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🌱☀️ Andreas | DIY Sustainable Gardening ☀️🌱

@solarpunkfarmer

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Growing a Solarpunk future | Tongva Land 🌱🏙️🧑‍🧑‍🧒🧿
Teaching you agroecology is my special interest 🌻🌈♾️
👇 Sustainable gardening resources 👇

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🍅 COURSE OFFERING - INFO BELOW 🌻
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Cultivating Life is BACK! Recordings of the classes are now available on demand with a one-time purchase!
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Learn the fundamentals of growing food in collaboration with your local ecosystem with this four-part, 8-hour video course. This information dense yet approachable class series condenses the art and science of agroecology into digestible terms. You'll gain an understanding of how to develop a garden design by reading the ecology and landscape, transform dirt into fertile living soil, systematically assemble your plantings, and grow food in harmony with the other beings you share the land with - all at a much lower cost than conventional veggie gardening using consumer products. Novice and experienced gardeners alike will find that Cultivating Life offers an abundance of practical wisdom and a fresh perspective on gardening.
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Your instructor is Andreas - aka the Solarpunk Farmer - who is an urban agriculture educator and master gardener with 13 years of growing experience. He is a passionate, knowledgeable, and keen instructor who has been designing and teaching gardening classes and workshops for nonprofits, urban farms, public institutions, and universities for over half a decade. Thank you for supporting my work!
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Head to bit.ly/spfcultivatinglife to access the course!! You can also find it in the linktree in my bio. EU STUDENTS: The course is not available through Vimeo for you; please comment below or DM me and I'll help you get access. Happy growing 🌱🌻☀️
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#gardening #organicgardening #sustainablegardening #agroecology #ecologicalgardening #regenerativegardening #sustainablefoodsystems #foodsovereignty #gardenideas #gardenclass #gardeningtips #gardening101 #soilhealth #cheapgardening #diygardening #nativeplanta #veggiegarden #urbangardening #urbangarden #gardendesign #soilfoodweb #companionplanting #gardenpests #growfoodathome #growsomethinggreen #gardeningislife #solarpunkfarmer #solarpunk taken in Los Angeles, California by @solarpunkfarmer

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a year ago

I've been experimenting with one question:

How do you grow a food forest when you don't own the land?

This is the system I've landed on after over 4 years of iteration.

I'd love to see what you're growing.

📸 Share a photo of your rental garden below, or tell me what challenge is holding you back. I'll do my best to help.

👇 Which solution surprised you the most?

🌱 All species in system (22):

🍌 Edible/medicinal: 'Brazilian Giant' banana, purple sweet potato, chayote, sugarcane, Tongan spinach, Moroccan mint, 'Frederick' passion fruit, African blue basil, finger lime, seedling loquat; Planting in gaps this weekend: blue turmeric, gotu kola, shampoo ginger
✂️ Biomass: Mexican sunflower, popcorn cassia, achira, white clover
🌼 Natives: CA mugwort, branching phacelia, CA fuchsia

Footnotes:

1. The strata are Low (L), Medium (M), High (H), Emergent (E) and are defined as a function of relative sun requirements in accordance with syntropic protocols.
2. Zones 5-9: Grow maypop (Passiflora incarnata). Zones 9-10+: Grow subtropical varieties, i.e. purple passionfruit (Passiflora edulis). Zones 11+: Grow tropical varieties, i.e. sweet granadilla (Passiflora ligularis).
3. I have observed anecdotally that phacelia's bristly trichomes are irritating to medium sized mammals such as rabbits, making them a useful barrier plant for creating exclusion zones around sensitive crops.

#foodforest #urbanhomestead #rentalgarden #permaculture #solarpunk Cover slide titled 'Anatomy of a Renter-Friendly Micro-Food Forest.' A dense subtropical backyard food forest with bananas, vines, and layered vegetation growing in a 95-square-foot rental garden. Overlay notes list Zone 10b, sandy loam, 22 plant species, and 27 months of growth. by @solarpunkfarmer

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4 months ago

🌾 CLASS OFFERING: INFO BELOW 🌻
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NOW AVAILABLE ON DEMAND WITH A ONE-TIME PURCHASE! Navigate to the linktree in my bio to access the class.
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Topic: Cover Crop Essentials. With just a couple dollars worth of seed, a surprisingly small amount of effort, and a few months of time, cover cropping can transform even the most barren, dusty dirt into fertile, productive living soil. The benefits do not stop there - cover crops can grow you tons of free nutrient rich mulch, suppress weeds and diseases, prevent soil erosion, sequester carbon, retain water in the soil, and support beneficial insects!!
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We will burrow deep into the science behind cover crops, and explore how they can play a key role in building you a healthy soil food web from the ground up. You will learn about about best planting and management practices, the functions of various species in cover crop mixes, how to design custom high diversity mixes for different applications, integrating natives and food plants into cover crops, how to defeat the dreaded Bermuda grass with a cover crop, and more! 🌻
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The class consists 1.5-hour long PowerPoint lecture recording. Please feel free to take photos of any infographics or diagrams included within the slide deck. EU STUDENTS: The course is not available through Vimeo for you; please comment below or DM me and I'll help you get access. Happy growing! 💚🌱☀️
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#organicgardening #regenerativegardening #covercrops #gardeninghacks #sustainablegardening #permaculture #gardeningtips #foodforest #covercrop #gardeningonabudget #agroecology #lowcostgarden #naturalfarming #gardeningskills #gardeningclass #healthysoil #soilfoodweb #easygardening #gardenmagic #growsomethinggreen #homesteading #selfsufficient #learngardening #solarpunkfarmer #solarpunk taken in Los Angeles, California by @solarpunkfarmer

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a year ago

Happy birthday to my incredible partner McKenna as they embark on their 33rd journey around the Sun! It's been an honor to share another of your voyages with you, and I look forward to many more! Your beauty, wisdom, kindness, and one-of-a-kind sense of humor never cease to remind me how lucky I am. I love you so much @mckennaraye! 💚😘🎂🥳 by @solarpunkfarmer

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5 days ago

Our Summer Series comes full circle, this is the final distro of our pilot program! We’re closing it out with @sfv_mutualaid, with fresh produce generously donated by @foodforward.

📅 Saturday, September 26th | 10am-12pm
📍 Reseda Backyard Farm, 7625 Wilbur Ave

Last month alone, here’s what we accomplished:
 🥬 7,335 pounds of produce kept out of the landfill (1,000 pounds more than our first market!!) 🏡 481 people impacted 🙌 19 volunteers who made it all happen

Numbers like these are a reminder of what community power looks like!

Our goal for this final distro: feed over 500 members of our community. Our need: volunteers to make it happen.

Pick a morning or afternoon shift, link in bio under “Harvest Heroes.” Expect sorting, cleaning, box breakdown, and hands-on work getting food to our neighbors. Let’s end this pilot on a high note!

✨Know someone who could use fresh produce? Share this post and help us spread the word so we can reach as many neighbors as possible.✨

We’re hoping to bring this program back, so stay tuned for more information! taken in Reseda, CA by @solarpunkfarmer

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23 days ago

This leafy crop survives heatwaves, and looks great while doing it.

Meet bele, or Tongan spinach. A perennial green that thrives in warm climates.

Despite the name, this highly ornamental, low maintenance crop shares few commonalities with spinach. And it is certainly not a cool season plant like most "traditional" leafy crops.

Firstly, bele is a tropical plant that performs best in high heat environments. In fact, I am now considering it a climate-resilient staple veggie candidate for the hottest months of the year. Once we hit triple digits in summer, its growth accelerated!

Secondly, this is actually an okra relative (same genus - Abelmoschus) rather than a spinach. That means the leaves are actually quite mucilaginous. Some (including myself) consider the raw ones to be unpleasant, however edible they are. Yet, when added to a slow cooker stew, they become delicious and tender while losing their sliminess.

Bele is a water-loving plant that becomes vulnerable to heat stress when dry or exposed to too much sun, so I plan to trial it as an understory plant in future graywater garden designs. It grows into a part shade-enjoying shrub that as you can see, is taller than my head (well over 6') and still growing.

Also, bele is very easy to propagate from cuttings! I've successfully rooted it in standard potting mix, and next I'm going to attempt field stakes (direct planted in the ground).

Thanks to my friend Natalie for gifting this plant to me. Would you grow it?

#organicgardening #tropicalplants #foodforest #EatYourGreens #solarpunk by @solarpunkfarmer

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a month ago

This prickly pear plant at the soon-to-be-open Sugar Bush Nursery is unbelievable. I've been harvesting buckets of fruit from it, and they are so delicious!! @sugarbnursery

#cactus #pricklypear #foraging #localfood #solarpunk by @solarpunkfarmer

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a month ago

Eating with the seasons is one of life's simple pleasures, and is also an accessible way to cultivate one's connection to the Earth!

Foraged papoutsosyka aka tuna or prickly pear, homegrown passionfruit, rack of 'Brazilian Giant' banana due this fall, aibika aka Tongan spinach.

#gardening #foraging #sustainableliving #localfood #solarpunk taken in Los Angeles, California by @solarpunkfarmer

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a month ago

You may or may not be able to guess my tomato of the year (it's at the end of the carousel). 🍅

We just got through a triple digit heatwave, and this variety is pushing out NEW GROWTH and flowers right now! 👀

Tomato season is not over yet. So here's a dose of informational and jocular tomato memes.

What's your favorite variety this year?

#organicgardening #tomatoes #heirloomtomatoes #veggiegarden #solarpunk by @solarpunkfarmer

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a month ago

Most people have at least a mild fear of spiders, and I definitely fall into this category.

This doesn't mean I'm not excited to observe this orb weaver standing nighttime watch over my edible landscape.

She's working overtime to apprehend flies, mosquitoes, grasshoppers, and all other manner of insects that become a nuisance to us when their populations get too large.

Our neighborhoods don't have a fly problem or a mosquito infestation, they have a spider deficiency. More broadly, they have a deficiency of the secondary and tertiary consumers our ecosystems require to maintain a functioning, stable food web.

As a result, our homes and yards are overpopulated with the species that eat our trash and suck our blood!

I think a lot of us know why human dominated landscapes are devoid of predators - even of the spiders, mantids, and birds.

Our cities are covered in non-native plants that do a poor job of supporting locally native predators, and they are doused in pesticides.

But it's possible for our cities to be biodiverse habitat for these helpers. My no-spray yard is packed full of both native plants and food crops alike, making it an excellent habitat for carnivorous insects and birds.

Since I started stewarding the land here 3 years ago, I've noticed a steady increase in the numbers of spiders, praying mantises, assassin bugs, lacewings, goldfinches, and towhees.

In many respects, these friends of mine - such as our orb weaver here - are already doing a lot to keep things under control. If we transform more of our human spaces into restored habitat, perhaps there wouldn't be enough flies and mosquitoes to bother us all the time!

#biodiversity #organicgardening #pestcontrol #EdibleLandscaping #solarpunk by @solarpunkfarmer

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a month ago

Bananas grow so fast that you can literally see it.

And the reason they can do this is because they are NOT trees.

Their "trunks" are actually made of concentrically overlapping leaf sheaths. These sheaths wrap together tightly, and are essentially hollow - consisting of a tough, waxy cuticle (outer layer) supported by a shear-resistant internal framework of thin intersecting membranes. The tissue itself is approximately 90% water.

Despite the massive size of an adult banana pseudostem (what one would call the trunk), all cell division occurs in the apical meristem - a small area at the very top of the underground true stem (corm) approximately the size of a grain of sand.

As cells mature, they inflate themselves like water balloons. In banana plants, this process occurs rapidly enough to be easily observable.

This cut in the pseudostem was made just a couple minutes prior to the photo being taken. Since then, the emerging new leaf has pushed out nearly half an inch of growth!

Not only do bananas grow quickly, all of their growth is directed vertically. This not only enables them to rapidly restore vegetative cover over a rainforest clearing or act as a quick living "umbrella" for a young fruit tree, it makes their incredible pace of development visible to the naked eye.

#bananas #gardening #fruittrees #plantfacts #solarpunk by @solarpunkfarmer

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a month ago

Hawaiian Opo gourd! This is a new crop I've been growing this year which I received seeds of from my friend Natalie (@natataterz)

Use it like a zucchini when it's young and green, and as a water bottle when hard and dry!

#bottlegourd #organicgardening #plantdaddy #heirloomveggies #solarpunk by @solarpunkfarmer

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