Thanks everyone for inviting me to contribute for the first time to this venerable and one of the most beautiful corners of the Daily Kos multiverse.
Before everyone gets agitated about this "political" title, don't worry, we're not dragging politics into the garden today. But today's blog is about a government service most people don't know about that's of direct interest to gardeners and anyone who cares about conservation, the environment and eating healthy food.
I think that applies to most of us here.
Most folks don't know that every county in the United States is part of a Natural Resources Conservation Service, US Department of Agriculture Conservation District promoting not just good farming practices, but also what they call "a healthy yard for homeowners." The agency brochure shown here, put together with the help of the Audubon Society, promotes bird, bat and butterfly friendly yards.
The brochure recommends flowers as well as feeders for birds, birdbaths or ponds, and particularly native plants. I'll tell you much more about your conservation district and its promotion of native plants below.
And before anyone accuses me of being a government agent promoting their own agency, I'm far from that. After living in China for over 27 years, and seeing that country's descent into some of the worst air, water and land pollution in modern times, as well as its drastic efforts to clean up the mess, my wife and I "retired" to WA state and started up an organic farm. We simply couldn't see ourselves playing golf in retirement on the toxic wasteland that is really what most golf courses are. And as an academic I did one of the first comprehensive surveys of public opinion on environmental issues in China, with a survey conducted both in Hong Kong and in Shenzhen in 2001. For anyone curious about that and a great deal of other environmentally focused research I and others have done in China, you can go here: http://civic-exchange.org/
So, rather than golf, my wife and I put together a farm plan with the help of the local Whatcom County Conservation District. We designed, built, and took occupancy of our very environmentally efficient house in January 2017.
We're holding our first environmental tour in June this year with the help of a local pro-environment umbrella group called Sustainable Connections. Every year Sustainable Connections hosts a public tour of houses with environmentally friendly landscaping and/or green building features. The idea is a lot like this blogging group--to share what someone else has done with their gardens (and houses) to conserve resources and improve the environment.
This is the blurb for the environmental tour of our house and landscaping:
"Harvest House is the United State's most northerly Net-Zero Energy residence certified by the Living Building Challenge Net-Zero certification program of the International Living Future Institute. The Mt. Baker scenic view house includes an agri-tourism focused A.D.U., a large deck overlooking a patio, a separate canning kitchen, cold storage pantry and wine cellar in the full basement as well as media room and a solarium that heats the whole house on sunny days in winter. The house takes full advantage of natural lighting and prevailing winds, allowing winter sun to penetrate deep inside but providing cool shade for summer. A hidden bank of Phase Change Material soaks up heat from the solarium and makes the in-floor radiant heat unnecessary much of the winter while cooling the house in summer.
"Using modified conventional building techniques, the 5,000-plus square foot modern farmhouse style, all electric structure achieved a near passive house standard of 1 Air Change per Hour (ACH) at $170 per square foot. Constructed on a just under 10-acre parcel (part of an old farm), the owners are developing a highly energy efficient "low carbon local produce" organic farm incorporating aquaculture and seasonal aquaponics in ponds, aquaponics in greenhouses, market gardens, select fruits and edible landscaping as well as fowl production. Its 18kWh solar array designed by EcoTech Solar provides all power used on the farm. It is also the first "Koch-Zero" certified house (no fossil fuel/heavily polluting Koch brothers owned construction materials were used in the build).
"Multi-generational, multi-use (commercial and residential) and aging in place design obviate need for remodeling to fit many different types of residency and use. The solar array, farm-integrated edible landscaping, open floor plan, basement canning kitchen and farm product storage areas that are naturally cooled, high vaulted ceilings and abundant natural lighting and air circulation contribute to a design that "harvests" wind, water, sunlight and soil and gives Harvest House its name."
If you look closely at the photo, you can see some of the edible landscaping in the deliberately small front yard. The patio (the other side of the solarium) is surrounded by bird friendly, native wildflowers bought from the Conservation District's annual native plants sale. Your local district probably has a native plants sale every year too. It's very much worth looking up!
Every Conservation District is "no charge, non-regulatory" and solutions oriented. They do farm planning, education on best practices farm management, habitat and restoration advice and assistance, and lots of help with various aspects of farming, including helping small farmers find resources and grants for conservation practices such as putting in hedgerows. They helped me put in a hedgerow at the south end of our farm, in fact. They hold workshops, do fish habitat work and visit classrooms leading hands-on class projects in these aspects. While government funded in large part, each district also depends on donations and volunteers. Every district offers opportunities to volunteers to help in water sampling, planting parties, plant sales and other events. Just go to your local district website to find out more. Usually, the website is [the name of your county]cd.org (for example mine is whatcomcd.org).
The native plant sale is probably one of the best ways to find low maintenance, bird and bee friendly plants for your yard. This year's WCD sale was held at the local community college. The photos show their tent and displays, and you can see some folks loading up on very reasonably priced native plants and trees. We picked up more wildflowers, evergreen huckleberries, twinberries and some vine maples to provide some shade and color to our ponds and some ground cover plants to go on the pond berms for erosion control.
Your conservation district may also have a small farm expo every year. If you're interested in what small farmers in your area are doing, and in supporting them, check it out. Supporting small, local farmers, particularly the organic and certified natural farmers, does a great deal to help us lessen both carbon and chemical pollution.
This year's Whatcom County Conservation District Small Farm Expo featured a keynote talk by Professor David R. Montgomery of the University of Washington. He gave a talk on dirt, which turns out to be far more important than you might think. While his book by that title focuses on the history and effects of soil erosion and loss of fertility, he became interested in the topic when his wife, a biologist, and he bought a house in Seattle and worked to transform barren dirt in their yard into productive garden soil.
His personal experience with turning dirt into soil (the opposite of his research on how civilizations turned rich soil into barren dirt) led him to want to know more about whether what he and his wife did in their personal garden was happening on a larger scale. And he wanted to know if it was a viable approach to commercial farming. As the next slide shows, he found out a lot, and what he discovered--that rebuilt healthy soil farming could match conventional yields with far less oil and chemical inputs--is extremely important for many reasons to all of us, farmer or not.
The final slide I wanted to show from his talk includes principles that apply to any of us gardeners. In your own vegetable gardens, it's important to disturb the soil as little as possible, to plant different plants in a spot from one year to the next (e.g., never plant tomatoes in the same place every year), and to never leave your garden spot bare over winter.
To close out this week's Saturday Garden blog, here's a picture of our conservation district native bird and bee friendly wildflower mix in bloom. We make sure the cats don't disturb the birds. The bees tend to defend themselves very well from cats--Meimei in the foreground is very deliberately ignoring them while Bobo is giving them a wide berth. The buzzing from the bees among these flowers was so loud you could hear it from 50 feet away. It's the sound of nature healthy and at work producing honey and pollinating the plants and fruits that feed and delight us.
In my mind, government is about management, which is more about nurturing, guiding, planning, preparing and organizing (all familiar gardening tasks) than about power, which is what politics is about. America is an experiment in self-government, in what de Toqueville noted as Americans' amazing penchant to organize voluntarily to solve problems, and our Conservation Districts are one of the wonderful ways we do that.
So have you volunteered to help your local district or taken advantage of its services? Have any of you invited government into your garden?