Please join our local Earth Day celebrations: (1) Friday, April 22 from 11:00 am – 1:00 pm at the Grants Pass and Medford campuses of RCC, and (2) Saturday, April 23 from 1:00 – 6:00 pm at the Sugarloaf Community Association band shell in Williams.
In honor of Earth Day, we are sharing some of our favorite projects and articles on sustainability. You are invited to send photos, stories, articles, and other ideas to sustainableroguevalley@gmail.com.
PROJECTS:
The garden patch is a Hugelkultur garlic demonstration garden. Hugelkutur is a German form of putting woody material down inside a raised garden bed. (I use wood chips.) The woody material gradually decomposes and feeds fungi and earthworms, bringing nutrients to the plants and also retaining moisture so that it requires less watering.
Right across the fence from the garlic patch is our chicken yard. There you can see the chickens happily feasting on food waste scraps, which serve as a great supplement to the chickens’ regular organic pellet food. Reducing food waste is near the top of all the solutions to our climate crisis, because if you put food waste in the garbage it outgasses methane, one of the worst greenhouse gases. Instead chickens use it to make wonderful eggs and chicken manure, a great addition to any garden. – Jerry
I got inspired by the book Compost City (by Rebecca Louie) to try underground composting. It’s easy! Just dig a hole in the backyard, add rocks on the bottom for drainage, cut the bottom off a metal trash can, and drill a few holes. Throw in your kitchen and yard scraps, and turn it occasionally with a garden fork to keep it aerobic. A bungee cord for the lid keeps pests out. Now it’s easy to deal with kitchen scraps in way that reduces methane, restores healthy soil, and helps to retain soil moisture. I dug the hole near a new filbert seedling and hope that the nutrients will help nourish the baby tree. – Dorothy
The photo on the left is a late winter picture of our yard that has not been mowed in two full years. We are practicing “leave the leaves.” If you look closely you see that a number of small Oregon grapes have been planted as well as several wild currant bushes. There is a path made of wood chips as the grass does get high midsummer.
The photo on the right shows some camas bulbs coming up in their second year of living in a dedicated “no mow, leave the leaves” area of our yard. We are hoping that they will naturalize here, and I will say that they look pretty happy right now. – Ginger
ARTICLES:
Science News article – “The Roots and Impacts of the Climate Crisis” – 3/10/22 – https://www.sciencenews.org/article/climate-change-crisis-history-research-carbon-human-impact
Pacific Northwest Forest Climate Alliance article – “The Status of Science on Forest Carbon Management” – 3/9/22 – https://sustainableroguevalley.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/status-of-science-forest-carbon-management_030922f.pdf
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