oh my...

family dinner. alive and kickin.

the great bean and onion pusch of ought ten...

getting ready for fall planting. last of the pole n' bush beans. the old growth onions with their snail tree sitters lodged up into the crown...

la pinche cosecha

too many strawberries to eat. homegirl whipped up some strawberries with crushed moroccan mint outta the banana plot and bam! stoner gourmet at its finest... i think. if i can remember correctly.

Closed for Business...

Heaps of changes around this joint. The gardens are pumping out melons and cukes and chards and beets and chilis and herbs and tomatos and artichokes and squashes and strawberries and everything else. Tons of house guests, a rad art show and now it's time for surf trips, back to school and some much needed downtime.

We will not be hosting any WWOOFers again until Spring 2011. Contact us in February if you're interested in WWOOFing in March or April.

Safe travels!

oh fuck. it's loser prom!

'cuz jello shots are eco as fuck and 'cuz none of us went to proper prom... and 'cuz wwoofers know how to make unresolved adolescent issues fun again!

Go Buckeyes!

The Ohio Playas!

that's what she said.

rad wwoofers from london and ohio are here. the garden tossed out tons of new garlic and vastly oversized root vegetables. and yes, that's what she said yesterday.

bring that beet back...

don't let the bastards beet ya down. la avenida beetdown. beetstreet. it's hard to beet five pound beets and mint juleps at 3pm.

the tejas crew came through and unleashed a positive flood of love on our gardens. heaps of cocktails made out of garden mint and bottom shelf bourbon. beetfries and amazing food. these gals knew their gardens, knew their cooking and knew their fun...  hell yes.

WWOOF updates

Hi. We are all full for WWOOFers this summer. If you want to swing by for a day or two, we can possibly host you up until July 15, but we are undergoing some infrastructure changes and are not hosting anyone between July 16 and September 15.

A few more thoughts about WWOOFing-

- Don't be surprised if WWOOF farms don't want to talk on the phone to you at first. Email is easier for most of the farms we are linked with and it gives us an opportunity to screen out the creeps and the wingnuts without having to engage them personally. Yeah, the WWOOF network recommends calling but a whole lot of us will hold back on the phone calls 'til you meet the sniff test. And when you get fifteen to thirty requests a week (it's summer farm season!), there is simply not enough time to be sitting around on the phone answering the same questions over and over again when there's planting and harvesting and composting and south swells.


If you want to WWOOF, read the farm's profile (like really read it, most of your questions will be answered) and decide if you're interested. Then send a nice email with a little about you. If the farm is interested in you (or any WWOOFers, lots are full right now and busy as hell), they will write back. Following up with further bitchy emails or even worse, bitchier phone calls is not a good way to proceed... no matter how desperate you are to do something on your summer break. We will always write you back as a matter of courtesy and expect that you reciprocate that courtesy by not getting pissy if we don't have room for you or don't want to respond to the 35 questions you ask that are all answered on our profile.

Legion of Roots and Amazing WWOOFers

Second bed of carrots just came up. Reds. Whites. Oranges. Yellows. Pinks. Delicious.

Three great new WWOOFers around digging beds and pulling the ubiquitous chickweed and quackgrass that loves our beds. N and D from the South Bay joined us for the weekend with delicious baked good and the kind of good natured positivity that is so needed in the world. T has been here from San Diego/Trestles a few days and has put her permaculture wisdom to work slaying our powdery mildew problems and finishing the irrigation systems. We are so fortunate for the amazing people the WWOOF network has sent us...

because when i hear the word permaculture, i shouldn't have to reach for my wallet

I spend a lot of time in "bad" parts of the region. Compton. Watts. Inglewood. San Fernando. East LA. Montebello. And everywhere I go there are little gardens tended by recently arrived mexican immigrants and withered old black women. There is a place in compton where there is a volunteer papaya tree 14' high with six whorls of orange papayas on it growing out of the crack of a housing project and places in south central where black men with southern drawls maintain horse corrals and grow corn a block off the 110 in between trucking company warehouses. there are little alley plots all over oxnard and ventura where people have chickens and grow epazote for dinner.

this is the past, present and future of sustainability: health, food and work without pretensions. it's too bad that most of permaculture scene in the region seems to be composed of twats selling $2,000 permaculture design courses to the type of over privileged yuppies who collect sustainable lifestyle choices like old generals collect medals.

Cherimoya Germination Salvation

After months of mixed results with starting plants from seed, we just
gave up and have followed the less than scientific process of just
throwing a bunch of seeds in a pot, pitching in some dirt and water
and letting the hands of fate do all the labor. And boom. Cherimoyas.
A dozen of them rocketing to the sky.

good wwoofer magic!

some daily affirmations to make the wwoofing process better for all of us...

• good wwoofers are friendly and nice

• good wwoofers read the farm listings carefully and only respond to farms they actually are interested in working on

• good wwoofers don't send out generic form emails to farms. most farms are super busy and take care to answer each prospective wwoofer and it's a bit disheartening to get emails from people who either haven't read your posting or asking questions obviously answered in your listing.

• good wwoofers realize that there is more to wwoofing than sweating with plants and dirt. most farms are rooted in family or community and good wwoofers do their best to contribute to every aspect of the farm: like being friendly and inviting to new wwoofers, neighbors and residents alike.

• good wwoofers help keep the living areas, working and cooking areas clean and functional. all wwoof hosts resent cleaning up after their visitors

• good wwoofers aren't sleezy men who harass their female counterparts.

• good wwoofers don't let god or jah come between them and respectful relationships with the greater wwoofing community.

• good wwoofers realize that the continued success of wwoofing is reliant upon wwoofers not stealing or sleezing or slacking so that farms no longer want to mess with them...

• good wwoofers are the best thing ever! (and we've had nothing but the best!!!)

xoxo

don't let wwoofing turn into thunderdome (though we do love tina turner a whole lot)

WWOOFing Opportunities...

We have some slots open for wwoofing for 10-14 days each between 6/1- 6/18 and then again from 6/20- 7/13. There should be a good crew of folks from all over the world bouncing through at that time so it might be a great time to make some new friends and have some fun. The weather is getting warmer and the gardens are starting to fire!

Projects that will be happening during that time:

- shed building or retrofitting
- rooftop planters being made for melons and passionfruit
- using old salvaged brick to build a new staircase
- removing a wall of invasive ivy and planting a new bed for bananas, cherimoya, passionfruit and chayote
- weeding, thinning and transplanting
- designing a bicycle storage area
- eating a lot of great food.

If you can't make the early summer slots, drop us a line as we may be hosting more wwoofers as space and projects dictate in the Fall...

a veritable uprising!

globe artichokes take to the world with revolutionary vigor to destroy capitalism one clenched fist at a time...

the high fashion world of glamour mulching...

with the dry climate and incessant NW winds here on the coast in alta california, it's a battle keeping the plants moist. following the lead of our lovely neighborhood Ventura Urban Homestead, we're 1/3 of the way through installing a greywater assisted drip irrigation system under a dense lasagna sheet mulch of compost, broccoli/cauliflower leaves, newspaper, cardboard and straw from the friendly folks at the ventura hay company. after hunching over for five hours, i didn't notice this glamour shot until it was too late... high fashion by the brussels sprouts...

No Platinum Card Can Compete

Three different colors of heirloom pole beans, a steaming basket and a
bit of olive oil. A dusting of freshly planed parmesean-reggiano and
voilà. A meal no yuppie could ever conjure with all the forces of
capitalism combined...

loquat love...

imagine a mango crossed with an apricot. and having whole boughs of them weeping over the cilantro and jimmy nardello and running strawberry plots... a more delicious heaven couldn't have been dreamed up by anyone...

a sad story.

back when i was a wee sprout, i had a tough ass cat named bosco. he was spunky and tough and a total battle cat with chunks missing out of his ears and scars across his face. i thought that unfixed farm cat swagger was the tuffest thing out there (aside from my neighbor dannyboy who could spit tobacco juice out his nose).

then one day bosco up and gave birth to kittens and my entire sense of masculinity came crashing down.

so it was when our "collards" up and decided to give birth to big old gabacho cauliflower heads....

(this whole permaculture interplanting thing sure wrecks havoc with your ability to remember what went where... mama's maps and everything...)

These Things Take Time...

Sure. We're on a Smiths kick. There's been a lot of Morrissey energy floating around. There was a sweet couple's serenade last night of How Soon Is Now? An almost-family-fieldtrip to see Los Esmiths play in East LA (the Chicano Smiths coverband). And we'd be lying if we hadn't been blasting "A Rush and a Push" at least three times a day. But it could be worse. Our homie next door has Tupac's "War Stories" on repeat at sunfall every single night. And La Señora across the street has been rocking Julio Iglesias like the motherfucker is on his last legs (he'll live forever... if there was ever an Immortal...)

In the span of four days, the pole beans went from 2" weak looking lil' nuggets on the edge of death (unlike Julio) to 13" harbingers of sorrow loaded down with 6" waxy, super sweet beans...

Sweet and Tender Fucking Hooligans

Up at 4am every morning to surf Ghost Point which only breaks when there's some lingering energy pulsing up from Satanic Acts in the Southern Hemisphere. This morning while the water heated up, I went out to give our beds an extra bath after the hellacious windstorms we've been having. In the gleaming moonlight I saw that some of the old heirloom Sunday Bloody Sunday beets were starting to bolt.

It was a black metal morning for sure so why not get all Nordic and have beets for breakfast? While the yierba steeped itself to 70º Celsius perfection, we chopped those nuggets up while burning churches and true love flitted through the old cabeza. Then,
out of nowhere, just as I was about to huck the second to last beet hunk into the steamer, the sagrada corazón appeared. Maybe churches were burning somewhere and maybe old neglected gods were returning to Earth, but in no uncertain terms, true love was hovering in the moonlit air...

Is it really so strange?

To wake up one morning with The Smiths rolling through your head and luke warm french press swill coursing through your guts to find that all of a sudden your barren urban ecosystem is completely overrun with mutant artichokes?

Early morning...

the crew

If you're wondering who we are... (see other posts for smokey joe and little one.)

papa m

big t

little t

gomez


birdie

God bless america!

madonna and machetes... a perfect sabbath for heretics.

perfectly good sabbath for subcommandante terrordrome to chop the fuck out of some invasive ivy. with madonna blasting in from across the way. ¡real material girls know how to swing!

community organizizing

The beds in the front are coming together which means Smokey Joe doesn't get to play ball out there any more. Once Papa and I (and the new WWOOFers) did the double dig and added some compost, they started looking more like burial plots than vegetable beds. So T and T are going to use some of the extra flagstone to make head stones for each bed. (Can you tell some of us are obsessed with Dexter?) Like Little T said, "the more food we plant, the creepier we can be."

Since Superbowl Sunday, we've gotten all the stone up and planted about 75% -- carrots, squash, red peppers, spinach, kale, melons, lettuce, broccoli, onions, cucumbers, beets, and cilantro are all in. A bunch of other seeds are germinating in the window, too. Oh, and the fruit trees and strawberries are on the side.

test test test 12121212

Is this thing on?

from the grave...

kinda sad diggin' up 80 years of other people's memories. the old toys. the bottle caps. the broken fanbelts.... but brussels sprouts and persimmons may just make up for it.

the process banana

the bricks came up with a beer or two. the worms looked a little chuffed that we'd undone their asylum and opened the dank riverbed soil to the light of day. but fuck it. we had a banana pup to transplant. and besides, we were processing. life. love. loneliness. gayness. straightness. connection and those that miss. lots of experience but still navigating through life heartfuckingfirst. 'cuz what else is there when it really comes down to it?

sunday morning coming all the way down...

 

"...and the beer i had for breakfast wasn't bad, so i had one more for dessert..."

big mexican cenón the night before. bottles were sacrificed in the name of good friends and love. wake up late to find T and black metal C rolling in with a fresh case of Tecate... K and F resurrected the leftovers into an amazing feast... which led to gettin' sassy in the front garden... what was once a shitey patio is now a garden to be...

la avenida is all the way live...

been a wild couple of weeks. with all the rain and cold weather (40º nights! brrrr) the kale has been going off. brohim set us up with some dwarf fruit rootstock and guava bushes which have gone in to provide much needed greenery to our otherwise bakersfield looking scene... the hardest part about all this is having the patience to realize that turning a neglected, compacted compound where the prior owners did all they could to kill everything green into an edible compound of love doesn't happen over night.

in fact, much as the WWII nerve gas chemicals were turned into pesticides and fertilizers, we aren't gonna be free of the 50 years of neglect any time soon. everytime we turn over a bed, dozens of bottle caps and broken toys come up. like the Homie version of La Santisima Muerte that our german wwoofer friend unearthed from his sepulchre under buried flagstone. it's a little disheartening to be finding plastic shit everywhere and the old bonfire pits where the last renters started random fires to burn their trash. but little by little, things are changing. the blueberries and strawberries are reclaiming the brown. the silverberry and guava hover over the artichokes and collards with their almost birdlike coloring. the passiflora vines are slowly beginning their steady creeps over concrete and stucco...

things will come around. like the 1978 carving on the sidewalk says.. "the avenue is all the way live..."

banana pups... arf! arf! arf!

rachel from the ventura urban homestead (our bitchin' sister compound 'round the way) passed on a gorgeous lil' banana pup her bananas produced. at 7 am on a rainy-ass day, our sister was out there digging and sweating and comforting the pup away from its parents... 

the neighborhood solidarity campaign is underway.

passion vine, peas, collards and artichokes...

on an otherwise gloomy day

this was all concrete, used motor oil and shitey fiberboard sheds two weeks ago...

...hijo'e gran puta... la lluvia sigue...

hijo'e graaaaaan puta. 5 dias de lluvia sin respite. but we been makin' the best of it. K and S have been here WWOOFing from Iowa for the past few days. Smart... no, brilliant kids with great hearts and huge minds. They and Monica from Florida spent an entire afternoon digging up urban refuse (trash can lids, little kids' birthday banners) from the depths of our soil, adding compost and designing what undoubtedly will be fabulous new beds.

the surf has been f'n terrible with double overhead sets, huge onshore winds and a gnarly shitplume stretching from C St to Hobos and as far as the eye can see towards Oxnard... but we've been making the best of it with hot whiskeys, cold tecates and a whole bunch of laughing around the fireplace.... and a bunch of plotting for new tropical and sub-tropical species that destroy concrete...

Noticias para Enero/January News

January has been a really good month. T and T and Burrito re-did the back cottage into a living art space complete with their amazing art. The nasty remnants of 40 years of renters has largely been scraped, hauled or painted away and it is looking good.

The front house went through the last of its termite restoration work with the last layer of varnish making the floors look decent. T ripped up another one of our concrete walkways and planted herself a bunch of brassica magic!

We got a couple new orange and lemon trees in and are hoping like mad they survive the occasional frosty morning we have!

Some projects we have on tap for the next couple weeks:

• Rip the rest of the North concrete walkway out and install a chicken tractor over it.
• Design and build some sort of storage shed out of all the materials we salvaged from the houses
• Transform cottage #3 "The Cell" into a more liveable space... possibly with living roof! (or a chayote/passion fruit equivalent!)... and windows installed. And a solar panel or three?

bienvenidos a la ancla, ventura

hello. we have a very new, very fun urban sustainability project going on in ventura, california and wanted to share it with those of you who care about such things or who are travelling/wwoofing your way around this part of alta california.

after numerous attempts at "going back to the land" our hearts and minds realized two things: one, for most people seeking an alternative to corporate death culture, moving into rural or wild areas proves, in the long run, to be isolating, alienating and lacking many of the economic and social resources those of us without blood families and trust funds need to survive. secondly, as more and more of us try and get off the train of planetary destruction, the last thing the earth needs is more well-intentioned people colonizing her last wildlands.

so instead of getting 4x4s and preparing to live alone in the woods, we went the opposite direction. we commandeered a 1/5 acre multi-family residential property in the barrio by the beach in ventura, california and are in the process of turning america's urban blight into an urban oasis with plentiful food, re-used infrastructure and materials, and a thriving community of youngish people who can live well on very little.

although we haven't been here very long, several garden beds and a small orchard of fruit trees have gone in. the concrete has vanished (50% down!!) or been transformed into more useful forms. the broken glass and bottle caps and lost plastic toys have been recycled or regifted. the moldy paint has been removed and old motor oil and leaking batteries recycled. the kale and chard and avocados and passion fruit are thriving, the peas are shooting up and already, as we sit around and drink a hot whiskey and laugh together, we can feel a subtle but palpable shift in the land beneath us. where once was broken glass and compacted, dusty soil, the 10,000 year old riverbed soil has already regained its moisture and the dark shades of decomposition. where once rusty machines stood, arugla and pomegranate scramble skyward.

as i look at L and T and M, and we talk about skateboarding and joy division and broccoli in the same sentence, i know we are onto something good: something old and thrifty where we reuse what has been presented before us in an effort to reshape the future in a more healthy, positive direction.

if any of this sounds interesting to you, click on the wwoof link to your right...

in the meantime, be good family, be good.