Great Basin Permaculture News

Permaculture in Las Vegas

Jessica Penrod — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 21:30:45 GMT

Thanks to website member and Madre Tierra planner Stefanie Milisits for writing this blog post!

You can find the post at this link:

http://www.colemanconcepts.com/permaculture-in-las-vegas/#comment-12

GBP featured in the cover story of this week's City Life!

Jessica Penrod — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 18:58:48 GMT

http://lasvegascitylife.com/sections/news/urban-farmers-spur-small-agricultural-renaissance-valley.html

Permie Movie Night 12/3 Rescheduled

Jessica Penrod — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 03:15:45 GMT

Permie Movie Night on Monday has been cancelled! We have not received the DVD in the mail yet. As soon as it arrives, we will reschedule. Our next event will be Saturday 12/8, a hands-on permaculture work day at the Permaculture Learning Garden. If we get 5 or more people out, we will finish up the cob bench once and for all!

See you soon,

Jessica

Somewhere in New Mexico Before the End of Time...

Jessica Penrod — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 17:34:20 GMT

Join us at Vegas Roots Community Garden this Saturday for a potluck and premiere of Somehwere in New Mexico Before the End of Time. The film follows a professor and his quest to prepare a community for a sustainable future. Topics include water harvesting and permaculture. Join us!

August Newsletter

Jessica Penrod — Thu, 09 Aug 2012 12:37:05 GMT

AugNL.docx

July Newsletter

Jessica Penrod — Mon, 02 Jul 2012 15:27:48 GMT

We're halfway there! June 2012

Jessica Penrod — Sun, 03 Jun 2012 22:53:37 GMT

Click here to download the PDF.

Earth Rising Headlines Benefit at Community Garden

Jessica Penrod — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 21:34:52 GMT

Thank you to Earth Rising and The Clydesdale for playing at our 2012 Earth Day Celebration!

http://www.lasvegassun.com/community/press-releases/348/

April 7 Water Catchment Workshop Changed to Cob Workshop

Jessica Penrod — Mon, 02 Apr 2012 01:54:56 GMT

Our cob bench is nearly finished! Please join us this Saturday at the garden for a muddy, foot-stomping time. Sun tea and snacks will be served!

We have postponed the water catchment workshop until June. This will give us time to gather donations and apply for the SOUP microgrant in May.

It’s Not a Fairytale: Seattle to Build Nation’s First Food Forest

Tiffany Whisenant — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 04:37:21 GMT

Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.

“This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project, tells TakePart. Harrison is working on construction and permit drawings now and expects to break ground this summer.

The concept of a food forest certainly pushes the envelope on urban agriculture and is grounded in the concept of permaculture, which means it will be perennial and self-sustaining, like a forest is in the wild. Not only is this forest Seattle’s first large-scale permaculture project, but it’s also believed to be the first of its kind in the nation.

“The concept means we consider the soils, companion plants, insects, bugs, everything will be mutually beneficial to each other,” says Harrison.

That the plan came together at all is remarkable on its own. What started as a group project for a permaculture design course ended up as a textbook example of community outreach gone right.

“Friends of the Food Forest undertook heroic outreach efforts to secure neighborhood support. The team mailed over 6,000 postcards in five different languages, tabled at events and fairs, and posted fliers,” writes Robert Mellinger for Crosscut.

Neighborhood input was so valued by the organizers, they even used translators to help Chinese residents have a voice in the planning.

So just who gets to harvest all that low-hanging fruit when the time comes?

“Anyone and everyone,” says Harrison. “There was major discussion about it. People worried, ‘What if someone comes and takes all the blueberries?’ That could very well happen, but maybe someone needed those blueberries. We look at it this way; if we have none at the end of blueberry season, then it means we’re successful.”

GBP's showing of "Dirt! The Movie" at Theatre7's Films That Feed festival

Tiffany Whisenant — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 04:33:33 GMT

http://www.filmmakersnotebook.com/061-tiffany-whisenant-dishes-the-dirt-at-films-that-feed/

Article published in La Voce January 2012 edition by Tiffany Whisenant

Tiffany Whisenant — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 04:31:24 GMT

It's a long way from the restaurants of Italy to my kitchen table in Las Vegas, but a love of wholesome food and a desire to improve the environment has connected the two. Now, I'm extending that line into my community through the practice of permaculture.

As an Italian-American, I grew up only knowing what it was to be a typical American. My brother and I hurried through our homework only to plunk ourselves in front of the television for hours. We took meals in front of the television, rarely talking to each other over the sounds of cartoons. We ate Cheerios® for breakfast, Kraft® Macaroni & Cheese for lunch, and foods ending in ® for dinner. This was our connection with food, and we saw very little problem with it.

However, when my brother was in the Army, he couldn’t stop talking about Italian food. He was exposed to the Slow Food movement, which resists the rise of fast food and the disappearance of local food traditions. He ate dishes made with fresh tomatoes and basil grown in the garden of the restaurant. Tasting truly fresh food, he wrote to inform me that I had no idea what good food was. He couldn’t have been more right.

Literally reading his letter while in my cubicle, munching on cookies I had gotten out of a vending machine, I realized that I had never truly experienced fresh food. What’s more, I had no experience with growing food save the pumpkin seeds I planted into a Dixie cup in elementary school. The picture my brother had painted was so vivid that I became determined to recreate a bit of his beautiful scenery at home.

I learned how to grow. Switching majors, I studied horticulture and was elated to find that I could never stop learning about plants. My quest to be a perpetual student had been fulfilled! I was hooked. Specifically, I became enthralled with where my food came from. I recoiled from the ugly truths of America’s industrialized food system, and vowed to offer my children and my community something better.

My good friend Jessica Penrod and I each started our own seeds and planted our first vegetable gardens at home. As a teacher with the Clark County School District, Jessica realized how disconnected many children are from their meals. She started a school garden and her school’s first garden club. She asked her students’ parents to only bring food to the classroom consisting of five ingredients or less. This helped Jessica keep her students connected with their food, and she could avoid explaining what maltodextrin is every time someone celebrated a birthday.

While shopping at Molto Vegas Farmer’s Market, Jessica and I marveled at the wonderful produce grown so close to home and indulged in the idea of starting a community garden. We envisioned a food forest, full of fruits and vegetables and rife with the possibility of education. We thought we could only reach that goal by diverting water from the mighty Colorado River, installing irrigation over every square inch. This was, from what I had learned, the only way to sustain such a place in one of the driest deserts in the world.

At this point, we met Peter Frigeri, owner of Gaia Flowers in downtown Las Vegas, where he sells flowers grown in an environmentally and socially responsible manner. Peter was hosting a class on making terrariums. Building these little enclosed plant environments was very inspirational; water lost from the soil is recycled in the container through condensation. After the terrarium was set up, it could be closed and would require no other inputs from us to sustain itself. What a wonderful concept! We discussed that this is really just an example of our water cycle, and that a sustainable system like this could be recreated to grow more than tiny mosses in a jar. Anybody could grow food this way, using the design concepts of permaculture. Lo and behold, our vision of a sustainable food forest was attainable.

Permaculture takes an approach similar to the terrarium; what is produced by one element of the system becomes useful for another element. For example, having a chicken around your garden could produce fertilizer for the plants grown there; fallen leaves from your grapevines become mulch for your soil. But this idea is larger than gardening. Permaculture, meaning ‘permanent agriculture’, also promotes sound ethics; caring for the earth, caring for people and sharing surpluses. Among other things, it promotes water resource management too. In a desert that receives no more rainfall than Baghdad, Iraq, conserving water is absolutely vital.

Peter, Jessica and I decided to learn more. We arranged a small group and began reading Bill Mollison’s Introduction to Permaculture. Taking it further, we started a demonstration garden at Tonopah Community Garden. In January of 2011, our group hosted the event, “Madre Tierra: An Introduction to Permaculture”, where Scott Pittman of the Permaculture Institute led 14 hours of educational sessions, teaching over fifty attendees how to build soil, catch water and much, much more. With so many interested people, we knew that the desire for people to be connected to their land and food was alive in Las Vegas.

This small group started in December of 2009 is today Great Basin Permaculture, a nonprofit dedicated to educating our dryland communities about the resources the desert has to offer. So far this year we have laid the groundwork for a food forest at Tonopah Community Garden, held fundraisers, and organized permaculture advocates throughout the southwest. The future holds much for us; we plan to build school gardens, be involved in city planning and continue our education efforts. The food we grow will be available for our community, as will our shared wisdom on how to treat the land. No matter if you’re in Italy or Las Vegas, food traditions and the ethics of permaculture are worthy of being kept alive so that we can all enjoy the abundance.

Apprentice Ecologist Post

Jessica Penrod — Sat, 23 Feb 2013 21:31:54 GMT

Thank you to Kaleb Hoeffgen for this thoughtful post!

http://www.wildernessproject.org/apprentice_ecologist/search.php?searchid=47206