensive dress codes, unrelenting deadlines aimed towards goals that were not my own.

I know now if I start to feel anxious, a rarity, I have a bunch of weeds that need pulling. Pulling weeds, tending a garden in general beats any anti-anxiety strategy I have tried.

So what is the climate connection? Glad you asked! Things I used to distract myself with were shopping for hours for crap I didn’t need wandering the mall in a fugue state ‘relaxing’, driving hither and yon for bargains to ’save money’ while paying what 18% on a credit card, taking a lot of looong weekend ‘get aways.’ Sound familiar?

Because I am where I want to be in my life, I do all of these a lot less. I am quite content now, and that itself has a huge climate impact. The open road beckons, but it does so in a whisper rather than a yell.

8. I cook my own meals much more often at home.

I’m re-skilling myself, in the kitchen, a direct result of having a flood of produce to handle and cooking a lot at once, means I do not buy many highly processed, plastic wrapped, small serving, factory made, well traveled meals these days. And no, you cannot convince me it is ‘food’ now that I’ve gotten used to the real thing. I prefer my tomato sauce over store bought any day. Does that make me an elite foodie? How can it when I am spending far less on far better tasting food?

I do understand that many of us are living under serious time constraints and pressures. And I certainly do not intend that this should be seen as an argument for the re-domestication of the American female. Real food skills make everyone sexier, men too.

9. I waste far less food.

“Americans waste more than 40 percent of the food we produce for consumption. That comes at an annual cost of more than $100 billion.”
-From Wasted Food

That’s 100 billion, with a B. A shocking number. We are getting far too used to numbers that should shock us. If I grew it, you can be sure I am not going to waste it. I watched it grow sometimes for months! We may take other people’s labor for granted but we rarely take our own for granted. How much food do you see wasted  in a week…take a look around. That means that all the energy put into growing it was wasted too.

10. I don’t use petrochemicals to grow my own food.

The list of products and strategies for growing your own luscious fruit and veg without petroleum and other petroleum dependent chemicals is very long now. Sustainable agriculture has been proven to be more efficient per hectare than industrial agriculture.

Now you might be inclined to attack any one of these points. Feel free. I may be moved, but remember, I made these changes so that I would enjoy my life more not to save the planet from catastrophic climate shifts. Are you a climate skeptic? I could care less. Please take that argument elsewhere.  I am over it. I am interested if you are a ‘tasty food skeptic’ because that would be weird and interesting. Tastiness, just another liberal plot…

If I am really honest, my immediate quality of life is more important to me than the rather abstract “massive climate disruption.” Probably true for most of you too. What can I say? I am, at base, a person who grew up loving fast cars, burgers and fries, road trips, fireworks and instant gratification… you know, an American.

My instant gratifications have simply shifted and incidentally I am actually… gratified.

Have no space to grow your own? Consider starting a yard sharing group with folks you know.

10 Reasons Becoming a Hyperlocavore is a Positive Climate Action by Liz McLellan is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at hyperlocavore.wordpress.com.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/profile/Liz.

I’m a Little Baby Bumble Bee…

I’m a Little Baby Bumble Bee!
Won’t My Mama Be So Proud of Me!
(Adapted from the absolutely horrible murderous bumble bee song taught to kindergarteners everywhere!)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robfon/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

You may be wondering why I am playing honey bee! Strange thing to do, I have to agree. I’ve always had a connection to bees, always thought of them as the magic little beings that make us possible. Have you every thought about your near total dependence on the humble bee? Nearly everything you eat is in some way connected to the diligent work of a armies of bees.
This is why when I came across the Tweehive project I said “Oh yes! I’d love to play!”

From their site:

Tweehive is a mass role play by human beings of a bee colony on twitter. This will take place on three days, July 14, August 5 and Sept 5. The aim is to raise bee awareness, wonderment, interest, actions – plus generate traffic to bee related sites and resources. We are affiliated withThe Pestival and our third daily role play will be featured at this South Bank event (London) in the first week of September.
- Tweehive Project

Everyone is welcome to jump in and play so, please read up and then participate in the Tweehive. The twitter game will raise awareness, teach you a bit about the complex lives of our most unappreciated allied creature. And maybe you’ll even find some honey of your own!

Note: The image is not actually a bumble bee, but a French bee, from France.
For my BEEEEEEEEES!!!

How To Start a Produce Exchange in Your Neighborhood

How do I start a local produce exchange on hyperlocavore.com?

What is a produce exchange? How is it different from a ‘yard share‘?

A produce exchange is an informal gathering of people who are already growing extra food in their yards. Some groups invite non growers to participate but that is up to each group. A yard share is an arrangement to share the work and share the harvest. You can set up either on hyperlocavore but in this post we are focusing on a produce exchange.

Let’s say you have a lovely large lemon tree which produces more lemons than you could ever squeeze. And let’s say Joseph down the way has a fig tree, and the Lees around the block have a giant rosemary bush, and your friend Marguerite has yet again planted way too many tomato plants. You start to get the image. There is a cornucopia of tastiness within a quarter mile. It’s time to start a produce exchange or perhaps a food donation system for a shelter in your neighborhood.

To see and example of an existing local produce exchange on hyperlocavore take a look at the Lamorinda Produce Exchange Many thanks to Amy Greacen who organized it.

How do I get a produce exchange going in my neighborhood?

1. Create a group on hyperlocavore.com. Be sure to name it in a way that is easy and clear.

• go to pods/groups from the top (tab) menu on hyperlocavore.com
• towards the right of the screen hit + Add a Group
• enter the details of your group and hit Save at the lower part of the screen.
• when you save the group there will be an opportunity to invite people to that group on the following screen. Use this feature if you have the emails of friends who may be interested.

2. If you don’t have emails then create a flier for your neighborhood, cafes, houses of worship to find interested gardeners. Many folks are just overwhelmed by all the extra they have and would love an opportunity to move it. On the flyer be sure to list the groups page on hyperlocavore so people can find you online easily.

Content example for your produce exchange flier:

Join us in starting a neighborhood produce exchange:
Some of us have extra lemons, some have extra figs.
We will have a biweekly produce exchange at the corner of Main and 4th every
other Saturday. Bring the kids!

We are organizing online at:
Lamorinda Produce Exchange Online is at:
http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/group/lafayetteproduceexchange

You don’t have to be a grower to be involved!
For more information call Edna Wreems at 555-414-1212 or email her at edna@—

Your groups rules.

The details of how your group works, when it meets and who can participate is up to you. Use your group page for hashing these issues out or meet in person and post your decisions. You are able to have a ‘members only’ discussion on the site.

Is there a limit to the number of people?
Must everyone bring something every time?
Can people bring prepared foods such as jams, baked foods, cheeses, pestos or chutneys.
Will you have a monthly BBQ or potluck to make it a real community?
Is exchange of money for things allowed?

Other ways to work together:

• create a group tool lending library
• create a seed exchange
• create a community comport pile
• do a group run to the nursery or hardware store
• have a yard building party to help a newbie grower install raised beds
• go on a scavenged materials hunt
• start a bulk buying club to reduce costs
• start a group meat buying club – free range cow? not so expensive when you share the cost.
• have a neighborhood ‘jam session’ – some people make jellies and jam – and maybe other folks bring their guitars!

How you work together, how creative you get in supporting each other is up to you!

Are there legal considerations?

Hyperlocavore.com does not give legal advice, however Nolo press puts out a terrific book called The Sharing Solution which is available for purchase on hyperlocavore.com and hyperlocavore.wordpress.com

Be sure to let the rest of the people on hyperlocavore.com know how your produce exchange is working by posting to your profile or in the discussion forums!

The Twitter FAQ on @hyperlocavore or How I Tweet

(With a tip of the hat to Jamais Cascio from @worldchanging and @cascio for the format and questions.)

(I’ll re-post or re-link to this when I get a flood of new followers on Twitter.)

So you’ve decided to follow me on Twitter. Thank you! I really appreciate that! I hope you will find me interesting, funny and helpful.

So, don’t take this the wrong way, but who are you? I just added you because [other Twitter user] suggested it.

My name is Liz McLellan. I am, among other things the maker of hyperlocavore.com a free yard sharing community. I am also a very engaged citizen, a cultural creative, a social entrepreneur, a gardener, a foodie, an activist and a believer in a positive future which is completely dependent on us.

What kinds of things do you Twitter about?

I twitter mostly about yard sharing, neighborhood resilience and community building, gardening, civic engagement, the various futures we are facing and how to move towards a positive one. I also occasionally become very interested in particular events and may for a time use #hashtags to speak to specific people about such topics as: #iranelections, #madmen,#bsg,* #transition or #peakoil. In the evenings I can sometimes be found on Twitter socializing with people. Feel free to jump in. I like meeting new people!

I hope that those interested in my main topics around green subjects, will humor me when I tweet about other topics. I will usually throttle back to my usual topics after a few days.

I have always tried to engage and reply to all DMs and @hyperlocavore responses. I am not all that interested in engaging in rigid binary debate, not because I am afraid of it, but because in 20 years of being online (remember theWeLL and picospan?), I can tell when I am in a genuine conversational exchange and a competition with a dogged ideologue. I do not see the world in black and white. I don’t respond to the latter, unless I find it amusing. For the most part, if I don’t find you amusing politically I will ignore you.

That said if you are genuinely open and interested in my point of view, I will do my best to be genuinely open and interested in your point of view.

And that said, if I don’t engage, it may also mean that I am simply very busy between running my site, working on the farm or trying to earn a living in some other way.

You’re not going to overload me with your Twitter posts, are you?

Well, I can be pretty communicative on twitter, the value of what I tweet is certainly up to you to interpret. My signal to noise ratio has been rated “astonishingly high at 94.2%!” by twitalyzer.com. I try to keep that number very high, as it’s a matter of pride for me. I also like to let you know who I actually am so I will tweet some trivial stuff that I think is funny, because you really learn who people are by what they think is funny. And things are so tense these days I think it’s really important we all have a few belly laughs everyday.

I also think we should all help the newbies understand what all this noise about the internets is. I will occasionally post things that are meant to be directly helpful to the clueless newbie, for instance an explanation of #hashtags, which may at first seem to come out of the blue. Actually, I would rather tweet than DM and answer to a question a lot of people are not but would like to ask.

If you are a clueless newbie please check out @leelefever ’s channel on Youtube. His company Common Craft makes the best introduction videos out there to all these new fangled web tools. I’ve used them for years to bring clients up to speed. Mashable.com is also a great resource and place to hunt for clues.

If at any given time I do obsess on a particular event such as #iranelection, then of course, feel free to unfollow. But please do check back in if you enjoyed me before the digression – it won’t be forever.

I do appreciate your time and attention and try not to abuse it.

Promoting hyperlocavore.com a free yard sharing community.

My passion and my business is my yard sharing project. I do not have any budget for advertising. I am completely bootstrapping on my own. Twitter has proved invaluably important to the project. I appreciate every single retweet I get, but I am especially grateful to all the twitter peeps who have been helping me make yard sharing a common idea and hyperlocavore.com the go to site your yard sharing needs.

A few posts about yard sharing:

On Choosing: How a Hyperlocavore Responds to Catastrophe
What is Yard Sharing?
What is a Distributed Suburban CSA Farm?
100 Reasons to Become a Hyperlocavore
A podcast interview I did with Nancy O’Mallon on aboutharvest.com
Hyperlocavore’s Youtube Channel

So you’re going to follow me back, right?

Maybe. I tend to not follow social media experts, SEO masters, multi-level marketers, ranters, sex bots, trolls or nasty people. As long as I have time I will at least check your bio. I as a rule won’t follow you if you haven’t taken the trouble to create an avatar and write a bio. I will follow some businesses and organizations back if I think we have some reason to communicate. I am currently trying to pare down though so I can be sure to pass on relevant info to people who are interested in my main topics. Please don’t be offended if I unfollow. It just means I am getting more focused on my areas of interest.

I am using TweetDeck and PowerTwitter to help filter and find great people, sort, retweet and stay responsive. Both tools are fantastic and come highly recommended if you want to make the most of your time on Twitter.

I will not follow you if you twitter exclusively about yourself or what happened to you today. It should go without saying that I block at will anyone I find offensive. I am not easily offended but I have no problem blocking people who treat others badly.

I am most interested in people who are working on positive change in their communities, people who are contributing to progress, social entrepreneurs, the scientifically curious, philanthropists, geeky green people, wonky people, burningman people, very funny people and people who respond to my jokes. I would also love to find an experienced mentor interested in helping hyperlocavore become the positive social force I know it can be. If you are this kind of person please tweet me directly. I am swamped these days but, I do want to connect if we are likely to click!

Cool! So what’s your Twitter account again?

If you are still interested you can follow me at @hyperlocavore.

* #bsg – Battlestar Gallactica

Help us Name Our New Donkey!

Congratulations to THE SHIBAGUYZ!

OK, so here’s the story in brief. We have a quarter horse named Roanie, who is of course a roan. He used to have a pal named Jim, but Jim died. Since then Roanie has been a very mopey horse. So we figure we would find him a friend. Donkeys or so we’ve been told make great companion animals for horses. Though mom is hinting that in the future the donkey will be my prime mode of transportation. Mom has a habit of naming animals what they actually are. Mama Kitty for instance, is the girl cat that showed up on our porch quite preggers and dropped all of our barn cats. Though we do have a white Bichon named Moxie and a three legged rescued Labrador named Peaches.

I wanted to name the new donkey  Moon Pie, but was swiftly vetoed, on the grounds I think, that any time we called her name we’d be inciting a craving for the old time treat. Anyway. Mom is calling the donkey Baby Burro. It’s cute. But I think we can do better. I’ve been taking nominations from the folks that follow @hyperlocavore on twitter. They started really rolling in and we’re having fun. So, I thought this is an awesome time for a contest.

We will continue taking nominations here in comments on the blog, on twitter and on hyperlocavore.com until Friday June 19th, 2009 at midnight. At that time nominations will be closed and mom will pick the finalists in the next few days. It’s her donkey, mom gets to make the rules. The nominees will be put to a vote in a poll which I will link to when we have the finalists – for 3 days. The winner will be announced the following week, when I get to it. (Note: there’s SO much to do on the farm these days, I kind of have to work around the daylight and animal schedule.)

The winner will receive a brand new copy of The Organic Gardener’s Handbook of Natural Insect and Disease Control (voted by NYT for their Best Gardening Books list.)

Operation Dandelion – We Need You to help us spread the yard sharing idea!

Even if you are not interested in yard sharing yourself, you can help others find yard share partners by spreading the word!

Be a dandelion and join Hyperlocavore – A Free Yard Sharing Community and then use the INVITE FRIENDS feature to let your friends, family and other contacts know about the site. It doesn’t matter where you are from – you can help us:

• bring our neighborhoods back to life
• help people save money
• help people eat better
• help kids learn about where food comes from
• help us build resilient communities
• help community groups get yard sharing going

Join Hyperlocavore – A Free Yard Sharing Community
We need dandelions!

Share this video!

Help Me Help You Get Yard Sharing Going in Your Town!

Please share this video with any one you know who might be interested in getting yard sharing going in their communities.
I can set you up very quickly! It’s a service your community can have up and running in minutes – for FREE!

What is Yard Sharing?
100 Reasons to Become a Hyperlocavore
What is a Distributed Suburban CSA?

twitter me @hyperlocavore

Let’s get growing!

Adding Yard Sharing to Your Community’s Offerings

Are you a faith community or community level organization looking to expand your offerings and impact without expanding your budget? We understand that creating a yard sharing registry is valuable resource for any localizing organization. We’re here to help.

We can set up a branded group for your organization, assign a member of your staff as an administrator and have the all the resources on hyperlocavore.com available to the people in your community who are interested in starting a yard sharing group.

Here are the advantages to using hyperlocavore.com:

1. For the wider concept of yard sharing and sustainability to succeed we have to support and nurture the relationships that people form to yard share. It’s a new idea. People need help and it is time consuming to attend to all the needs of this community.

2. Simply creating a registry or map, does not support the groups forming or staying together. It takes human resources to deliver anything beyond a matchmaking service. Those groups therefore are on their own, and left to succeed or fail on their own. Hyperlocavore.com offers ongoing support for those relationships, a community of other people all over the world working on yard sharing and group gardens, and a community of support deeply committed to the success of each yard sharing arrangement. It may not be part of your mission to offer anything on top of a matching system. Nurturing these groups takes time and commitment.

3. You program will not be dependent on funding that is not always available from quarter to quarter. This is a self supported site. The members of your community who want to yard share will not need to worry that volunteers may or may not be available to keep your site registry up to date using technical staff or volunteer hours.

4. We can brand your group or area page with your logo.

5. If you DO have staff hours available we can allow you to administer your own pages. If not we can do that for you but maintain the resources with your logo.

6. This is a way to immediately expand your offerings and effectiveness without impacting your non profit budget. If you are a for profit business we will do the same for a small monthly fee.

7. The value to the members of a network such as this is intimately related to the number of people involved. Silo-ing one area from another, means that our mutual friends may never find each other.

8. We are called hyperlocavore because we have the ability to match people on the neighborhood level and allow them to create private groups to internally organize their own yard share groups. We exist to support these relationships and are happy to share credit in partnership.

9. Impress your board members with a quick launch of an invaluable resource whether you are a faith community, a poverty reduction community organization, a real food group or a professional edible landscaper we can add value to what you do every day!

It take minutes for us to set your organization up. It’s free for non-profits and suburban farmers!
Let’s get people growing TOGETHER!

Liz McLellan hyperlocavore.com

On Choosing – A Hyperlocavore Responds to Catastrophe

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has
genius, power and magic in it!”
— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Please note: a discussion with the community at ongoing on The Oil Drum in their Campfire section. Please participate.

One of the most useful things I have ever learned in my life is that the most effective way to deal with worry and anxiety is to act on those things in your life that you can control, and leave the rest up to the Universe. Some call it the “Serenity Prayer.” Whatever you believe in or do not believe in, knowing just what you can control in your life and what you cannot is the key to your joy. This much I know.

Everyday we are presented with immense, rolling, overlapping catastrophes; environmental devastation, [swineflu!?] societal malaise and violence, and running out of the stuff that, we are told, underpins our every creature comfort – oil. All of these things are true. That hand basket you’ve heard so much about, we’re riding in it!

How do we “carry on”, as the Brits used to say? Well, I’m not at all interested in “carrying on” actually. Nose down, joy in check, plodding and miserable. I want to thrive. I was raised with mighty high expectations of what this life can be, and I’m not giving those expectations up. I want to reach the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I want to love and live well. And I want to eat REALLY well. I got used to that in the 1990’s.

Well, first I would like to suggest some humility, for many on the planet, this rolling crisis has been their daily experience for as long as they have lived. It is nothing new. Check in with yourself. What are you grateful for? What have you been given in life by your community, your family, your beloveds, your friends and your neighbors, by this Earth? You can read this. There must be someone who taught you to read. Take a moment. Sit with your gratitude.

That’s where I began when I starting building hyperlocavore.com – a free yard sharing community, sitting with my gratitude. I had just been laid off. It was April. I had been a tech strategy person at a 35 year old sustainability non-profit that had been fighting the good fight as long as I had been on the planet. I took an inventory…

OK. Stop.

Honestly? I can’t lie. First, I felt terror. Then, blind rage with a dollop of total panic. Boiling blood, fist shaking, laying curses on all who had done me wrong – all that. That lasted for a few months, if I tell the truth. Then there was a substantial period of pouting and just feeling so sad for myself, my poor pitiful sorry self. I bore easily. And I got bored with myself behaving that way, pretty quickly.

When I moved on, it was via gratitude. Sitting with and contemplating all that I was and am grateful for, after all the crying, bargaining and bemoaning had subsided. What did I have, well, besides the sweatpants I had been wearing for a few weeks? I am literate and reasonably intelligent, if broke. I have knowledge that people can band together and build amazing fantastical giant things, cities even, because I’ve been part of a community that does that every year now for much more than a decade. I speak of the Burning Man festival and year round astounding creative beautiful community made of doers. I believe I write well enough.

And I have a good idea that has been bugging me since I was about 5. I used to look at the inside of city blocks in San Francisco and wonder, why the heck were the yards all fenced off, in the middle and mostly unused. Why not, I thought way back then, tear those fences down and build a garden full of fruit trees, nut trees and veggie patches? Why don’t people grow food there?

I am grateful that I grew up in the Silicon Valley, a place that fed my voracious curiosity and kept me tinkering. I am grateful for growing up in the Bay Area, a place absolutely crammed with practical minded revolutionaries and doing daring dreamers. The rest of the country seems to think the only thing we gave them was tie-dye and 4 foot bongs, but they would be mistaken. The Bay Area is a place that teaches everyone “Why Not?” A society of people that does not let you just talk about a good idea without telling you, in chorus, to “DO IT!” It is tough to get away with a lot moaning and jaw flapping in a place like that.

Yard sharing is all about being grateful for what you have, not anxious about what you don’t. It’s about responding practically to chaos, to the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns. Never in all my life did I think I would quote Donald Rumsfeld but, there you are. These are strange days, indeed!

You do know these things for sure. You know you need healthy food and you know you need it cheap. So do all your friends and neighbors, the members of your faith communities, so does your slacker posse. So does your family. Doing for yourself, deepening your food security and your community resilience is the most direct thing you can do to bring your rational and general anxiety down to a manageable size. Sit down to a meal that you grew yourself from seeds which you saved, bread you baked, eggs you gathered, and you will know in your bones that you and yours will be alright.

We get new people signing up to the social network every single day, practical people looking to get down to business. I built the site because a lot of us don’t have all resources or skills we need to grow our own. Some of us lack time, some lack space, some have physical limitations, or lack certain tools. Some have so little experience growing things that the task seems overwhelming. Where do we start? All of these issues can be minimized in a well gathered and tended yard sharing group, a healthy community.

Some folks are linking up yards and creating mini suburban farm/CSAs, like Kipp Nash in Boulder, Colorado. Each family gets a weekly box of the freshest produce and the rest he sells at the farmers market. If this looks like the job for you, come on by the site and find some farm clients and yards to tend! Kipp’s got eight yards he is farming. Will you ever look at a lawn again in the same way? When I see a sad lone Honey-Doer on a loud riding mower all I see is wasted space, wasted water and meaningless work.

Look at the world with this skew and green thumbs will appear and share the secrets of plant whispering, food waste will be gathered from multiple households and make a formidable sweet smelling compost pile. Friends will band together to buy 3 year old apple trees, for a lifetime of apples. Abuelitas will pass on magic recipes and kids will coax worms to party in warm living soil. Their curiosity will catch fire! Streets will become neighborhoods, neighbors will become friends. No one will feel alone, frozen or powerless, because no one will be alone, frozen or powerless. Potlucks will abound! All will eat better.

This is the future we see, we hyperlocavores. We know it’s coming, because we’re building it right now. Who has time to fret? Pass the cornbread and fresh salsa. Look someone brought the boom box! Start building, now.

Our great, great grandparents used to have victory gardens but, they also had rent parties. Londoners danced in underground tunnels as fire came down from the sky. They stayed put. They raised rent, barns and kids together. They didn’t just survive, many of them thrived. I hope we will all use this compound crisis as a reminder that the hard times are very often the very best of times. Take note of what you have, be grateful for your loved ones. Take note of those around you who may feel alone. They are not and you are not, alone.

We, each of us every moment of the day, will choose our responses to what’s happening. Some will choose to go numb, watch more TV, play more video games, surf mindlessly. Some will chose hate, rage, to nurse grievances or will choose take their pain out on the people around them, in most cases it will be the people they love most in this world. Look around. Is that what you want for your beloveds?

Will you choose another day of fear, of distrust, anger or powerlessness, of envy, isolation …complaining or will you choose the plentiful garden, the neighborhood, real community, real food and pleasure?

Yes.
Pleasure.

“There’s only two things that money can’t buy,
That’s true love and homegrown
tomatoes!”

- Guy Clark

I would add ‘real community’ to that list of things money can’t buy.

I choose real community, dancing in the chaos, pleasure, delectable
food and the edible and musical neighborhood.

For a podcast featuring Liz McLellan, interviewed by Nancy O’Mallon,
the host of aboutharvest.com

go to: Yard sharing for growing your own food.

Happy Digging!
LizM – connector/maker/digger
twitter me @hyperlocavore

On Choosing – A Hyperlocavore Responds to
Catastrophe by Liz McLellan is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.
Based on a work at hyperlocavore.wordpress.com.

Take the Hyperlocavore Pledge

Another take on the Locavore Pledge – going hyperlocal!

GROW IT YOURSELF IN YOUR YARD (organically),
If you can’t GROW IT YOURSELF IN YOUR YARD, in a YARD SHARE GARDEN WITH OTHERS
If you can’t GROW IT YOURSELF IN A YARD SHARE, then LOCALLY PRODUCED.
If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then ORGANIC.
If not ORGANIC, then FAMILY FARM.
If not FAMILY FARM, then LOCAL BUSINESS.
If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then FAIR TRADE.

How we feed ourselves matters.

What is a distributed suburban CSA?

Some folks are taking the yard sharing idea a step further. Meet Kipp Nash of Boulder Colorado, who farms 8 neighbor’s yards as a Community Supported Agriculture operation called Community Roots CSA. In 2009 Kipp Nash and the team at Community Roots are developing a program to directly feed five food insecure families in the Boulder area and are looking for donations in support of this project.

I built Hyperlocavore.com in part to encourage aspiring food growing entrepreneurs like Kipp to consider the serial yard CSA approach. I encourage interested growers to join the site to seek and maintain yard sharing client relationships, share your experiences with other suburban farmers and yard sharing groups. The site is free. Feel free to create wide area groups such as “Seeking Yardshares, Chicago, IL” in order to find farming clients or private groups such as “New Day Suburban Farm,” which would be just the yards which you have linked together in your yard share farm.

Other yard share farmers:

Your Backyard Farmer
MyFarmSF
Eden on Earth
Brick City Urban Farms
Abundant Life Farm
Backyard Farmer

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions at: hyperlocavore@gmail.com.

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays!

New Jelly Belly Flavors

srsly wtf?

Composting, UR Doing It Wrong!

Another title of this post could be, “How to Make a Perfect Worm Proof Barrier.” Sadly, worms really need to be part of the whole composting process. To not invite them is like, not inviting Jack Nicholson to the Oscars. It makes no sense. Worms need to be at the head of the table for the feast, in fact, they are your guest of honor.

In searching the land for composting materials, I was really happy to clean out the barn and add all that old hay. I think it would have been ok to losely layer it on top. Unfortunately it was the second layer after the cardboard. With the winter snow and frozen water it made a perfectly impenetrable mat, a giant bouncer at the end of the red carpet that got his orders wrong. “Sorry sir, you’re not on the list.”

I spent two days digging the muck up, pulling the frozen mush out and retossing the beds. Normally you wouldn’t do this, but they were smelling foul. I think they will be fine in a few weeks.

What is yardsharing?

TAKING A BREAK © Vossphotog... | Dreamstime.com

“You know, the tomato that’s from your garden tastes very different from one that isn’t. And peas – what is it like to eat peas in season? So we want the White House to be a place of education and awareness. And hopefully kids will be interested because there are kids living here.”

- Michelle Obama on the Whitehouse Vegetable Garden

“hyperlocavore.com,” which blends bottom-up collaboration with food production. It’s an example of peer-to-peer agriculture, and it’s a pretty neat concept. The founder of hyperlocavore wrote to me, saying that she thought this was a pretty “worldchanging” idea. I agree. Check ‘em out.”

- Jamais Cascio
openthefuture.com and worldchanging.com

What is a ‘hyperlocavore’?

A hyperlocavore is a person who tries to eat as much food as locally as possible. Growing your own is as local as it gets!

What is ‘yardsharing’?

Yard sharing is an arrangement between people to share skills and gardening resources; space, time, strength, tools or skills, in order to grow food as locally as possible, to make neighborhoods resilient, kids healthy and food much cheaper!

Why would I want to set up a yardsharing group?

Yard sharing is a way to connect people who love to garden, people who love healthy fresh food and people who have yards! Often people who have yards have little time time for a vegetable garden. And sometimes gardeners have trouble finding soil to garden in because they rent an apartment! Sometimes older people lack stamina and are socially isolated, finding younger people to partner in growing food together works wonderfully for all. There are all kinds of reasons it makes sense.

Yard sharing works for:

• apartment dwellers
• busy parents
• older people
• frugalistas
• foodies
• tree huggers
• cheap bastards
• farmers lacking land
• land holders lacking farmers
• people sick of leaf blowers
• curious kids
• folks with a disability
• people who want to get outside more
• people that want to eat better
• people that want to eat cheaper
• people who want to make their community resilient
• people who like their food super fresh
• people worried about peak oil
• and maybe you! (if you’re not on the list – send me a note!)

Yard sharing cuts down on greenhouse gases by limiting the travel time of fruit and vegetables to your table.
Yard sharing is a great way to connect with your family, friends and neighbors!
Yard sharing helps you eat more veggies!
Yard sharing can be a workable solution for people with physical limitations who want to eat better and more cheaply.
Yard sharing is an excellent way to teach children about food and biology!
Yard sharing is a great way to get cheaper produce to older people on a fixed income!
Yard sharing helps you get enough vitamin D from sunshine!
Yard sharing is a way to avoid pesticides and other chemicals on your food!
Yard sharing is a fun activity to share!
Yard sharing helps to create independent local food systems that are less sensitive to the price of oil.

And nothing tastes as good as food you grew yourself!

Who can yard share?

Anyone! If you don’t see a group for your area just create one! Then send invites to people in your neighborhood, your friends and
their friends and maybe you will find someone willing to start with you!

OK, Sign me up! No! Wait, is it free? Yes? OK, Sign me up!

No thanks, but I do want to take a look.

This post is part of Fight Back Fridays!

hyperlocavore.com is a free social network here to help you form a yard sharing group with people in your neighborhood, a group of friends, a community restaurant and it’s neighbors, members of your family, faith communities or new friends made on hyperlocavore.

How to Start A Produce Exchange in Your Neighborhood – Share Your Extra Fruits and Vegetables!

DIY Project – Low Watt LED Greenhouse

[diy-greenhouse.pdf]

You may not want or need as much insulation as I used. It’s very cold where I live. It is not a thing of beauty and was build strictly to function as a place to start plants and extend our very short growing season. It hides in our garage.

So far it has been a constant 58 degrees inside the greenhouse. I have started only cold friendly plants. It likely gets a bit chillier when the lights go off.

Materials:

Many times you can find some of what you need for free on freecyle.org, reyooz.com, thinggo.com or trusty craigslist.org. A thrift store is another good place to check for some of these items.

Shelf with 5 shelves $50.00
8 LED grow light panels $240.00
Roll of sheet plastic $12.00
2 Power strips $10.00
2 Timers $14.00
1 Thermometer $ 2.50
Trays $3.00

Total: About 331.50 (plus tax)

Time of useful life. The only element I expect not to last for at least 10 years are the LED panels.

Things I had on hand:

old blanket
cotton cord
zip ties
staple gun
blinder clips
bubble wrap
duct tape
some lattice panel to
keep the barn cats out

Notes:

• LEDWholesalers on ebay.com – 2 orders – 900 LED Grow light 4 Red + Blue Hydroponic Lamp Panels. They have a few negative comments but for the most part they get 5 stars.
• My shelf was a bargain apparently. I can’t find these very cheap online.
• Make sure the timers are the grounded type (three prong.)
• The power strips plug into the timers.
• The LED panels go into the power strips.

Instructions:

1. Assemble shelf per directions that come with shelf.
2.Test all of your panels. You may need to send them back and it’s easier to do when they are not attached.
3.Attach LED panels to undersides of each shelf. (I used cotton cord and staples because it will be easy to remove panels if they go bad.)
4.Use zip ties to attach power strips to the back braces of the shelf.
5.Set timers for the amount of “daylight” you want. People differ on this. I have mine set for 14 hours. We will see how this goes.
6.Plug all panels into the two strips.
7.Test switches.
8.Make panels of bubble wrap to cover 3 sides of the shelf. (I used 2 layers.)
9.Staple the bubble wrap panels from the top shelf.
10.Use duct tape to close gaps in panels – Do not seal the whole thing up – plants like air. Stay away from PVC plastic.
11.Make plastic sheets into panels that will cover three sides of the shelf
12.Staple them also from the top of the shelf.
13.Use duct tape to close gaps in plastic sheet panels.
14.Create 4th panel – door. Cut plastic the length of shelf. Use a layer or two of bubble wrap. Duct tape edges if you like.
15.Staple door to top of shelf. Use clips to keep door folded open when working with plants.
16.Cover top with blanket for insulation in colder areas.
17.Use string to attach thermometer to easily visible spot in greenhouse.
18.Fill with trays of seedlings.
19.Water and wait.

Check the site for more reports on how our seedling starts are doing.
Happy digging!

LizM

hyperlocavore@gmail.com
twitter.com/hyperlocavore

The Great Let’s Get Growing Seed Share

If you are like me you try a lot of new things. You’ve been through all the seed catalogs and your seeds are making their way to you right now. You’ve probably over done it again in your enthusiasm. You have saved seed from seasons past. You have seeds from failed experiments! You have enough extra to get one newbie gardener going!

This is how it works. All of you veteran gardeners out there, I’m talking to you! I just mailed four six newbie gardeners enough extra seeds for all of them to have lush edible gardens this season!

Pick a newbie gardener on hyperlocavore.com and send them a mix of various seeds, flowers, herbs, fruits and vegetables to help them get growing this season! It took me about an hour to do this for four different people.

What’s in it for you? Well, the pleasure of giving of course! I just mailed four six gardens and I cannot wait to see how my fledgling gardeners grow.

To the newbie gardeners, I can’t guarantee you will wind up with a seed packet in the mail. I can’t guarantee that you will be sent your favorite fruits, vegetables or herbs. If you receive something you do not intend to plant I only ask that you find someone in the seed swap forum who would like to plant them, and then send them on. This is an experiment! Hopefully a fun and fruitful one!

Whether you are a newbie gardener or an experienced grower sign up for The Great Let’s Get Growing Seed Share! It’s free. All I ask is that you share your gardens and your experiences on hyperlocavore.com and pay it forward.

Be sure to check out Fight Back Fridays!

Super Local and Mighty Tasty – bookofcooks.com

I just came across a wonderful resource called bookofcooks.com that hooks you up with people who love to cook in your neighborhood.

Confused about Climate Change?

There are still a few people out there trying to figure out if they should change their lives based on concerns about climate change.

If you are one of these folks, I’d like to encourage you to watch this video. I promise the guy will not try to scare the pants of you! He just gives you a very handy way to sort through the decision about whether or not to take the claims of those that argue that climate change is a serious problem, well seriously.

If you found this helpful please share this one with your friends, family and neighbors.

Should People Be Able to Grow Their Own Food in Their Yards?

Please click on the pie chart to VOTE!!!

Winter at the Funny Farm

Ten Signs You May Be A Farm Nerd

HONEY FARMER © Mrphoto | Dreamstime.com

All Your Beets R Belong To Us!

1. You dream of learning Ruby on Rails and building a chicken coop. You can’t decide which to get started with first.

2. You have been outside working on biochar, but want to check your rendering – You get soot all over your keyboard.

3. You are hacking the timers on your soaker hose system.

4. You are making a quilt based on images of neurons. (Don’t that’s my project!)

5. You wonder if nano-particle solar paint will be available in barn red.

6. All your garden plant markers have latin names.

7. You visit instructables.com every day.

8. You note that being a farmer is a little like being a programmer. You can wear the same type of thing everyday and no one will comment. This pleases you.

9. You are really really scared of bees, but you are considering making a honey bee hive. You think beekeeper outfits are full of awesome.

10. Like most farmers you have a pest problem in the garden.  Unlike most farmers your first thought on solving the problem is the possible introduction of farm lizards.

If you answered yes:
0-2 times You are a farm nerd like Carrot Top is a comic.
3-5 times You may indeed be a bit of a farm nerd.
6-8 times You are definitely, or more accurately speaking “approximately” (of course) a farm nerd, with a margin of error of +/- .04.
9-10 times You rock the farm like Kirk rocks the Universe!

Can you relate? Mail me! Or join us at hyperlocavore.com.

Yardsharing Workbook – Requesting Your Ideas!

GARDEN GNOME ©Cammeraydave

I’m in the process of writing a workbook for yard sharing groups and I could use your input!

The success of any garden share depends entirely on the expectations set by the entire group at the outset of the relationship between the members of the group. Respect of each other’s needs and hopes for the project should be a given.

It’s important to keep the workbook a flexible tool. I am assuming groups will have different needs regarding the formality of their agreements. My question to you is what sort of things would you need to work through in an agreement with your yardsharing members before you felt comfortable forming a working group?

• What needs to be in your agreement?
• What would be a deal breaker?
• What questions would you have for the garden or property owner?
• What questions would you have for the gardeners in the group?
• What questions would you want to work through regarding finances for your group?
• What is important to formalize?
• What is important to keep loose?

These agreements will depend only on what each group sorts through. How can we help make these groups enjoyable and workable for all the people involved?

Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts!

Hyperlocavore has a New Logo!

Thanks to everyone that participated in helping us sort through the options for the logo for our social network, hyperlocavore.com. It was a tough choice! In the end I went with the one that could reduce best to the most distinctive avatar. Some folks were not crazy about the one we chose, but other folks were. This was an experiment in crowdsourcing. In the end no clear winner emerged, however it did help me sort out my own gut reactions and how they related to other people’s thoughts. All in all it was a very helpful process, and for that I am grateful to everyone who participated.

Thanks especially to The Net Men who went through all the design iterations with patience and professionalism.

Happy Digging!

LizM

Hello to my Twitterfriends! How Very Green You Look Today!

Get your twitter mosaic here.

Next round – help hyperlocavore.com pick a logo!

Logo 16

Logo 18

Logo 22

Logo 6

Which conveys the yardsharing idea best?
Which logo is warmest?
Which do you logo?

Please note the text at the bottom will read:
A Yardsharing Community
Because everyone loves a homegrown tomato!

Thank you for helping us sort this out!

Yardsharing Return on Investment – How Does 61K Sound?

Growing food together may not be for everyone, but for the frugal healthy eaters amongst us it makes a lot of sense and cents. When you grow fruit and veg together you can share tools, space and work. So let’s assume you and two friends decide to start a yardsharing garden to save some money on fresh organics, have a healthy outdoor activity to share, and to teach your kids that food does not come from Walmart.

GREEN APPLES
© Digidogs | Dreamstime.com

Also keep in mind that when we talk about return on investment for planting your own gardens we are taking into account all of the benefits of growing our own food, which are not strictly about personal economies. There are so many reasons to grow your own, saving great heaping gobs of cash is just one.

Let’s say your families agree that almonds, Granny Smith apples, and blueberries are a good place to start, and so off we go. These are back of the napkin calculations. I am not factoring in anything too complicated like seasonality, storage, inflation, peak oil or buying local. You may pick different crops. I simply picked three things I spend a lot of money on. Almonds and blueberries shock me every time I buy them. Both are considered ’superfoods,’ densely packed nutrition in perfect snacky form.

Let’s assume that each of our families enjoys approximately:

• 2 lbs organic Granny Smith apples @ $4.50 per week.
• 1 lb organic anti-oxidant rich blueberries @ $12.00 per week.
• .5 lb organic almonds @ 7.00 per week

That’s about $24.00 per week per family, or about $1250.00 per family per year for three pretty basic healthy staples. It’s $3750.00 per year for all three families to eat yummy organic green apples, blueberries and almonds. Now let’s assume that to produce this amount for three families you will need:

• 4 almond trees (producing about 64 lbs per year)
• 2 apple trees (producing about 600 lbs per year)
• 15 mature blueberry bushes (producing about 150 pounds per year)

Your group wants the benefit sooner rather than later so you agree to purchase mature trees and shrubs.

• 4 producing almond trees – 8′ @ $80.00 = $320.00
• 2 producing apple trees 8′ @ $90.00 = $180.00
• 15 producing blueberry bushes 4′ @ $40.00 = $600.00

Your one time investment is about $1700.00 (plus tax and shipping) for all three families, including one time purchase of tools and starting garden costs using a rough figure of $600.00, assuming you have no tools between you and your soil needs a lot of help. Add some sweat equity and a year to let the trees and shrubs settle in.

This works out to about $600.00 per family for 20 years worth of apples, almonds and blueberries! Growing their own saves all three families a total of $74,000.00 over 20 years. – Assuming your families share, or 24K, is conservatively invested expecting a 2.8 % return over those 20 years and adjusted for inflation – that’s $61,072.13 clams via the magic of compound interest!

Now the almond trees, treated well, will produce almonds for 40+ years. The apples for 30, and you may need to replace the blueberries. We’re just playing with pens and napkins after all.

So, how do you like them apples, almonds, and blueberries?

Note: Numbers were revised on Feb. 5th after being published on Feb 4th 2009.

Which logo do you like better?

100 Reasons to Become a Hyperlocavore.

First a definition, a hyperlocavore tries to eat as much food as close to home as possible, in order to reduce the food miles that his food travels. It is an extension of the term locavore. A locavore typically tries to eat seasonally within 100 miles of her home, to reduce food miles and to develop the local economic base. A hyperlocavore therefore wants to bring food even closer. And what’s closer than your neighborhood? We have a time crunch, we have land and property that is loosing value fast, we have kids who don’t know where their food comes from, and we have a climate crisis.

Hyperlocavore.com, a social network, is here to help facilitate yardsharing. Yardsharing and group growing is new. It’s different from a community garden – but the site (hyperlocavore.com) can be used to create and manage one. A yardshare might be an arrangement between an elderly couple and a young one to grow more food cheaply for both. Or friends who live in an apartment and a friend in the burbs to save money and food miles.

This is a list of the reasons I think group gardens and yardsharing is an idea whose time has come. The links hide some people, websites and imagery that have inspired me to build hyperlocavore.com. Have fun exploring. Every reason is not meant to appeal to everyone. See if just one make sense to you! Then join us to explore the possibilities. The site is free, and you do not need to commit to anything to participate. It’s new to most of us. It’s up to you what makes sense for you and yours. We just hope to inspire and facilitate. If you agree with more than two of these, you just may be a hyperlocavore!

(A note: I’m a North American, citizen of the U.S., so this certainly reflects some of my perspectives and biases. Please contact me if I’ve got something really wrong, I’m happy to discuss any concerns!)

Happy Growing!

1. You want to taste those real tomatoes you’ve heard so much about.
   
2. You want to decrease your reliance on fossil fuels.
3. You want to teach your kids where food comes from.
4. You want the smell of soil in your nose.
5. You want to pick your salad from your porch.
6. You want your neighborhood to have positive street life.
7. You want to be less isolated.
8. You want to build food security into your life.
9. You want to get more sun!
10. You want to develop some upper arm strength.
11. You want a hotter bootie!
12. You want to help that nice old man down the block. He works too hard!
13. You want your neighborhoods to have cheap access to healing herbs!
14. You want to be a farmer but you have no farm.
15. You want your high cholesterol to go down!
16. You miss the family farm.
17. You especially miss the rooster on the family farm.
18. You want to lead and not to follow!
19. You want to be more independent.
20. You want to show em how it’s done!
21. You want to walk out the door and eat mangoes!
22. You want your children to be sustainably self sufficient.
23. You want your children to eat their veggies.
24. You want to involve your family in a group activity.
25. You can’t live without fresh organic veg, and it seems to be getting too expensive!
26. You want to do something with your friends besides drink beer.
27. You’ve never been able to find that Hatch chili from where you grew up.
28. You want to shorten the distance from farm to plate.
29. You have a brown thumb and want to know what that’s all about.
30. You have a yard that is full of weeds.
31. You want to reduce the chemical load on your body.
32. You think the lawn is a sign of all that is wrong with America.
33. You hate mowing.
34. You know that cute chic down the block is a big freakin’ hippy but you wanna get to know her betta anyway.
35. You know that dude down the block is a big freakin’ hippy but you wanna get to know him betta anyway.
36. You took Obama’s call to service to heart.
37. No one sees your gardening triumphs.
38. You want to lessen your ecological footprint.
39. You look around and you see your neighborhood dying, and you want to do something.
40. You have been blessed and you want to express gratitude.
41. You remember what the neighborhood was like when people talked.
    
42. You need to pay it forward.
    
43. You need something to do besides what you been doing.
    
44. You want your food to taste as good as Gordon Ramsey’s.
45. You don’t have a farmers’ market near you.
    
46. You can’t get into the local CSA – It filled up fast!
47. You work too many hours and need some help in your garden.
48. You have physical limitations, and a garden and could use some help.
49. You are a former hedge fund manager with a lot of time on your hands now.
    
50. Your kids need to get moving.
51. You really need a new set of friends.
    
52. You know it’s the end of the world as we know it, and you want to feel fine.
    
53. You want to quit talking the talk and start walking the walk.
54. You want to simplify your life.
55. You find no joy in fragging any more.
    
56. You are an exceedingly cheap bastard, and want to save even more cash.
    
57. You are sick of living on Top Ramen.
    
58. Yes we can!
59. Si, se puede!
    
60. Chop wood, carry water.
    
61. You’ve been saving seeds, but have no place to plant them.
    
62. You want to surprise your hard working single mom with regular homegrown fruit and vegetables.
    
63. You are unutterably bored, filled with ennui, and about to jump.
    
64. Om, nom, nom, nom.
    
65. You want to live more like the rest of the world.
    
66. You want the suburban wasteland to become juicier.
    
67. You can’t afford the gas to get to the market, and your veggie ride isn’t road ready yet.
    
68. The bodega in your neighborhood doesn’t carry anything but candy, cigarettes, and booze.
    
69. Guerilla gardening just isn’t giving you the thrill it used to…sigh.
70. The force is strong with you, little one.
    
71. You are actually serious about this “reliance on foreign oil” thing you keep going on about.
    
72. Better jam.
    
73. Better pie.
    
74. Better chutney.
75. Fresh eggs! Like still chicken butt warm fresh.
    
76. You really need to step away from the computer.
    
77. You actually do have a vitamin D deficiency from lack of sunshine.
    
78. You’re afraid of the veg your freegan roommate brings home.
79. You’ve never actually tasted a fresh vegetable, ditto fruit.
    
80. You decided you didn’t like vegetables when you were 6, you stuck to your guns but you’re a big girl/boy now.
    
81. You are down with the peak oil hypothesis, and want to stop freaking the f$ck out.
    
82. You want to find like minded people and be useful.
    
83. You’ve got a hankerin’ fer something really dirty.
    
84. Your grandmother, who has been dead for 8 years keeps coming back to you in dreams – She reminds you there is an elephant in the root cellar. You want to sleep more soundly.
    
85. You really, really like potlucks.
    
86. You want to grow enough extra to donate to the homeless shelter.
    
87. You take the very long view.
    
88. Your houseplants are telling you to get out and make new friends.
    
89. You’ll be damned if your gonna spend five dollars for a sack of potatoes !
    
90. You think that you are surrounded by ugliness, and you’re right.
91. You will simply die if you don’t have a St. Germaine cocktail and the godforsaken town you live in has no reputable supplier of elderflower liqueur. You are therefore, desperate enough to make your own.
    
92. You walk softly but carry a giant gourd.
93. You have a lot of stuff, but you feel empty.
94. Your country has been embargoed by the rest of the world and you are hungry.
95. You want to live the good life, not that one! This one!
96. You want to make it easier to cook at home.
97. You really want to slow down but don’t know how.
98. You want to see this, not this when you go outside.
99. The spirit of true community has filled your heart and you want to fill your days differently.
    
100. One word – zucchini.

Join us at hyperlocavore and find or start a yardsharing group in your neighborhood. You don’t have to have a yard to share or a green thumb – This is a learning community.

* OK I admit there are a few repeats. I said the same thing a few different ways… Use the comment to add your own!

Geek Candy – Ask500people.com

When you are just starting out, and your idea seems a bit odd to people you know it is critical to get honest feedback from people you do not know. Our friends and family love us and so it’s often hard for them to tell us exactly what’s on their minds. Sometimes they are very encouraging even if our idea is disastrously dumb. Sometimes they tear our idea down just because it’s wild and woolly and they kinda don’t get it and secretly they don’t want us to leave town. And exactly what they think doesn’t really matter. Well it matters in the sense that we love them and their feelings are important to us. But what really matters is what the big world thinks.

When you need to ask the big world, take a look at Wondermill Webworks with their mighty little Google Maps mashup ask500people, a site that let’s you do instant market research for your mad scheme.

To use ask500people you simply ask a question. Format the possible responses (multiple choice, essay, yes/no.) Then let your question loose into the wide world. And the wide world starts answering. As people answer, you can see their markers pop up on the map instantly; Fargo says NO!, Calcutta says YES!, Winnipeg says YES! Albany another YES! Poughkipsee says Meh., and Vladivostok thinks you are a gigantic cretin!

As the answers roll in your heart rises and sinks.

They like me! They REALLY LIKE ME!!!

Except Vladivostok.

Ask500People - Instant market research

I’m running about 80/20 positive at the time of this blog. A banner day! I know I’m onto something. I know I can make this a go! I know I can keep tweeking to my hearts content and get the jam and the cake – the instant feedback! It’s kind of like how I imagine it feels to be a budding comic, and to be killing for your first time. Addictive.

I can quit anytime I want.

Here are my questions:

Would you consider sharing your yard to grow fruit and vegetables with friends and neighbors to save money and the planet?

Would you find this site useful? with a link to hyperlocavore.

They also have tools that allow you to target your questions to the entrepreneurial community in a focused manner. Test a logo, or a tagline, a business idea through targeting a community willing to give you honest realtime answers. I’m heading over to see what else the good people at Wondermill are doing these days. As far as I can tell their products are full of awesome.

Starting a big thing with small steps.

hyperlocavore has been banging around in my noggin for about two years now. When I talked with folks about it I generally got lots of encouragement – but often a quizzical look. It’s out in the world making it’s own friends now and the response is amazing! What a feeling! People say when one door closes another opens. What they don’t say is you can’t just stand there looking at that new door like a lumpkin. You have to turn the damn knob and walk out into the world!

Keep growing,

LizM