My Hypothesis...

When I was turning up the soil the other day with the mighty pick-ax, I found a couple pieces of glass, discarded trip irrigation tubes, some screws and nails along with some pieces of asphalt shingling. I thought to myself "I bet the Hohokam didn't accidentally dig up pieces of asphalt shingling." I also then thought to myself "I bet the Hohokam didn't have full time jobs and were full time students while they were farming too." Well, I shouldn't say that they didn't have anything else to do besides farm, I am sure the tribes people carried multiple roles, such as farmers, teachers, defenders, parents and all the vital roles that can be found in any society over time. But I can't help but think that they were able to a lot more time and focus to cultivating the land, whereas most people now roll up to the grocery store, plunk down some cash for groceries for the week (be it themselves and/or their families), and stick it in the fridge when they get home....I bet the Hohokam didn't have a fridge when they got home.

 I went to the Phoenix public library to check up on some Hohokam history.They had a special room called "The Arizona Room" which housed a treasure trove of original AZ artifacts. There were a few restrictions though. I was condensed to about 45 minutes worth of research (by my own schedule) and I was not allowed to take anything out nor write anything down (all AZ archives had to stay in that room and no pens were allowed...I didn't have a pencil). I pulled a few pieces off the shelves and kept getting more and more information about the canal system that was unearthed around Sky Harbor International Airport, which is all of a 8 minute drive from my house. What I wanted to find was specific plants and planting methods that the tribe used for the spring, which is when I intend to plant. I didn't find anything. I left the library a little dejected, thinking what the heck did they do, and when the heck am I going to be able to get back to the library to research this stuff with still not having found the time to plant.

 So for my hypothesis. Thinking about those asphalt pieces I am thinking that the urban planting methods will be better. I've come to this immediate expectation because this soil has been subject to well over a century of urban development, has had a variety of things done to it, and is going to be affected by the inability of a busy dude to tend to the plants every need at any given day...I've got four wedding weekends coming up out of town, which is when I get to actually play in the garden. I've got the plant species picked out (corn, summer squash, garden beans and Tepary Beans) which were mentioned on a variety of websites and the PHX garden magazine for both native and modern planting. I believe that trying to incorporate more native methods (if I ever find them) of how to plant won't do well in modern urban farming. The surrounding vegetation is different, the soil is different, the inputs will inevitable be different. And to remind the reader, the purpose isn't to recreate the environment of the Hohokam tribe at the time, it is just to see if there methods would work in an urban setting with an urban farmer with an urban lifestyle. With the very wide, wide, wide range of variables and ill-kept controls... I simply don't see how traditional ecological knowledge will prevail here in comparison to urban methods. I am not discounting that the crops won't grow at all, but I think that the land has been changed so much and my deficiencies as a farmer won't be able to support what successful TEK implementation demands.

Getting going and seeing the light.

I just submitted this project as a talk for the Ignite Phoenix event on May 4th. It is kind of like a more structured TED talk for the community. I gave one of these before for my sustainability education job, which you can see here. It was sweet, but man did it take a bunch of prep work.

I think that this project is very interesting, but if it is actually going to work, then I need to start documenting shorter and more frequent posts, and try to avoid these essay like bonanzas, seeing as I already have a few other essays that I need to address for other courses. So enough about blog posts strategy, lets move on with some dirt.

So, I've started to hunt down the literature that I am going to need for this. A lot of it is conveniently located at the Phoenix public library, so that is a win, but most of those titles I can't take out of the library, so my plan of referencing a lot of that work while in the yard isn't going to happen, unless I can get real friendly with the library...in a strictly academic sense of course. But I can't really move forward with this project until I get the sources to reference from. It is going to take some time to lock down these sources, and the planting season has arrived too. So I have some sources identified at the library and the impulse buy the other day of the latest Phoenix Home & Garden Magazine edition: The Garden Issue. I flipped though it and they have some solid tips about what/how to plant, and also some really fancy pictures of high end fancy gardens over in Scottsdale. Maybe one day I'll get to that point.

But one thing I want to look at is something I can't prevent, but also really like. I have a big tree in my yard, and I recently learned from my landlord that it is a Evergreen Elm. Now, the name is a bit misleading as this tree did just shed all of its leaves this past December/January. But here it is in March and all the leaves are back in full strength. It is a beautiful tree with willow-like weeping branches that are also high enough to walk under. It is thee trademark to my yard, and it happens to blanket my garden in spotted shade.

I am not sure yet if this is going to be a benefit or a liability with the plants as the garden rows are directly beneath the tree, but if I were to hypothesize: I would think that the plants would do better with the shade as the spring/summer heat increases, giving some opportunity for sunlight to hit (to allow photosynthesis to happen) while providing consistent breaks from the hot sun. It isn't really rocket science (plants needing light and all), but the right species for the light allocation that I have is a bit of science. Speaking of which, if you are on facebook and enjoy science, you should probably like this.

The last note I want to make is the neighbors choice of an awning. Being that I live right in the middle of an urban neighborhood, my west wall is my neighbors east wall, so we are very close. Besides all the random noises of animals I hear over there (man and geese..I think?), whatever they decide to put up on their property is something I have to live with, and so is the case with anyone who would want to start gardening in a dense neighborhood. Anyway, if you see in the picture,

it marks a very early onslaught of solid shade onto the garden in the afternoon. I am not for sure in this, but I have a suspicion that it is the reason why nothing grew on my two west rows the initial time I tried to plant. It is a control that will play a big part in how this all goes, but maybe my choice of plants for those rows before (green peppers, zucchini, tomato) just wasn't the right choice anyway.

Access Granted! Now what?

Alright! We have been officially given the thumbs up for this project. With some gracious poking and prodding for me to actually have a clear focus complements of my professor Denise Mitten, Ph.D, there is now solid direction to this project. In borrowing a couple of concepts from another course I am taking, Sustainability Theory and Practice in Education, the idea of Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) came into light during one of the papers. TEK is the knowledge often used by indigenous peoples to pay attention to the land to best work with it. This could be understanding seasonal changes to water flows to best maximize crop yield or hunting game. I started thinking about how the Hohokam tribe used TEK to survive for a millennium in the valley of the sun, as place that I initially thought humans should not exist. Turns out they did fine for a thousand years before abruptly disappearing.

Seeing as I have already written the formal research proposal, I'll spare you and myself from another paraphrasing, so here is the link to it that can be found on my school site.

Now that I have the go ahead...what the heck do I do? Before I just started digging up dirt and bought the cheapest seeds at the local hardware store, but now there is a point to all this. This makes me wonder about how most lay persons start when they want to start a garden, which is one of the big reasons why I proposed this project. My being from the East Coast in a water rich environment, those underlying ideas of how to garden there are still the foundation of how I first think to garden here in the desert, a completely different and arid environment. I can't help but imagine that is how many of the gardens in the desert start, and either become very resource intensive processes or the garden keepers just give up because their prior garden knowledge isn't able to sustain a garden in the desert.

You know, sometimes I forget that I teach research methods to high schoolers, and that the very next step is one I assess regularly. I should probably follow that lead. Sounds like a up coming post to me.

Urban Desert Farming: A semester research project

What is prompting this new blog/old blog revival is the suggestions that I have received from fellow PhD cohort 7 members about my wanting to try urban desert farming. Some may say it is just gardening in a backyard in the desert, and to an extent they are right. But, as I have been talking to cohort members and reading more about our complete disassociation of what we consume and where it comes from, then looking at my $100 grocery bill, I thought to myself that I have never really eaten anything that I have grown. As in 100% of all the food that I have consumed in my life came from somewhere else.

For our research methods course, we are tasked to design some sort of research project to span the semester. AS I have no interest in being in front of a laptop longer than I have to be, I wanted to get sweaty, dirty and have a physical product to show for my work, and not just more of the same academic work. I usually work in my backyard when it is light out, so as I was staring at my failed attempt of a garden (pictured above) that served as a distraction to my work last semester, what if I do some research and application of how to sustainably urban farm in the desert, all in the comfort of my own home? Sweet, right? Here is a quick list of some of what I want to explore for this project:

1. Best vegetable species for desert climate
2. Water distribution techniques
3. Compost quality testing (Current compost situation pictured)
4. Compost distribution techniques
5. Rain water harvesting
6. Independent water allocation (not just me standing with a hose)
7. Sunlight exposure
8. Temperature reaction (it is going to start to get hot!)
9. Weed infiltration & species identification
10. Integrated pest management
11. Local compost co-ops/collectives
12. Local urban farming initiatives
13. Maximizing food yield
14. AZ Local Farmers Techniques
15. Healthy habits to maintaining all of this

So here is the start of this blog per suggestion of my classmates, documenting the struggles and successes of learning and applying urban farming techniques. Besides learning some research methods and how to farm, my main goal with this is to have fun, which I feel can be all to absent from the first year of doctoral work. I hope to also intersperse other posts not about the research project itself, but about the experience of learning, teaching and applying sustainability principles, which has yet to be boring.

Relaunch...

Good Afternoon,

This blog died two years ago. I quit my last job of teaching out of severe frustration, took solace out of living out of my car, was offered a job as a sustainability instructor back in Phoenix, someone told me what I was doing was dissertation worthy, applied to Prescott College's Sustainability Education program, got in, have been hacking away at that this year and a whole bunch else that I am not going to really go into, besides the following:

My job: www.crestsustainability.net

My new passion: www.abchphoto.com

But, the time has come to "reimagine" (one of my new favorite terms) this blog, as it will no longer be about the random musings about my life, but now the focused experience of a fellow learning and teaching this whole sustainability thing in what was called "The Most Unsustainable City" by author Andrew Ross in his book "Bird on Fire," Phoenix, Arizona.

Besides the absurdity of living in the desert at times as well as learning and teaching a subject still in its infancy, with little common denominators and self-appointed intellectual muses leading the charge in their own respective fields, this blog is aimed at capturing the work and effort of not only learning sustainability, applying sustainability and teaching sustainability, but really giving this all encompassing field of study some sort of relevance for all, and further relevance for myself in continuing with it. Let us hope it doesn't reach a re-demise as the prior self once did.

Note: I am writing this while laying on my patch of grass in my back yard in the desert, a completely non-native and resource intensive plant to keep alive in a climate that receives about 10 inches of rain a year.

Holidays

I believe that this is my second post composed on a plane. POSTS ON A PLANE!!! It really is one of the few genuine moments in which I have complete solitude to just think and write… about nothing in particular. But at least this time there is no farty guy to accompany me in this flight.
When I land in Chicago (from Phoenix), I will have to stay put for two days, and not be able to leave until Monday morning (it is currently Saturday evening). I am thinking about contacting Uber, or Chris Enany, one of my long lost conservative friends from Ithaca, all…two of them. I know that he busted out there to try out his comedy after being a banker in North Carolina; one of those jobs that help you realize that boring jobs, no matter how lucrative, turn out to suck.
Today kicked off winter break, two weeks of pure glory, pure running around visiting random people and sitting in my basement room and rediscovering how limited Simsbury is glory. At some point I really need to sign up for some off the wall volunteer holiday project in some abandoned land, like western Arkansas, whatever the hell might actually be out there. But, in reflection to the wandering trip this past summer that I more or less gave up going into grand detail about in prior posts (teaching will make you give up on many things, such as fun…and personal life), I am excited to kick it in Chicago for whatever reason. A hotel room and hanging around the airport waiting for a standby flight could be fun, but I think just getting lost and possibly hunting down an old friend to possibly sleep on a couch is much, much more appealing.
In regards to teaching, I have reached my 75% mastery point, with only one semester left of my teaching commitment. I must say that as the teaching skills have actual proved themselves to be not too shabby, it is rather clear that my interest in teaching is quite shabby. I am in the process of applying to doctoral programs, so far at ASU and … University of Alaska Fairbanks. I could go to Alaska for 4 to 5 years. I would be there til I’m 30 and would have fought 3 bears, in addition to earning a Ph.D. Minor detail. Though, with my stellar performance on the GRE (HORGODDAMNRIFFIC), I think I better start to consider a Ph.D. in deep frying frozen cod pieces. Or fries, or even slices of pizza if the Arizona State Fair would have anything to do with it.
Well, the battery symbol on my laptop is saying that it doesn’t want to be my teammate in this endeavor anymore. Quick notes though, being a hockey goalie is going well, currently 2-1 on the season and in second place with a GAA of over 0.8. Had my first shift for Radio Phoenix which could have been much rougher, and I accidentally killed Quentin, my beta fish, by forgetting him outside and he froze to death as I drank to delight. Mike (my roommate) and I then buried him in one of plants on the patio. He will live on through the plant that is now aptly named Quentin. See you in CT, which is currently being barraged with snow. Glorious.

Details

Wow, it has been two months since I posted last. I hope that gives you an indication of what the teaching world has been like so far. Yet, here on the quintessential lazy Sunday, I feel the nerve to do not much of anything, and be guilty for it too.

I left you with a summarizing of my trip over the summer. Now, as epic as that trip was, it was captured in many photos, maybe not reducing the need to relive it though words, but for time constraints and the mere elapse of time, many an event has taken place since August 15th.

The trip, to circumnavigate detail, was awesome. I saw a lot of this country and the areas that it is trying to preserve, that being much of the west and the country's national parks. Hoping along though central New York, around (and into) the Great Lakes then making a quick stop in good ole' Green Bay. From there, busting through Wisconsin, making an epic stop in Minneapolis for one night only, and then crashing into the Bad Lands of South Dakota at twilight was unforgettable, not to mention the lightning storm I was caught in camping out in the open prairie. I awoke in a dazed fury, hit in the face by rain and threw the tent in the front of my car, and before the wind blew me over, I crawled into the back seat and slept...uncomfortably.

From there, it was a national park parade. Badlands to the Crazy Horse monument, which was actually crazy...no really, look it up. Then onto the town of Deadwood, S.D. where I met some very lovely and accommodating ladies (I'll leave your thoughts to your thoughts, though all was kosher, I promise). After paying my respects to Wild Bill and Calamity Jane, though I stayed in there preferred hotel room (Where they got on their....business time) that evening, I moved onto Mt. Rushmore...wahoo.. and then over to wind cave national park, which is 150 or so miles of underground tunnel wahoo!! for reals.

After emerging from the cold caverns of the Earth, and then should have been gorged by a Buffalo, I cruised through southeastern Wyoming (where I saw a sign for a town with a population of...1), to then rolling into Rocky Mountain National Park where the Alpine Tundra be, with some sweet elk. Then onto Colorado National Monument, which was a smaller, more beautiful Grand Canyon-esque. Black Canyon of the Gunnison, which is just a sheer gash into the Earth of sheer glory. Stayed there for the evening, cruised on over to 4 corners, which is a plaque in the ground, and then through Payson and into my humble abode in Phoenix.

There is a certain element to pushing things off, in that sometimes, not all the time, they lose their inherent quality, much like the journey I took. But, it is also hard to clearly encapsulate an extensive experience as a whole...it must be broken down into it's individual parts and explored in detail.

At this point, I'm going to try and choose one thing, and go into the grandest of detail of it, regardless of all that takes place in life. I notice that I try to get it all, which severely depletes the value of what I'm talking about, which is basically the reason why I started doing this thing. And I guess that is something that can be said for life as well; try not to do it all at once. Do what you can when you can, but if you try and take it all on at once, it gets overwhelming, dilutes in value, and nothing is truly taken away from it. Besides, as I have taught my students, being vague and too general sucks. Details, details details.


Oh yeah, and watch out for this guy!