We at Throop Learning Garden have wanted to be certified as a National Wildlife Federation certified wildlife habitat. We lacked a water feature, so Therese put out the call for birdbaths.
Enter Jim…

Jim showed up a few Sundays back with ideas and supplies to construct a hypertufa birdbath for us. He provided us with an impromptu reskilling that delighted us all!  The steps were simple, and all of us participated.

First he had us dig a flattish hole, a little larger than our birdbath would be. He mounded the disturbed soil in the center of the hole, to form the template for the birdbath. Next he flattened out a garbage bag over the mound to create a smooth surface. He mixed oxides with cement and had us paint decorations directly onto the bag. Then we packed the wet hypertufa mixure over the bag-covered mound. We added chicken wire into the hypertufa for added strength. Jim showed us how to ensure sturdy edges on the birdbath by crimping, like making a piecrust. Finally we sealed the whole creation with the sides of the garbage bag and buried it all under several inches of soil. We let it cure one week. The unveiling on June 30 revealed a simple, colorful container that far exceeded our initial expectations for a birdbath.

Jim will give a hypertufa reskilling on Saturday, August 24 from 9 – 11am at Throop Learning Garden. This will be followed by a potluck lunch. Watch for RSVP info. We will be asking for donations to cover materials. Everyone will go home with a hypertufa container.
 
Michael has been conducting Wednesday morning work parties this summer at Throop Learning Garden, meeting from 8:30 – 11:30am. Michael will be concentrating on infrastructure like irrigation, and the remaining lawn conversion, as well as the usual garden tasks.  Contact us for more information.

— January Nordman

Throop Learning Garden has exploded with an infestation of roly-polies! You know the critters: small, dark grey, trilobite looking crustaceans with many legs: pillbugs or armadillidae, have a voracious appetite. They consume many times their body weight in detritus and greens. They are capable of making lace from the most robust cucumber or lettuce leaves. Usually they are most welcome detritus removers, munching on fallen leaves. They are kept in check by predators like birds, beetles, and skunks. But when they have a population surge – watch out!

When it comes to garden pests, I am torn between a live-and-let-live stance and saving my harvest. When the environment cannot be balanced, eradication often means killing the pests. Therein lies the paradox of all gardens.

Balance is fleeting, as nature is never static. Harmony lies in an endless round of eating and being eaten – killing at its most primal. The reality is that all creatures kill to live: earthworms eat bacteria, aphids eat leaves, ants farm aphids, spiders eat ants, and so on up the food chain to us.

Congratulations to all our volunteers for your part in making the Throop Learning Garden a Green City honoree by the City of Pasadena!

Hard to top that, but the festivities continued the evening of the 21st and all day on Sunday the 22nd.

Saturday night, Throop Church screened  “A Place at the Table”, followed by a discussion led by Dr. Eric Walsh, director of the Pasadena Department of Public Health. The documentary deals with hunger and its many faces across the US.  The discussion centered around how we can end hunger in our community. This seemed like a continuation of the “Next Course” event organized by Mark Rice that took place earlier that day. Many ideas were expressed with the central question being, how do we connect the dots with habitat, food, and water conservation? We seem to be reaching critical mass with so many people addressing pieces of the issue of food security. The major gist is to encourage local gardens and expand education.

Pasadena declared a one-week moratorium on landscape watering the last week of February. This was a one-time event to repair infrastructure. But it serves as a reminder of our dependence on available-on-demand access to water. The idea that we can turn on a tap and receive an endless supply of potable water is a modern luxury. Ready access has allowed us to become wasteful and complacent about our most precious resource. Water is life, pure and simple.

We have essentially negated the possibility of regenerative, natural hydrological cycles and systems with our increasingly paved and degraded urban landscape. We currently treat rain as an unwanted guest, that should be drained away through pipes and conduits as quickly and efficiently as possible. Water policy has become a drainage issue rather than a conservation issue. This fundamental disconnect from our most basic resource is not sustainable at any level. We must break this pattern, in order to heal our landscapes and ourselves.

How do we invite water back into our environment and our lives?

The new year marks a turning point for NELA Transition/Throop Learning Garden. We have enjoyed success at creating a garden through community! We reveled in the transformation from weed patch to beautiful, productive garden. The exhilaration of the process propelled us to completion. We celebrated with a wider community of friends, neighbors, and city officials.
 
Now we face the next phase: the task of expanding and sustaining our garden and community through time. Now we envision our potential, endurance, and continued purpose. How can we best utilize and preserve this resource? How can we further develop and honor the community that has coalesced around the garden? How can we link our garden with other similar projects to form a viable biotic and community network?
 
Many ideas circulate. Sandy and Lucinda have excellent ideas on developing and coordinating garden volunteers. Rev. Tera brings new concepts for classes and community activities. Ginko has a long, interesting list of projected workshops. Mark offers the potential to link garden systems throughout the area. We have offers to work with various Pasadena city officials on a variety of projects. All these voices and many more will be vital to the garden’s flourishing. And as the garden flourishes, so will we!

—January Nordman

We near the winter solstice; the shortest day and longest night of the year. It is a time for introspection, being quiet, and being patient. The hard work of summer and fall have passed. The harvests grow smaller, but remain abundant. It is a time for resting in gratitude for what we have accomplished and what is, with a thought for visioning what could be.

We celebrated the garden dedication on November 16. We enjoyed our 100+ attendees, especially the cross pollination, as people from diverse arenas met and conversed with one another. Ideas were shared. New alliances were forged. New projects began to take shape. And people just enjoyed themselves.

We have been less active in the garden since then; planting a few winter crops, cleaning up after the marauding raccoons that visit nightly, pausing to reflect on how to move forward in the new year. I am partial to the pausing just now; maybe sitting on the beautiful bench Greg Marquez built for us and savoring the riotous splendor of the culmination of labor, community, and nature. The bench is a perfect vantage point to regain perspective, recharge the weary body, and retrieve the sense of beauty and wonder often lost in the shuffle of daily life.

Rev. Tera Little of Throop Church emailed me this tangible bit of evidence of the impact of the garden:

Our harvests have been bountiful this year, measured by bushel and heartspace.

Thanks to all who helped make this manifest.
— January Nordman

As we mark our first anniversary of the lawn conversion, we can count the milestones: covering the lawn with lasagna mulch, constructing the patio and terrace-walls, planting fruit trees in the food forest, planting the Cal Tech-donated Olive Tree, putting in the herb garden, and installing the raised-bed vegetable garden.

Beyond these milestones we constructed something far more precious: community. We forged new friendships and alliances, brought new skills and awareness to many people, built a habitat for birds, bees, and earthworms, and produced countless bushels of nourishing produce that we could share with a wide variety of folks.

While the garden alone will not ensure us food security, it is part of a path to more interdependent, healthy future.

Heartfelt thanks to all who participated.
— January Nordman