A Special Thank from the Ananda Harvest Team to all of you who Helped Us Reach Our Goal on Kickstarter!!!!!!!!!!

Thank You!!!

]]> http://blog.anandaharvest.org/2010/02/805/feed/ 1 http://blog.anandaharvest.org/2010/02/snow-load/ http://blog.anandaharvest.org/2010/02/snow-load/#comments Thu, 11 Feb 2010 05:59:36 +0000 Matt http://blog.anandaharvest.org/2010/02/snow-load/

Winter’s a good time for indoor games as we rest up and get ready for spring planting.  And with Valentine’s day around the corner, we figured, why not play ping pong and show some love for your farmer instead of buy lots of stuffed teddies?

So we’re hosting a Ping Pong Fundraiser this Friday at New York’s only private ping pong club and we’d love you to stop by!

It’s a final push for our kickstarter cabin fundraiser – there are only 6 days to go so if you haven’t donated, do it now! If you’ve already donated, we thank you from the bottom of our harvest baskets. All tickets from the Love Thy Farmer event will go toward the Ananda Harvest Cabin Project. Either way, you should come out, have some fun and learn to love your farmer!

The event will include everything from a doubles ping-pong tournament to DJs, and more!

Won’t you be our Valentine?

TICKETS: Advance Ticket Donation on kickstarter of $20 or more!) Door price ( $25.00) http://lovethyfarmer.eventbrite.com/

WHEN: February 12th, 2009 8pm- 11:30pm

WHERE: SPiN New York 48 East 23rd Street New York, NY 10010

MORE INFO: http://lovethyfarmer.eventbrite.com/

Jean Pain (1930 – 1981) was a French innovator who developed a compost based bioenergy system that produced 100% of his energy needs. He heated water to 60 degrees celsius at a rate of 4 litres a minute which he used for washing and heating. He also distilled enough methane to run an electricity generator, cooking elements, and power his truck. This method of creating usable energy from composting materials has come to be known as Jean Pain Composting, or the Jean Pain Method.

Some videos of the method:

Maryam Henein (friend) and Geo Langsworthy have made this incredible documentary. I am also looking to see Gunther Hauk in the film. Gunther is a famous biodynamic farmer and beekeeper who was one of my mentors.

Feb 4 in the Village. See below:

http://www.thehoneybeeconservancy.org/Events.html

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=248125679489&index=1

Bring  your friends!

This is one of the greatest mysteries to me.

If they do use rows they are either like this.

Mad narrow. Or like this.

A huge row that looks way too huge to reach across. I just can’t figure out how they do this. The only thing I can think is that they walk on their “beds” as they plant and then again when they harvest. I don’t see another way.

I feel like this lady from Cornell.

Confused with lanes (doesn’t she look a little bewildered?), stuck reiterating something Eliot Coleman probably got from Europe 20 years ago.  In case some of you are wondering why I’m mentioning this.  It’s because I like to grow the most food per area (short of turning into an agro-business monster).  The Ashram has usable land crammed between trees.  Chop Chop….  NO! Not the trees!  It also seems to be the best defence against weeds.

A friend just passed me this excellent article from Dmitry Orlov on the fallacy of “community creation”, two words which certainly get slung around carelessly in my corner of the world. I’m particularly impressed by his observations of the diminished role of women in community building. I’m too young to really know this firsthand, but apparently they were THE community builders — and that makes sense. Ever since reading H. L. Mencken’s In Defense of Women I’ve been thinking about this exact thing in similar terms. Completely non-PC, all of it, but that’s probably telltale in and of itself. Ladies, what’s your take?

Astyk makes the excellent point regarding the destruction of community through overwork and the herding of women out of the home and into the workplace. Women can’t just be (unless they are rich) — they have to have an occupation, and the default occupation — “homemaker” — carries a bit of a stigma. Women have always been the backbone of any community, and the regimentation of women’s lives was a brilliant move in the direction of totalitarian consumerism, because it allowed relationships even within the family, such as child-rearing, to be commercialized. Once all social interaction is centered around consumption patterns, community as a notion becomes little more than an advertising gimmick, and self-organizing properties of society become restricted to pursuing the latest commercial fashion.

If you fancy, do read the full article at ClubOrlov here.

So after Matt & Dave’s glowing reviews, I finally got ahold of a copy of Eliot Coleman’s Winter Harvest Handbook and have this morning already devoured half of it. Really a remarkable, accessible work that I recommend to everyone!

I already want to know even more about the history of it so I did a little research based on the bibliography and found a few things that might be of interest:

“The Profitable culture of vegetables for market gardeners” by Thomas Smith

“Fields, factories and workshops: or, Industry combined with agriculture” by Petri Aleks Kropotkin

“Manuel pratique de la culture maraichère de Paris” by J. G. Moreau, J. J. Daverne (Français)

A close friend and fellow farmer of Ananda Harvest Emma Hacohen decide to launch

Don’t Be a Bum

A socially conscious venture where 50% of the proceeds of her pillows go to a different non-profit each month.

See her interview below with two fellow farmers  Farming Your Mind, Thanks Emma!  Keep up the great work….

by Emma

I recently read that delving into 8 minutes of deep meditation daily can increase ones brain size. Although 8 minutes may seem like an easy feat, meditation is one of the hardest exercises to conquer… for me at least.

For those of us still struggling to ignore our overly stimulated minds and reach a sense of heightened relaxation, The Ananda Ashram, located in Monroe, NY, offers a perfect balance of yoga, meditation and now FARMING!

If your mind resembles an erratic maze, with your thoughts running amuck, chances are, silencing those thoughts will prove to be like a maze with no end.

Some yogis use chanting as a way to focus ones energy on repetitive mantras in order to calm the mind.  These yogis use farming.

I was introduced to The Ananda Harvest by one of the founders of the farm, David Gottlieb. Gottlieb with fellow founding farmer Jerri Chou, among others, saw an opportunity to start a farm, escape from the city, and help decrease the amount of money the Ashram was spending on food.

I got a chance to chat with the two Brooklynites and here’s what they said:

Why did you decide to start the Ananda Harvest Project?
We didn’t even know we WERE starting it at first. It all started when a group of us started visiting Ananda. It was this amazingly peaceful place on such beautiful land. We started wondering why it wasn’t being used to produce anything and got to thinking how great it would be to start a farm and grow veggies on the land! We started building the idea and then began the actual garden with friends. It’s been a beautiful exercise, not only in body, but community, and personal growth.

Who is involved?
There’s a group of us (mostly creative, eco/socially conscious people from the city). We’re programmers, communicators, designers, etc. But it would never have been possible if not for the original farmer of the land, Dave Washburn, and his son, Matt, who have been holding down the fort up there!

What can we expect to see in 2010?
There’s a lot coming. There’s been so much excitement! We’re planning on building an additional cabin for people to stay in and holding a workshop on how to build that cabin! We’ll be planting in the spring and expanding our growing to more areas of the Ashram. We’re also looking to host all sorts of courses including permaculture, beekeeping, etc. It’s going to be a jam packed season of growing!

Is there any synergy between the farm and the yogis that visit the Ashram? If not, do you plan on creating any?
Definitely. The whole concept is based on meditating with your hands. So many of us need a place of peace and where we can create something tangible. That’s what this farm is for us, a meditation. Not to mention that all yogis are welcome to pick up a pick and help dig and we’ll be encouraging those who visit to partake in the amazing and extensive series of courses at Ananda.

How can we help?
We’re always looking for help, supporters, or just visitors. For more information you can check out anandaharvest.org and sign up for our newsletter. Or feel free to send us an email at hello@anandaharvest.org.

Answer’s Contributed by David Gottlieb and Jerri Chou
Founding Farmers at Ananda Harvest
www.anandaharvest.org <http://www.anandaharvest.org>

While plenty of city schools, from elementary to secondary, teach students about environmental issues like endangered species or global warming, places like the Green School put an overwhelming emphasis on civic involvement.

The students are encouraged to delve into local issues that may affect them and their families, like contamination in waterways like the Gowanus Canal, water quality or the razing of low-scale housing.

“You can’t have a kid in a violent neighborhood and say, ‘Let’s talk about the polar bear,’ ” said Karali Pitzele, one of the school’s two co-directors.

Across the nation, the range of green schools form a fledgling network, with some of them benefiting from state grants and mandates to incorporate environmental education into the curriculum.

Click here to read the article at The New York Times

This short photo essay is absolutely beautiful, and makes me want to build a glass beehive. Anyone know if that is possible, or if it would actually be damaging to the bees even if it were out of direct sunlight?

From fizzyenergy.com:

A bell jar was placed on top of a mini hive and bees from the nucleus started to create foundation of a hive in the jar. Once the foundation is laid, the bees work in masses to form the rest of the hive.

Click on the link below. It is a video of our first weekend at the ashram. We escaped the concrete jungle and enjoyed the pleasures of nature, water and the silence at the ashram, but most importantly we shared and learned more about permaculture.

Ananda Harvest Summit from Seema Shah on Vimeo.

Please note that I did not capture the educational sessions that were taking place during the weekend. I can share with you the relaxing and beautiful moments from the weekend with my first time video editing skillz off of iMovie.

Reposted from Johnny’s Seeds (not sure how I missed this?):

USDA TO LAUNCH HIGH TUNNEL PILOT STUDY TO INCREASE AVAILABILITY OF LOCALLY GROWN FOODS

3-Year Project To Verify Effectiveness Of High Tunnels In Natural Resource Conservation

WASHINGTON, Dec. 16, 2009 – Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan today announced a new pilot project under the ‘Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food’ initiative for farmers to establish high tunnels – also known as hoop houses – to increase the availability of locally grown produce in a conservation-friendly way. Merrigan and other Obama administration officials highlighted opportunities available for producers in a video posted on USDA’s YouTube channel, which shows high tunnels recently installed in the White House garden.

Perhaps this might add validity for some of you to the notion of setting up quick hoops. Me, I’m starting to reconsidor. I wonder if Michelle Obama had to fight as hard to bury the EMT hoops in the ground. This shit is driving me bananas. I’m starting to think cold frames was a better idea. Anyone know where we can get old sliding glass doors from? That would be an ideal size pane to use for a coldframe. How bout 3/4″ to 1″ diameter footing pins 3 ‘ or more? The wider diameter footing pins might make it easier to bury the 3/4″ EMT. Currently I’m using 1/2″ to 3/4″ pins, pounded in to the ground, and then yanked out to create the hole.

John Jeavons Look this guy up. Along with Alan Chadwick, Jeavons is one of the pioneers of French Biointensive Gardening. (Bio for Biodynamic). His books are amazing. I am planning to go to the conference if anyone is interested.

He will be presenting a one-day GROW BIOINTENSIVE Sustainable Mini-Farming Workshop at Treys Hall on the Douglass Campus at Rutgers University.

The workshop offers an excellent opportunity to acquire a wealth of information on the most efficient gardening method we know. This information has been gathered from over thirty-five years of research, and is currently in use in over 130 countries around the world.

John Jeavons has been the Director of the GROW BIOINTENSIVE Mini-Farming program for Ecology Action since 1972. He is the author of  How to Grow More Vegetables and Fruits, Nuts, Berries, Grains, and Other Crops Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine, the primer on sustainable Biointensive Mini-Farming, which is currently available in English, Spanish, German, French, Arabic, Hindi and Russian.

Keynote at NOFA-NJ January 30th

These guys seem like the are doing it swell over in Pine Island, NY. Only about 20 minutes drive from Ananda Ashram. It would be another local farm to check out I think. Sounds like they have some type intimate dining experience as well…

Apparently the folks over at Stone Circle Farm sell these machines.

I discovered the transplanter while living in Japan a few years ago. I was
so excited about it that I not only decided to buy one and bring it back but
also made arrangements with the company to import them because they are so
well-suited to small farms.

From The Feedbag, here’s a great piece about the problems that small farms face today, featuring Windfall Farms in Montgomery, New York. Thanks to Matt for the find!

My good friend Ray (he’s kind a melancholic type of guy) just sent me this link about the winter solstice.

http://www.chiff.com/home_life/holiday/winter-solstice.htm

It’s kind of cheesy but I found myself liking it a lot. I think I might
have the SAD disorder right now. 40 mins till the solstice!

And the video is funny, with the Enya music..

Wars of the future will be fought over water as they are over oil today, as the source of human survival enters the global marketplace and political arena. Corporate giants, private investors, and corrupt governments vie for control of our dwindling supply, prompting protests, lawsuits, and revolutions from citizens fighting for the right to survive. Past civilizations have collapsed from poor water management.

Check out the trailer for Blue Gold: Water Wars

A beautiful idea which has long been needed — I know you can’t wait for the iPhone App!

http://whatisfresh.com/

http://whatisfresh.com/

Hard to believe how easy it really is to solve our climate and pollution problems. Put the planet back to a more natural state and it fixes itself!! It is funny how as humans we tend to complicate a beautifully simple process. Watch this short video.

The Northeast Organic Farmers Association Conference is coming up in Saratoga Springs, Jan. 22-24, 2010 (pre-event registration ends Jan. 8, 2010). Check out the schedule [PDF]!

We had our first real snow of the season at Ananda. While most of us in the city dread the cloudy skies, this one was a sight for sore eyes. Gleaming white, fluffy — it was the perfect snow. A group of us worked through the actual storm moving rocks and gravel to build the access road for the new cabins to be built. (Though there was joking about escaping from the gulag, I don’t know another bunch of folks that’s has had that much actually working in the snow).

We talked in the one cabin already there about future plans for the garden over hot cups of tea. Then down to the cafeteria for an amazing macrobiotic meal and to warmed up some more to tea and soup — getting us warm enough for a post-meal snow ball fight!

The snow lightened up for a beautifully bright evening of meditation (Joan, one of the oldest women at Ananda who helped start the ashram said it was the most beautiful she has ever seen the place).

After a bit of banjo playing and merry making with new and old friends over a roaring fire, the guys went out to clear the snow off the makeshift hoop houses we have up to protect the still baby veggies (Matt and Dave are going to Maine next weekend to learn a little more about winter gardening. Serendipitously, our friends Jose, Seth and Stephanie stayed with the expert on the stuff while they were up in Maine last year!)

In the morning, we woke up to the above scene. The kind of quiet where you can hear the snow fall and your foot steps crunch. The veggies looked a little cold this morning but the snow might actually help keep them warm and by 11 am the sun was going strong and melting much of the snow.

All in all, a pretty beautiful weekend.

Eric Toensmeier Tours His Backyard Perennial Food Garden and teaches us that with a little know how, we can change the way we look at “yard work”. He is producing delicious, healthy food nearly year round in a relatively small space.

More videos in this series are available at Permaculture & Regenerative Design News

Wow. Once again file under “severe nature magic”. This BBC video link is a must-watch.

I sadly wasn’t able to find much more information in English about this amazing vine, but a Google Translation of the Spanish Wikipedia page seems to indicate that it is a type of cucumber in the Cucurbitaceae family and thus related to melons, gourds and, well, other cucumbers.

The seeds, which are produced by a football-sized pod, can glide hundreds of metres across the forest. That ensures that the seeds fall far from their parent, giving the next generation of vines a head start. A BBC team team captured the film of the gliding seeds for the natural history series Life.

Well, all apologies for yet another post about young Eliot Coleman, but as my good friend Dave G would put it, this stuff is pretty much blowing my domepiece right the hell off:

From Chelsea Green (who hopefully won’t mind me cribbing this great information):

Three Basic Components

The winter harvest, as we practice it at Four Season Farm, has three components: cold-hardy vegetables, succession planting, and protected cultivation.

Cold-hardy vegetables are those that tolerate cold temperatures. They are often cultivated out of doors year-round in areas with mild winter climates. The majority of them have far lower light requirements than the warm-season crops.

The list of cold-hardy vegetables includes the familiar—spinach, chard, carrots, scallions—and the novel—mâche, claytonia, minutina, and arugula. To date there are some thirty different vegetables—arugula, beet greens, broccoli raab, carrots, chard, chicory, claytonia, collards, dandelion, endive, escarole, garlic greens, kale, kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, mâche, minutina, mizuna, mustard greens, pak choi, parsley, radicchio, radish, scallions, sorrel, spinach, tatsoi, turnips, watercress—which at one time or another we have grown in our winter-harvest greenhouses. (The most promising vegetables, those with which we have the most experience, are discussed individually in chapter 8.) The eating quality of these cold-hardy vegetables is unrivaled during the cooler temperatures of fall, winter, and spring. They reach a higher level of perfection without the heat stress of summer.

Succession planting means sowing vegetables more than once during a season in order to provide for a continual harvest. The choice of sowing dates, from late summer through late fall, and winter into spring, keeps the cornucopia flowing. In midwinter the vigorous regrowth on cut-and-come-again crops provides the harvest while late-fall-and-winter-sown crops slowly reach productive size.

We begin planting the winter-harvest crops on August 1, the start of what we call the “second spring.” We continue planting through the fall. The reality of sowing for winter harvest is that the seasons are reversed from the usual spring-planting experience. Day length is contracting rather than expanding; temperatures are becoming cooler rather than warmer. Success in maintaining a continuity of crops for harvest through the winter is a function of understanding the effect of shorter day length and cooler temperatures on increasing the time from sowing to harvest. Thus the choice of precise sowing dates for fall planting is much more crucial than for spring planting. The dates are also very crop specific, and I’ll explain this in more detail in chapter 4.

We aim for a goal of never leaving a greenhouse bed unplanted, and we come pretty close. Within twenty-four hours after a crop is harvested, we remove the residues, re-prepare the soil, and replant. We keep careful records so as to follow as varied a crop rotation as possible.

Protected cultivation means vegetables under cover. The traditional winter vegetables will often survive outdoors under a blanket of snow. Since gardeners can’t count on snow, the best substitute is shelter of an unheated greenhouse. Many delicious winter vegetables need only that minimal protection.

Our winter-harvest cold houses are standard, plastic-covered, gothic-style hoop houses. The largest of our houses are 30 feet wide and 96 feet long. They are aligned on an east-west axis. For the most part the cold houses need only a single-layer covering of UV-resistant plastic, whereas heated greenhouses benefit from two layers, which are air-inflated to minimize heat loss.

The success of our cold houses seems unlikely in our Zone 5 Maine winters where temperatures can drop to –20˚F (–29˚C). But our growing system works because we have learned to augment the climate-tempering effect of the cold house itself by adding a second layer of protection. We place floating row-cover material over the crops inside the greenhouse to create a twicetempered climate. The soil itself thus becomes our heat-storage medium, as it is in the natural world.

Ridiculously cool. Grab a copy of Eliot’s book The Winter Harvest Handbook here: [amazon.com]

More cool press for Ananda Harvest rolls in, this time from the always charming Brooklyn Based:

A group of Brooklynites is getting back to the land in a way that goes beyond rooftops, fire escapes and community gardens, and they want to bring you with them. Ananda Ashram, just an hour out of the city in Monroe, NY, had an operational farm in the 1970s, and started cultivating the earth again this summer after a long fallow period. A crew of self-described urban hippies from Brooklyn, including Matteo Bueno, Jerri Chou, Wendell Davis, Dave Gottlieb, and Stephanie Redlenner (who is from Brooklyn in spirit) organized an agricultural revitalization this summer. Jerri Chou answers some questions for us about Ananda Harvest.

Read the rest on brooklynbased.net!

Found on Chelseagreen.com:

In this video, Eliot Coleman, author of the recently released The Winter Harvest Handbook: Year-Round Vegetable Production Using Deep Organic Techniques and Unheated Greenhouses, presents the story of the winter harvest. He speaks about how he came to become the nation’s leading four-season farmer and the shock of the industrial establishment when his all-organic cold-weather growing methods proved to be not only possible—but more productive than “traditional” (chemical) methods.

Reblogged from BoingBoing.net:

Recent research suggests that spending time in nature actually makes people “more caring.” The studies, by University of Rochester psychologists Netta Weinstein, Andrew Przybylski, and Richard Ryan, showed that people exposed to nature (well, mostly slideshows of nature) put a higher value on intrinsic aspirations, such as doing good in the world or having meaningful relationships, and lower value on extrinsic aspirations, like making a lot of cash or admired by many people. Now as I mentioned, the participants didn’t actually live outdoors for a while or anything as part of the study. Rather, in three of the studies, they looked at images of either the built environment or landscapes and such. And in the fourth, some participants were assigned to work in a laboratory either with or without plants around them. Then they answered a series of questions or were given tests of generosity. “The result? People who were in contact with nature were more willing to open their wallets and share. As with aspirations, the higher the immersion in nature, the more likely subjects were to be generous with their winnings.”