The fun continues...

Our community continues to ripple out from the Deadend Homestead, Permaculture Park and our new friends at The Shire! We were all so excited this past weekend to have so many friends and family to our Sunday Potluck. Through the selfless efforts of so many loving cultivators we continue to accomplish more than we could ever really expect.

Sharing the love at Pecan Street Festival with EcoSteve
and The Shire.

Each week brings about new wonders for us here at Community Cultivators. Recently, we spent a weekend with EcoSteve and our Shire friends at Central Texas' oldest and largest free art festival, Pecan Street Festival held right here on 6th Street. With thousands of people we shared the beauty of abundance and community through earth plaster and solar cooking demonstrations as well as our miniature off-grid aquaponics system.

The festival was a great success and we managed to even divvy up our resources and continue our contribution to the new Deadend Homestead. If you haven't heard the news, The folks of the Deadend have taken over the house at the end of Pennsylvania Avenue and, with the help and encouragement of so many loving friends and cultivators, completed months worth renovations in mere weeks.

Cardboard, soaked in water and enriched with nutrient tea
is used as a weed barrier and fungal habitat. I deep layer
of wood mulch over the top of that and you've got
the beginnings of a beautiful garden... or orchard!

This past Sunday, we had a great time transforming a formerly dilapidated space, full of broken glass, rusty nails and other hazardous unknowns, into a massively sheet-mulched garden space.  Through the continued generosity of organizations like Wheatsville Co-op, and Davy's Tree Services, we've upcycled bale after bale of cardboard and several yards of wood mulch into rich healthy soils ready to bring vibrant new life to this once "dead-end".

The exchange of skills and knowledge are not limited to mulching and household renovation projects. We have a lot of fun learning new things and sharing our talents within the community. Nettie Tiso with Racecar Apparel put together a screen-printing demonstration and workshop. Her new spring collection features farmers market fresh produce and an exclusive run on Community Cultivators shirts and tanks. We're very fortunate to have so many talented folks in this community!

Nettie of Racecar Apparel preparing the screen for our
beautiful new Community Cultivators tees and tanks.
Special Thanks to Denton Weaver for the design work!

If you've yet to make it out to one of these incredible events don't worry, you're not alone. And you can also take comfort in the knowledge that we will continue to cultivate our collective communities, one potluck at a time.

Attending a potluck is easy. Simply click the 'like' button on the right hand side of this blog and we'll keep you informed of all our events through facebook. Not on facebook? No problem! Come out and visit us any time at the dead-end of Pennsylvania Avenue near 12th and airport or contact us via email.

From a manageability standpoint, we've decided to cut back on the frequency of our now famous potlucks. We are now only hosting potlucks every other Sunday afternoon. You are of course encouraged to stop by any time and we always welcome new visitors. Having the potlucks less frequently will allow us to be more intentional with our efforts and insure that we are providing the best possible experience to everyone involved.

Finally, I'd like to invite you all out to a wondrous adventure at the Hundred Acre Wood for the second annual Grackle Fest the weekend of June 3rd - 5th. Community Cultivators will be continuing in the spirit of Sunday fun with 2 hours of workshops on Permaculture, Aquaponics and Community Cultivation starting at noon on Sunday, June 5th. Something for everyone!

Backyard food security

Here at Community Cultivators we like to highlight those folks who are really taking the ideas of sustainability to new heights. The backyard of Denton Weaver's home in Northeast Austin is a prime example. Through the use of recycled materials, a strong imagination and a vision for highly productive food systems, Denton has created something we can't help but recognize as a revolution in local food security.

More than just a backyard garden, Denton looks for ways to put our waste to work... producing food for himself and the community. In what would otherwise be an average backyard, Denton has begun to explore new and creative ways to produce a large amount of food in a very small space. He does this through an innovative system known as "Aquaponics".

Aquaponics takes the familiar systems of Aquaculture (farming of fish) and Hydroponics (plants grown in liquid medium) and bridges them together to create a closed-loop system that produces almost no waste and is capable of unbelievable productivity. Perhaps the most astounding and promising aspect of this bio-integrated method of food production is the incredible lack of water being used compared to conventional gardening systems.

In a conventional garden, you might have to water daily to keep your plants happy and productive. Much of this water seeps through the soil or evaporates before your plants can put it to use. Often times this escaping water takes many of the vital nutrients, those essential building blocks of healthy plant growth, with it as it leaches away. The "closed-loop" water circulation within an aquaponics system resolves this loss of vital nutrients and water through a symbiotic relationship between plants and fish.

In aquaponics, water is continually filtered through gravel beds where rhizobacteria and plant roots strip out the fish wastes, such as ammonia, nitrates, nitrites and phosphorus, that would otherwise build up and become toxic to fish. In turn, these fish wastes serve as liquid fertilizer for plants. Very little water is lost to evaporation and, unlike most traditional gardens, the water is continually recirculated requiring only 10% of what might be used to irrigate the same amount of produce in a typical garden.

Denton prepares his floating-raft grow-bed system in the
repurposed hull of small sailboat.

Looking something like a Rube Goldberg machine for gardeners, Denton's backyard system is built largely out of recycled materials.

"I found the old miniature sailboat hull on the side of the road with a 'free' sign on it!" Denton happily exclaims. "It just worked out that I was looking to experiment with a floating-raft design. It's my sunken boat garden!"

"The fish tank is a large sand filtration system for natural swimming pools I recovered from the dump. I'd say about 90% of the materials were on their way to the landfill."

There are many challenges to designs such as this and Denton has spent a considerable amount of time experimenting and retooling his designs.

"It's all a work in progress," he concedes. "We've just started to establish the grow-beds and we're still looking to find more fish."

Currently, Denton has only a single fish swimming around in his fish tank with a plan to add several more as the system stabilizes.

"Even with a minimal amount of fish solids, we've still managed to propagate several tree cuttings and the root systems of our water-loving lettuces are really healthy."

"Eventually I'd like to have several varieties of fish and other aquatic life. It's all about diversity and trying new things," he says with a smile.

There are a lot of reasons to appreciate that motto and it's one that Denton lives by.

"Soon I'd like to have enough food to start selling at the farmers market but, more than that, I'd like to show others how they can grow a ton of food in their backyards without a lot of waste."

Three Projects - Three Videos

This is an update I've been meaning to get on this blog for too long. The follow is a set of video projects we've put together from some of our various projects in cultivating our community. Many of the people who are reading this may already have seen these videos on our facebook group.

This first video was our first Community Cultivation project. As most good things, this project started spontaneously with a handful of friends, an idea and a lot of generosity and positive energy. The idea was thrown on the table only about a week beforehand and most of the planning didn't happen until that afternoon when we all converged on a small backyard on Alexander St. The garden was a gift to the residents of the house in exchange for their grace and hospitality over the preceding month.

With lofty ideals and a few basic tools we set to designing a small 4 foot by 15 foot mini-swale double-reach garden bed. The double-reach, mini-swale design is a simple and practical setup that combines the great passive water collection of a mini-swale with the functionality of a double-reach bed. The four foot width of the bed allows for access to the center areas of the garden bed from either side, thus "double-reach". Making short runs of these double-reach beds is idea for establishing miniature swales. To do this, we simply had to arrange the bed so that it was level from end to end and that it was facing an up hill slope. At this particular site we had the blessing of a neighboring roof that drained onto a sloped yard with a decent grade right into our new 15 foot long passive catchment system.

We dug our level trench using a classic leveling tool known as a bunyip. It's basically two yardsticks with a length of clear flexible hose running between them. You fill the hose with water and food coloring and leave a little air on both ends where the yardsticks are. The food coloring is so that you can clearly see the waterline on either side of the hose. You test the level by looking at the water level on each yardstick. Once the waterline rests at the same place on both yardsticks you know both spots are level with each other. It takes some time to master but it's a very effective and inexpensive way to find a level between two points.

After establishing the level and digging out our trench we mounded the soil atop the four foot width of the soon to be double-reach garden bed directly down slope of the trench. We then covered the whole thing in cardboard which acts as a biodegradable weed barrier. On top of that we added compost and mulch. The strange pictures you see of fleshy looking things on the end of rakes are kombucha scobys that we got from a local kombucha brewer. We've found the active microbes in these are a great kick start to compost. 

With cardboard and compost down, all we had left to do was cover the whole thing in straw mulch and plant it up! 

Given all the excitement, we also took the opportunity to trim some nearby overgrown shrubs, install a compost pile and plant a large elderberry. Follow it all up with a nice potluck of local, homegrown foods and it's no surprise things kept growing from here!

Second, we have a video of the Sunflower Co-op Permablitz event. Check our blog archive for a write-up on this event and more pictures. 

And finally, our very fun aquaponics video that shows the power of community coming together to explore a do-it-yourself means of food production that goes beyond the kitchen garden.

As our exploration of permaculture, aquaponics and Community Cultivation continues there are sure to be more videos to come. Spring is on the horizon and we've many more projects are in the works so stay tuned for new posts, new videos and new events you can help us cultivate!