What is Zadruga Urbana?

Republication from Zadruga Urbana

 

“Zadruga Urbana” is a group of people who came together with the shared dissatisfaction for the current system of food production, who believe in the necessity for a collective movement to take the process into their own hands. We believe that collective gardens raise people’s awareness of producing their own food, consuming locally and being autonomous/productive, enabling individuals without land of their own to produce food with a sensitivity for their local natural environment.

Our group wants to bring people together to learn and promote the ideas to find solutions for change towards a more sustainable life regardless of previous experience. Everyone is welcome to participate in our gardens and network, to learn and share the skills of producing our own food. We aim to use local seeds and to fertilize our crop naturally.

Back in action with mycology in a permacultured community

If one can follow in detail some very careful steps in starting up mushroom growing especially on a farm and even more so on a farm with permaculture as part of its design, you can feed a whole bunch of people using what you may otherwise throw away.  While growing mushrooms the left overs from the production become some of the best compost and soil producer on earth.  It may be a science to know too much but you may regulate how much and what you need to know.

We encountered a great set of videos that are the best introduction to general mushroom knowledge based on a community/collective farm in New Hampshire called D-Acres dacres.org which is among the best community projects we have encountered in this English speaking universe.  We hope you find the videos informative and get you started on something

https://youtu.be/y8sm1uDPWj8 

Current events and the state of the world

It has been a very sad August when we allow the media to affect us.  Thousands of people dying unnecessarily, in war and conflict, in protests and on the streets, from Missouri to Gaza, from Kurdistan to Damascus, from Donetsk to Santiago, armies, states, police, brutally slaughter their perceived enemies. In Syria the latest count of deaths since the uprising begun has reached 170,000 people and with the ISIS the numbers are climbing.  In Gaza 2,100 is the last count in a few weeks.  In Ukraine it is questionable what the numbers are but lately different sides refer to 2,000.  In Africa the numbers are never so important to the western media to report, until the Ebola epidemic  came and the media took an interest as far as this epidemic may cause a threat elsewhere.  Yet there is one constant statistic that not many are reporting in the mass media.  Over 60,000 people a day, nearly half being children, are dying from the simple cause of the lack of nutrients and clean water.  Meanwhile if one is to divide the annual world production of corn (alone) by the population one will find the corn produced alone can prevent death from hunger.  An enormous amount of food is produced worldwide, maybe "too much" according to economists who are waged by corporations that benefit from the rise of the price of commodities.

Natural Building Materials and Biomass Roofing

Sustainable Build of UK is a great source for construction material and techniques that advance the concept of autonomy and sustainability.  This post serves as an example of the great information one may find there directly, instead of us borrowing this information.  Hopefully it will remain available for time to come, but if you have any plans of using this information soon on a project it is advised to store and reproduce such information as we can not conclude it will always be available and free.

http://www.sustainablebuild.co.uk 

 Natural Building Materials and Biomass Roofing

Biomass roofing is the use of plant materials to build roofs. People from around the world have always used whatever vegetation was locally available and abundant to build their roofs. This cultural and environmental diversity has led to a wide range of roofing materials and styles, from the simple and ephemeral to the more durable and complex.

The Different Types of Biomass Roofing

Although hundreds of different plants have been used to roof houses, these can be classified into two main types: thatch and wood tiles.

Basmati planting and the art of growing rice

Basmati Farming Practices at a Glance

Seed Selection

• Farmers procure seeds from the trusted sources – government agencies, agricultural universities and Research centers
• Seed required for 1 acre of the cultivation is 5-8kg approximately

Treatment of Seed

• 1kg salt is diluted in 10 litres of water to prepare solution for treatment of the seed
• After this 8 to 10 kg of seeds poured in this solution, in this way quality seeds are drowned within the solution and seeds which float on the upper surface are thrown as waste
• The left seeds are washed with the water for 3 to 4 times so that the salt is completely washed out
• The seeds, then are kept in the solution of 10 litres of water, 5 grams Emison and 2.5 grams of Agromycin or 1 gram of streptomycin for 24 hours
• After this the seeds are spread in a small area with wet sacks on the seeds to germinate and sacks are continuously watered or regular intervals

Growing Chillie (or is it growing chili?) Peppers

Enough with theory and political food for thought, spring is springing up all around us (except for you poor folks way up north). It is time to leave the books and pencils (remember those?) and go out and do some work. If you procrastinate now by mid-fall you will be cursing yourselves for not starting out earlier. Some of the things we have been experimenting with (other than quinoa and amaranth as evident throughout our site) is peppers. We eat many different peppers in many different ways.

Hot peppers need some extra time to grow and produce their best so we start with them earlier. Depending on weather we may start indoors as the seeds need a certain warm temperature to germinate. Then we take the plants out once they pop up and make a temporary greenhouse out of PVC pipe and clear plastic. If you are in a sunny part of the world even if it is cold a small greenhouse sturdy enough to resist wind and just big enough to clear the plants before the temperature will warm up is sufficient. Here we found a good article with the same permaculture tendencies we have, about the tricks of planting chili peppers.

A good thing to grow on sunny dry warmer climates

The Grand Amaranth Experiment

Of all the grain crops, amaranth has to be the easiest to turn into something that you can eat.  If you have ever wondered how to add a cereal crop to your garden, consider amaranth.  This versatile, beautiful, and easy to grow plant can add another dimension to gardening.  Unlike wheat or oats, where you need to cut the stalks, thresh the grain and then grind it into flour, amaranth literally falls from the seed heads ready to eat.

I started this experiment last year with a small test crop just to get an idea of what to expect.  Andrew Still of the Seed Ambassadors spoke highly of amaranth and gave me a few seeds of Copperhead, an ornamental yet grain producing variety.  There are two or three species of grain amaranth, Amaranthus caudatus, and Amaranthus cruentus (Copperhead is this species) being the most important, each of which encompasses many varieties.  Most of the amaranth varieties have purple or red hues in the plant stalks and leaves as well as brilliantly colored flowers.  Copperhead is an exception with rust and copper tones in the stems and flowers.  The common commercial variety called Plainsman is a hybrid of two other species,  Amaranthus hypochondriacus, from Mexico and Amaranthus hybridus, from Pakistan.

Why Free? And why this manifesto may be of interest

We will refrain from an endless analysis and discussion of why this book, among zillions, may be of interest to us, but we have highlighted some key phrases that drew our attention.  It may be easy to bash the book or to praise it and we may do both in the future, but it may have to be done together with all of you who may have read it.  What's the value of us providing with a reason not to read it but remain confident that its criticism is as good as reading it yourselves?

Both myself and my courageous publishers, Permanent Publications, have decided to publish a free online version of this book, and the normal paperback version under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported license, for three reasons:

First, the ideas and practical tools contained within it should be free to whoever may find them useful, and not made falsely scarce by the mechanisms of the monetary economy.

Second, just as actions display our beliefs more honestly than our words, the ways in which ideas and practical tools are shared are at least as important as the words themselves. I wanted the medium to be fully aligned with the message.

Third, I wanted to release it under a Creative Commons licence because it felt fraudulent to have my name on the front of this book. As I said in the acknowledgements page of my last book, what are my words but “an accumulation of all that has come

Permaculture: Back to Basics?

Permaculture seems to have grown almost as many interpretations as there are practitioners. Patrick Whitefield talks to Simon Fairlie.

download as pdf

an occasional magazine about land rights

SF : A lot of “permaculture plots” are on a small  fiddly scale. The prevalence of herb spirals, mini-ponds, willow arbours and micro-coppices, along with ubiquitous “forest gardens” are charming, but are they really any more than a current fashion trend in “alternative” gardening? In some quarters, the perceived quaintness of Permaculture (PC) gardening prevents it from being regarded as a serious method of cultivation. Are these approaches actually permacultural and if so, is PC married to such methods? Or is there room for a more efficiency-based approach?

PW : Small scale is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact there’s plenty of evidence to show that small scale food production, including gardening, actually yields more food than large scale. It may produce less per person employed and certainly produces less financial return, but on average it does produce more food per hectare.¹

Permaculture and the beaten path to freedom

Permaculture revisited

Here we have a good example of how a noble proposal and related information may be undermined to pose no threat to the system.  While wondering around the web for practical information about permaculture, one good source is The Permaculture Institute.  As an example (there is nothing in particular that is wrong with the PI but it is representative) of how an idea can be sterilized and be assimilated within the dominant system of capitalism.  Permaculture as a proposal of how land can be utilized in a sustainable way and not as a temporary area of exploitation till it is depleted and abandoned is something that few good willing souls may have anything against.  But in itself does not contain automatically a viable way for people to escape the domination of the economic and political system we all (almost all, or almost all who are not struggling to escape it) live under.  Some would say it does not need to, and may be a good step for people who will engage in such living to take the next step towards liberation.  This is what is troubling us and we can not see clearly.  Does permaculture have a hidden radical agenda?  Who is the keeper of this hidden agenda and who are the innocent victims who will engage in such a practice

Permaculture and water catching earth

Forest Hills farm catches rain for irrigation

Long before they heard the word “permaculture,” Forest Hills residents Terry Jo and Dave Bichell had embraced the tenets of organic gardening to create sustainable spaces on their Old Hickory Boulevard farm. Permaculture gave them the tools to overcome drought and flooding.

“Permaculture is a way of growing that uses the land to soak up and store water,” Terry Jo explained. “You use the natural features of the land and plant trees in such a way to hold water, and use plants to help nourish each other without fertilizers.”

The farm is a remnant of a historic plantation, she said, and the land had been used for pasture by previous owners. She was committed to avoiding pesticides or fertilizers, so she set out to see what could be grown on pasture land without alteration. “We grew a crop of hay for a couple of years, because at that time that was about all we could grow without using irrigation and pesticides.”