Urban Ecoist

One thing that is unavoidable in a city is compacted soil. Cities are already covered with pavement and concrete, but even the soil in cities can act as a barrier to water. Compacted soil is a natural result from people walking on or vehicles driving on the soil. When a city’s landscape prevents water to flow through, groundwater supplies slowly dwindle, and in a time in our history when water is becoming scarce, cities need to find ways to allow infiltration.

Usually, compacted soil is only a nightmare for gardeners and landscapers. Urban farmers will spend hours digging up compacted soils, trying to break up dense clumps into smaller clumps that will increase the spaces between particles and allow oxygen and other elemental necessities for proper vegetative growth. This is a simple enough idea, but compacted soils also need to be broken up in order to allow water to flow through and down into the groundwater supply. Urban soils are especially compacted, and thus act as an impermeable barrier to water. This barrier is preventing water in the form of rain and snow from flowing through soil.

Well, what do you know, but trees can help break up compacted soils. Trees root systems are excellent at going deeply into the ground, pushing their way into any available space and then just plowing right through into areas not so available, too. The bigger the tree, the bigger the root system, and the more soil the tree will move into, breaking up compacted soil. If the soil is permeable, water in the form of precipitation will freely flow through the soil.

And now, science is proving this theory(?). Researchers from Cornell, Virginia Tech and the University of California at Davis have been conducting experiments “digging” into this issue, and the results are not surprising, but still helpful to city planners.

The lack of infiltration opportunities affects groundwater recharge and has negative repercussions on water quality downstream. Researchers know that urban forests, like rural forest land, can play a pivotal role in stormwater mitigation, but developing approaches that exploit the ability of trees to handle stormwater is difficult in highly built city cores or in urban sprawl where asphalt can be the dominant cover feature.

A group of researchers from Virginia Tech, Cornell, and University of California at Davis have been investigating innovative ways to maximize the potential of trees to address stormwater in a series of studies supported by the U.S. Forest Service’s
Urban and Community Forestry Grants Program. The results of the studies were published in the November-December issue of the Journal of Environmental
Quality.

Virginia Tech scientists used two container experiments to establish that urban tree roots have the potential to penetrate compacted subsoils and increase infiltration rates in reservoirs being used to store stormwater. In one study, roots of both black oak and red maple trees penetrated clay loam soil compacted to 1.6 g cm-3, increasing infiltration rates by an average of 153%. –SPX via Terra Daily

The two other studies furthered the “just plant trees” solution and tried out structured soils, which are engineered to carry a pavement load while remaining permeable as well as geotextiles that will also allow tree root growth to penetrate compacted soils, thus increasing the infiltration rate of water.

I don’t really want to say “duh” here but, it kind of seems like a natural reaction as it is pretty obvious that more trees are better for cities. It is heartening to find out that some university grad students are interested in proving that fact.

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So, last week, I wrote a post about turkeys, and I really meant to continue on the whole tip-sheet on being more sustainable in your giving of Thanks to our corporate benefactors. I was planning on writing about vegetables and their seasonality, making your own gravies and stocks and soups, buying organic, you know all that good stuff, but then I got other ideas for things to bitch write about, and here we are. I could try to cover things in this post today, maybe extend it through tomorrow, but you have most likely figured it all out last week when everyone else wrote about sustainable or “green” Thanksgivings.

Instead of rehashing what others are rehashing, today, I am thinking about generations, namely that of my grandparents and mine. I was raised by my grandparents, who were really fantastic people that made me who I am today, and their generation was born during the Great Depression. My grandfather fought in Korea and married my grandmother soon afterward in 1953. Their generation saw great hardship, and it was from this time that the Agricultural Revolution was born.

My great-grandparents passed down recipes and gardening skills to their children, and my grandparents were into farmers markets and making things from scratch. And then my grandmother started getting lazy…

She admitted, so it’s not like I am calling her out here. She started buying graham cracker crusts at the grocery store for her cheesecake. My grandfather would make little digs about it, saying it was not how he remembered it, or not as good as his mothers. My grandmother would remind him of his diabetes and maybe he shouldn’t be eating cheesecake.

The Agricultural Revolution did increase yields and provided this nation with a great deal of food, and some of that food went to countries around the world, preventing millions from starvation. But the AR also lead to the rise of the Processed Foods Industry. The Archer Daniels Midlands and Cargills lead to the Sara Lees and the Krafts, which filled our kitchen cupboards with all sorts of partially-hydrogenated deliciousness and high-fructose goodness. Just today, a new Government Accounting Office report finds that farm subsidies are profiting millionaires (and corporate farms) rather than that small, family-based farm, and health doesn’t get in the way of big profits.

Enter my generation. Actually, I doubt that I can speak that generally about my generation. I live in two bubbles when it comes to food. I live in Portland, which is a localvore’s dream, and I have spent many years working in pretty decent restaurants that at least tried to source locally, even in Michigan. That and being raised by an older generation that didn’t always rely on buying everything in a handy box-kit or frozen prepackaged, I may not be as common as I like to think I am. But the fact that more and more organic food is available and more and more people are talking about organic produce (and fabrics, furniture, cleaners, etc), I am convinced that my generation is making progress.

Funny how things come full circle. Now, it’s all the rage to make your own stocks and sauces, compost your vegetable peelings, recycle your glass jars. For my grandparents, and their parents, and their parents, you had to make your own stocks. Composting wasn’t called composting, it was just burying the kitchen scraps, because what else are you going to do with them. Jars were precious commodities for “canning” the vegetables from your summer garden, and insuring that you had food for February. Sure, the Agricultural Revolution may have freed us from the seasons, but at what cost?

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If you are a city dweller, an Urban Ecoist if you will, you may have some stuff in your backyard of which you may not be aware.

Lead

Lead may be in your backyard, especially in older neighborhoods, as the houses at one point, more likely than not, had lead paint on the exterior. The lead paint may have flaked off and fallen into the soil around the house, and the lead from the paint on the exterior may have leached into the soil as well. Most lead contamination around residential homes are within a few feet of the house.

If your house is on a busy street, you may have lead in the yard from car’s long ago that ran on leaded gasoline. Even if you are a not-so-city-dweller, and instead opted for the ‘burbs, if your house is on former orchard land, the pesticides used in the past, in the form of lead arsenate, may be in your soil.

Born in the ’70’s? No wonder you don’t read so well.

Hmm. Lead. Doesn’t that cause developmental problems in children? Doesn’t severe lead poisoning lead to seizures and possibly death? Yeah, that’s lead. Heck, it even affects adults in the form of memory loss and hypertension.

The US Environmental Protection Agency considers garden soil contaminated if it has 400 parts lead per million parts of soil.

The University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Soil and Plant Tissue Testing Lab, which charges $9 a sample, normally receives about 10,000 soil sample requests a year for soil to be tested for a suite of contaminants, including lead. This year, the lab is on track to get about 16,000. Lab director Steve Bodine said he does not know exactly why people are sending in more soil samples, but believes it is at least in part because of an increased interest in vegetable gardening. Typically, about 10 percent of the homes tested show unsafe levels of lead. — Boston Globe

First…what can you do about lead in your backyard?

Really, not much. If it is a major problem, you can have your soil dug up and replaced, which is pretty pricey. Hopefully, if you do have lead in your yard, it won’t be above the EPA limit for what is safe. Except if you grow vegetables. Read on.

A good number of urbanites rent their homes, and if that is the case, there is a regulation that if the house you will be renting has lead contamination, the landlord must notify you of that fact. The same disclosure rule is in effect if you plan on selling or buying a house. However, there is no regulation that landlords or sellers have to test their properties. Nice loophole, huh?

Not sure about lead in your rented backyard? If it is an older home, you may want to assume that there is some lead. You can have it tested, but just to be sure, plant all vegetables in pots or raised-bed gardens. Lead doesn’t usually leach up into soil, so a raised garden will alleviate even a small amount of lead contamination.

Oh, yeah, and avoid bare soil in your yard. Tracking it inside does no good for anyone. Also, pets tend to seek out soil, so give them few opportunities. Even a good, deep layer of mulch can help in that department.

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I ran across this over the weekend, and though it so brilliant that I had to share it.

Prisons across the United States are going green, and by that I mean that inmates are growing organic produce, composting the food waste from the prison kitchens, and even recycling shoes into that rubber turf that is being installed around playgrounds.

Above: Ironwood State Prison in California operates its own solar power plant.

An Oregon prison is raising honeybees, an Indiana prison built a wind turbine to reduce its energy costs, a California prison has solar panels, and a North Carolina correctional facility has built a cistern system to capture rain water.

Can we really learn a better way from those who have strayed? Seems we can. The programs at the prisons are not only a great way to reduce costs, help the environment, and divert refuse from landfills, but also the pro-green programs are teaching the inmates valuable skills and giving them responsibilities to encourage self-confidence and a feeling of community.

From the Associated Press:

LITTLEROCK, Wash. – Of all the things convicted murderer Robert Knowles has been called during his 13 years behind bars, recycler hasn’t been one of them.

But there he was one morning, pitchfork in hand, composting food scraps from the main chow line and coffee grounds from prison headquarters — doing his part to “green” the prison.

“It’s nice to be out in the elements,” said Knowles, 42, stirring dark, rich compost that will amend the soil at the small farm where he and fellow inmates of the Cedar Creek Corrections Center grew 8,000 pounds of organic vegetables this year.

Inmates of the minimum-security facility, 25 miles from Olympia, the state capital, raise bees, grow organic tomatoes and lettuce, compost 100 percent of food waste and even recycle shoe scraps that are made into playground turf.

“It reduces cost, reduces our damaging impact on the environment, engages inmates as students,” said Eldon Vail, secretary of the Washington Department of Corrections, which oversees 15 prisons and 18,000 offenders. “It’s good security.”

As around-the-clock operations, prisons are voracious resource hogs, and administrators are under increasing pressure to reduce waste and conserve energy and water.

In 2007, states spent more than $49 billion to feed, house, clothe, treat and supervise 2.3 million offenders, the Pew Center on the States reported this year.

As the prison population has grown this decade, up 76 percent from 1.3 million in 2000, the number of prisons and jails has risen with it. The latest U.S. Bureau of Justice data show 1,821 facilities in 2005, up from 1,668 in 2000.

To keep costs down, the Indiana Department of Corrections installed water boilers that run on waste wood chips, and built a wind turbine at one prison that generates about 10 kilowatts an hour and saves $2,280 a year.

At Ironwood State Prison in Blythe, Calif., 6,200 solar panels send energy back to the grid, enough to power 4,100 homes a year. The prison was trying to meet an executive order requiring state agencies to reduce energy use by 20 percent by 2015, said a spokeswoman, Lt. Sue Smith.

North Carolina’s Department of Corrections switched to chemical-free cleaners and vegetable-based inks. This summer, because of a water shortage, inmates converted 50-gallon pickle barrels into small cisterns that capture rainwater.

Under a state mandate to reduce energy use, the Oregon Department of Corrections replaced old appliances with energy-efficient ones, installed solar water heaters and used a geothermal well to heat water. It also modified washing machines so they could reuse rinse-water to wash about a million pounds of clothes a month.

At Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution in Pendleton, Ore., inmates recycle scraps from old prison blues to make diaper bags for women’s shelters and dog beds for animal shelters.

“We try to model prosocial behavior,” said Vern Rowan, business manager for the Oregon Department of Corrections. Being sustainable “is something that everybody should be doing, regardless of where they’re at.”

Cedar Creek, in the heart of a forest, feels more like an outdoor retreat than institutional lockup.

Most of the 400 inmates are in a work program, and put in between six and eight hours a day.

The responsibility of caring for the prison’s three hives of Italian honey bees falls mostly to Daniel Travatte, 36, a soft-spoken former drug addict who is serving 10 years for attempted armed robbery.

Under the supervision of prison counselor Vicki Briggs, Travatte has learned to harvest honey — which inmates occasionally eat with breakfast biscuits — and use beeswax to make lotions. He’s become an expert on their habits.

“I’m trying to change myself,” said Travatte. “A lot of people go through prison with no intention of changing. I love working with the bees. It keeps me busy. I have a lot of responsibility to take care of.”

While there isn’t scientific evidence that such activities are helping inmates, Nalini Nadkarni, an environmental studies professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., notes anecdotal evidence that it’s working.

“They were stimulating their minds and having conversations that were different than ‘How much more time we have left’?” said Nadkarni.

One inmate went beyond conversations, enrolling in a doctoral program when he got out and co-authoring a research paper with Nadkarni on a moss-growing project she started to help reduce the impact of wild moss harvesting on forests.

While Cedar Creek went green out of economic necessity — it had to conserve because it didn’t have the wastewater capacity to expand four years ago — it is now embracing other benefits, said Dan Pacholke, a state prison administrator who helped implement many of the practices.

Cedar Creek uses 250,000 fewer gallons of water a year, saves $6,000 to $8,400 annually on garbage bills and avoided a $1.4 million sewage treatment plant upgrade.

A large “Con-Post” marks the prison’s composting station, made of recycled concrete blocks and reclaimed wood, where Knowles spends about six hours a day, making sure the compost gets enough heat, moisture and air to break down food scraps.

“They trust me to do all this with no supervision,” said Knowles, who is serving time for the hit-and-run death of an off-duty police officer.

“I like growing the vegetables,” Knowles said. “My mom had a garden. I can see having my own garden.”

Sorry, I rarely like including an entire article in a post, but I really had a hard time deciding what paragraphs to include. I find this inspirational and I hope that the positive reaction to the established programs will encourage other correctional facilities to follow suit and develop their own gardens, composting programs, and develop ways to convert old systems to renewable and sustainable ones.

And what can we on the “outside” learn from these prisoners? Composting is easy, and organic gardening is also pretty easy. Not only are you providing your family with fresh, healthy produce, but if you include your whole family in the garden, you are giving kids responsibilities which will in turn give them self-confidence. Not only that, but getting kids out in the garden is a great way to teach them about how consumption and our part in the larger cycles of the Earth and its ecosystems.

I think schools should also take a note from the prisons of America. Have students spend an hour in a school garden or turning compost. Have a school wind turbine, and teach kids how it works. Have students organize a scrap drive, like back in World World II, and encourage them to lead the green revolution.

Viva la Revolution!!

And it took prisoners to lead the way? Maybe not, but going green is a great component to an inmate’s rehabilitation.

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I live in Portland, Oregon, and yes, it’s true that it is an all-around super cool city, and one of those crazy things that make it cool is that chickens are allowed. Yes, that’s right, right in the city, you can have your own little urban farmyard.

Does your city allow chickens? I found a pretty decent listing of local chicken laws across the United States as compiled by The City Chicken. You will notice that most cities have limits on the number of chickens you may have, as well as the gender. Hens do not necessarily need a rooster around the lay eggs, but hens have the tendency to pretend to be the rooster if one is not a part of your flock…wait, brood, wait, wait, clutch. Oh, forget it. I’m calling it a flocken.

Chickens? Really? Chickens…Yeah, yeah, I know, but seriously, chickens are great. If you have the space and the gumption, you really should think about housing some chicks around your yard. Chickens not only reward you with eggs, but also insect-control and a good foundation for really nutritious compost. And they also like to eat weeds around the yard, so think of chickens as nature’s little composting gardener.

And you could… eat them.

Chickens will be happy living in anything that provides a little bit of shelter. If you want the eggs, you will need to establish a nesting site, otherwise the hens will lay them in secret spots and try to hide them. Even a small yard will be plenty of room for a few hens.

With emphasis on living lightly and producing more of our own food locally, why not think about chickens? And how about adding a duck or two to really make it a farm.

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If you have not heard or read about it, you may not know that frogs and amphibians are in trouble. Reports of declining numbers are coming in from all parts of the Earth, and if it helps, think of an amphibian as a canary in a coalmine. Amphibians are good bio-indicators of ecological health. This is mostly due to the fact that frogs and amphibians have permeable skin, and having such, amphibians tend to “soak up” pollutants and other chemicals more easily. The pollution also bio-accumulates in amphibians, so effects of said chemicals can be more palpable than in other creatures. Amphibians also spend their lives in both water and on land, so they get the, er, worst of both worlds. In other words, frogs are rather fragile, and when the world becomes too dry or polluted, they die.

So why not turn your little plot of potential wildlife habitat of a back or front yard into a frog sanctuary.

It’s easier than you think. But you will need to put in a pond. Ponds can be simple or you can go crazy. But if you ever needed a reason to put in a small pond in the backyard, this is it. Do it for the frogs.

Frogs like fresh water and lots of cover. If you have a bigger pond, you can have both fish and frogs, but for the most part, you may have to choose frogs over fish. You see, eggs and tadpoles are like candy to fish, so frogs won’t move in if fish are around. If you have one of those two-tier ponds, you could have frogs in the top and fish in the bottom. Or you try to create a barrier in your pond with rocks, which frogs also happen to enjoy.

Other things to keep in mind. Frogs need gently sloping walls, not straight ones. Also, make sure to include some aquatic plants in your frog pond. Keep your water clean, and as frogs are voracious insect eaters, you shouldn’t have to worry about mosquitoes, but of course, keep the water fresh and clean all the same.

If you are using city water, you may want to let the chlorine blow off of your water before adding it to your pond. Chlorine blows off fast when the water is left out in the sun. Frogs are sensitive to chlorine, so try not to add water out of the tap into your pond. Let it sit out in a bucket or four for a few days.

Outside the pond, have lost of groundcover plants and shrubs around the yard. Frogs don’t like a lot of direct sunlight, so if you have a shady garden, you are one step in the right direction already. Frogs also like rocks and logs around which to make their homes.

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