Neighborhood Harvesting - - Why Not?!

Too Far

Buying local; eating local; food miles. These buzz words fall under that politically correct banner that hovers over us before their reality in our future ultimately takes over.  Sort of like “green” or “renewable.”  

But these do refer to some of the upcoming lifestyle norms as fossil fuels peak, CO2 rises and the economy ceases to grow. The call to keep dollars localized at this point is sometimes a hard sell, but a necessary part for the transition.  

Not only are the national big box stores our traditional local interlopers, but every other item within said stores is made in China, Bangladesh, et. al.  As expected, this global operating design for commerce breeds unsustainability. It erodes local economy. It won’t last forever. 

[The other night we went to a newish restaurant which specializes in international beers -  I mean, like, 300 varieties.  As I sat at the bar facing the solid wall of foreign labels I envisioned every bottle there arriving via an ocean-going vessel.  Maybe voyages of 5,000 food miles?  Very fossil fuel intensive. And this is so ironic, given the variety of regional local breweries we enjoy.]

Mulberry Tree

But, even when we do transition to shopping locally-owned stores, buying veggies from CSA’s and putting in some backyard tomatoes of our own, there is still one really local food source omitted: Neighborhood fruits and nuts. Local urban harvests. Formally, this is referred to as the edible landscape. I prefer foraging; taking a good look around at trees and bushes for food that may be escaping our attention.

Fruit trees and bushes planted on private or public land are scattered all through the city. Many simply seeded themselves and took off.  Many were planted for landscaping purposes along streets, in front yards or in parks. 

It's sometimes assumed that most of these fruit and nut sources are reserved for local critters, and they do take their rightful share. However, there is enough for everyone, including bipeds.  In fact, a great amount of this potential local harvest actually falls and goes to waste every year.

Black Walnut Tree

The group FallingFruit.Org. maps out the following variety of nuts and fruit in the neighborhoods of the Madison area. Included are:

Apple, Blackberry, Black Raspberry, Black Walnut, Cherry, Chokeberry, Grape, Mulberry, Passionfruit, Peach, Pear, Plum, Quince, Raspberry, Serviceberry, Strawberry

The specific sites for these crops are submitted by neighbors and foraging enthusiasts. Each tree or bush is pinpointed and the fruit described. Check your neighborhood or, potentially, any neighborhood in the country/world!

Local group Madison Fruits and Nuts works to plant and harvest fruit, fresh and free. They have attempted coordination with the City of Madison to develop a more systematized format for planting fruit trees on public land.  Their map of existing trees also allows you to zero in on a neighborhood, then to an individual tree.

Cleaning and Sorting Mulberries

Ready for Winter

I have harvested in my own neighborhood over the past two years. Not much foraging, per se, but two trees have been enough to get me started with mulberries and black walnuts.  Each source is about .1 food mile away from home! As is common, neighbors who own these trees are grateful to have the fruit cleaned up and off their sidewalks and lawns.  (Black walnuts and mulberries can make an unacceptable mess, don’t you know...) 

De-husking Black Walnuts

Drying Walnuts

A little sorting and cleaning and freezing of fruit, and a little bit more labor for walnuts, gets me a store that takes me through winter dormancy!

Knowing Your Place

Cracking Nuts and Removing Meats

Local harvesting provides much more than sustenance. Actual foraging reinforces the essential concept of place; the community of nature and people we ought to be intricately acquainted with.  It's not just the cluster of houses and yards that streak by while driving. Walking and observing reveals the ecosystem of the neighborhood and, maybe, some personal face time with neighbors themselves! The more we understand the ecology of our place the more likely we are to understand the importance of all sorts of local interactions.

Ready for Toppings or Baking

Creating one more natural connection to this sense of place is essential for kids. Imagine the fruit and nuts that could be collected and processed by students from a local neighborhood...


Further Resources:

What I Learned From a Ten Mile Diet - Vicki Robin (exc. TED Talk!)
The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation

Yum! Madison Wants Fruit Trees

Neighborhood Fruit

Dane Buy Local

Sustain Dane

Wallpaper and Your Backyard

Unfortunately, a side effect of the "No Child Left Inside" movement is a growing fatigue of the commandment to get kids into the woods. This call for accessing nature has sometimes become the primary concern- into the woods, the parks, the ponds, the wetlands, the deserts, the beaches.


Are we inadvertently delineating Nature as "out there?" Do we designate natural spots in town so often that children infer Nature to be defined by a parcel of land? Must it be a reserved or preserved plot with undeveloped status (or as quasi-natural as we can get it)?  


Don't get me wrong, our conserved lands are learning labs of high value and need to be visited and studied. Let's not forget, however, that the natural world surrounds children all the time, and they need to identify this. This natural world is grossly disguised with blacktop and concrete or totally shut out via bricks and glass. Cultural shrouding has, all too often, wall-papered nature out. Even so, children need to be able to identify their surroundings as such: Nature that is always there, but sometimes culturally impeded.  


So, there is the common mindset that one's neighborhood and even backyard don't qualify as a strand of Nature. Sure, there are squirrels and buckthorn and waskely wabbits that eat Mom's hasta shoots. But that's still not legit. "It's just the backyard." Not necessarily Nature. 


Case in point: I have a small backyard with a few trees. As a somewhat seasoned birder, I've kept notes and tallies of bird sightings from many spots in North America. Guess where I finally settled in to watch the feathered ones. My backyard. Instead of gallivanting all over the state at 5:00 AM on spring mornings, I settled into an Adirondack chair behind the house with the binocs. Surprise... The little chirpers are there!  Many folks keep "yard records" and I now know why. It's not necessary to go "out" in search of nature.


Here's the list of sightings from the yard so far this calendar year - through May 13th.  (Technically my yard extends vertically in altitude to, say, 2,000 feet.)


Canada Goose
Turkey Vulture
Red-tailed Hawk
Peregrine Falcon (2 flyovers!)
Sandhill Crane

Cedar Waxwing

Ring-Billed Gull
Mourning Dove
Great Horned Owl
Chimney Swift
Red-Bellied Woodpecker
Downy Woodpecker
Hairy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Eastern Phoebe
Blue Jay
American Crow
Black-Capped Chickadee
Tufted Titmouse
White-Breasted Nuthatch
Red-Breasted Nuthatch
House Wren
Ruby-Crowned Kinglet
Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
Veery
American Robin
Gray Catbird
Cedar Waxwing (flock of 12)
Yellow-Rumped Warbler
Nashville Warbler
Chestnut-Sided Warbler
Northern Cardinal
Chipping Sparrow
White-Throated Sparrow
Dark-Eyed Junco
Brown-Headed Cowbird
House Finch
American Goldfinch
House Sparrow
Great-Crested Flycatcher


Thirty-nine species that will either stick around for the summer or migrate through to northern climes. And migration hasn't ended, by any means. I am thrilled with the anticipation and sightings all around me. Out the back door. I don't need to spend gasoline carbon by going off to "hotspots" around the state. This is a relatively new awakening.


We cannot neglect conserved land of any sort and must work to preserve every acre from developers. But, we must be mindful of every little bit of our natural environment, and challenge kids to do the same. (Check out a bird tracking program each winter from Cornell called FeederWatch.) What's in your backyard? What's in your friend's backyard? When is the tent going up in the backyard? Are we going on a snipe hunt in the backyard?


Further


We have also witnessed over the decades the housing development manifest destiny syndrome. We've named streets Deerpath Rd. and Hawk Crossing and Fox Run which, ultimately, becomes the death knell for said organism mentioned. If said organism, plus its coyote and turkey friends, happen to show up in said suburban setting we shoot and trap and fear until their sovereign territories are swallowed up. Is it any wonder neighborhoods are not considered a part of nature?




Walking a sidewalk to school or waiting at the bus stop is part of this backyard nature jurisdiction for kids. When slinging the backpack down "Badger Lane," there are multitudes of growing things to be observed throughout the seasons. (Phenology does creep into and between yards.) Kids need to get out of bed and out of the house without a rush, which can be accomplished. :-) With a slower, less crazed walk to the bus, they can take in natural surroundings that peek out through man-made structures: Sky, temperature, blooms, worms on the sidewalk, depth of snow, leaf piles, a new sound.


Otherwise, it's only wallpaper.

Past Lesson Plan: Consumer Imports Make Their Stand

I wasn't going to include lesson plans on this blog, but one comes to mind that gave me an "ah-hah!" moment a couple of years ago: Shrinking geography and growing energy usage.

As a part of getting the feel for continents and an exposure to their countries I have had kids check their own homes for tags and markings that show a manufacturing country of origin. Clothing, toys, kitchen items, etc. We usually assembled quite a list. But this particular time we polled 55 countries! This from a 4th grade class of 21, in the midwest. 

Canada, United States, Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Cuba, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico

Colombia,  Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina

Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Madagascar, Namibia

Sweden, Denmark, Germany, France, Italy, Greece, Russia

Turkey, Israel, Kuwait, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Brunei, Maylasia, Indonesia, Mongolia, Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, Marianna Islands, Philippines, 

 Australia

I certainly don't require 4th graders to memorize world countries - seven  continents is enough... But I think an exposure to the political units on these continents is important. Kids will have heard place names like "Thailand" and "Nigeria" and "Bolivia" and associate them with homes beyond our own. Other homes; other cultures. 


As we wrote our country names onto stickies and put them on the world map up front, I began to sense a geography surge. The products in these fourth grade homes all came marching from foreign ports, across and above the four major oceans. Thousands and thousands and thousands of miles on the water and in the air.

World Shipping Lanes

Imports. Energy intensive imports. Right there on our wall map: Products that were somehow outsourced for cheap and/or unjust labor or inexpensive materials. It's been going on for years, of course. But the amount of finite fuel used and emissions spewed simply to carry products from one part of the world to another is grotesque.  

Currently, I cannot go through a store without checking the origin of products. I am cursed and obsessed. Especially in big box stores. It used to be just an exercise in geographic distribution, but now I visualize miles and fuel. Not that I necessarily need all these products - there are hundreds of frivolous objects that don't contribute to my quality of life. But, someday in the relatively near future, these will start to disappear from our shelves.


Do we wean away from them voluntarily now, or wait for them to be yanked because fuel for such non-essentials is unavailable?


What will the shipping lane map look like in twenty years?


What will the clothing tags of 4th graders look like twenty years from now?

Why 100 Global Locations Are Highlighted In Photos

While browsing the magazine section at Borders I found a Newsweek Special Edition issue with nature photos. Thinking it was one of those end of the year Favorite Places photo spreads, I picked it up to see where people had traveled last year. One hundred places worldwide, to be exact.


But then the rest of the title rose up on the cover photo of a blue-green volcanic atoll in the Pacific:  “100 Places to Remember Before They Disappear".   

Now, that’s a bold title!  Though I knew pretty quickly that this was related to climate change, my next thought was that mainstream media had actually taken up this scenario. 

Newsweek International had, indeed, published this beautiful magazine from a book and the photo exhibition of the same title. All the photo locations have some probable upcoming fate due to climate change mechanisms. The original photo collection was based on sites noted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change data before the Copenhagen Conference last fall.  

The array of formats that have shown these 100 Places include the traveling photo exhibition, the hardcover book, the website and the newspaper stand magazine.  Check the project for the complete background, as well as the 100 gorgeous photos. The interactive world map is especially insightful.

Fareed Zakaria, Newsweek International Editor, points out that the world sites represented by the photos all take on their own peculiar set of climate change challenges.  Each occupies a “narrow ecological niche.”   Population distributions inherit a variety of climate patterns related to sunlight and rain and winds and temperature.  

The places photographed are not about policy or science.  They are about the people and habitations as we know them and appreciate them now.  They are a reminder that there is a world out there beyond our own daily lives.  Climate change becomes a story about beautiful places to preserve.

As usual, it is up to the “developed” world to make itself aware of cultures and the lands beyond its own.  Ethically, we owe the rest of the world in terms of climate change. 

I am awed that this project has taken off worldwide.  I applaud the courage to reveal places of challenge and the issue of the climate change charge.    

“UNLESS,” said the Lorax.

Pull Down The Map

I admit it. I was a geography major. I also admit that for a time I could not remember which side was which on the island of Hispaniola: Dominican Republic...west? Haiti...east?  Hmmm...

Of course, geography is more than maps. It’s a complex view of the spatial relationships among natural landscapes and systems, and the distribution and movements of people within these landscapes. But connecting the geographic dots on a map is ultimately so important to kids' abstract thinking; the first step to eventually connecting the cultural dots. 


Pull down the map. I know that many of us yank down that wall map at a moment’s notice, whether making a reference in a storybook or checking on where Johnny will be visiting Grandma. In Wisconsin, our city map makes repeat performances in the 3rd grade, the Wisconsin map in 4th, and the USA map in 5th. But along with these themes we need to implant, more globally, places for people and places for happenings on a regular basis. Continents and oceans are the guide points, of course, and we do a good job with these land and the water masses. Further detailed references, though, will make students versatile beyond the C’s and O’s.

We in the United States have some tunnel vision when it comes to other parts of the world. We are very large, wealthy, relatively peaceful and sometimes self-absorbed. We may have the opportunity for overseas travel or study, but usually happenings in other regions of the world are just small flashes of media bytes. We aren’t anchored well to other places and peoples. 

On the other hand, the population of Britain is much better versed in world geography and, hence, world issues. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) focuses daily on world regional news from all continents. Ironically, it is because of Britain’s long former history as a colonial power on said continents that school children and adults have more references and connections to the planet. The British Empire may have, at least, given its current students more proficient global consciousness. They aren't alone.

Haiti is our neighbor in the Caribbean; one of many island neighbors. It’s grabbed our attention because of the destruction of 7 on a scale of 10. Haiti is now on our mental map. The same seems to happen with hurricanes and tsunamis. The geographic radar kicks in at times of disaster. Sad but true.

Though this island neighbor is across a stretch of water from the United States, Haiti is close in proximity. Port-au-Prince is 713 miles from Miami, as the crow flies. That is less than the driving distance from Madison to either Washington, DC or Denver. Yet, for the most part, we don’t know too much about the poorest country in the hemisphere. (Ref)

~ first independent state in the Caribbean due to a slave revolt in 1804-

~ French is spoken in Haiti-

~ the US occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1939-
~there are over 500,000 Haitian-Americans living in the US-

So, this week we and media are surprised by the sheer number and density of citizens living in Haiti's capital, the lack of infrastructure, and the fact that “rebars” hadn’t be used to reinforce the cinder block and concrete structures. (Why this obsession with rebars?) The country has been deforested, leading to a wariness that further shocks will trigger further landslides. 

The point is this: we often don’t reach out for information about other places and cultures, even our neighbors. There are 195 countries on Earth, all with history and culture. As the planet gets smaller and more interdependent during the pinch for limited resources, the task for all of us will be gaining the knowledge and understanding of other peoples. Pull the map for students - every chance you get.

Here is a most compelling gallery of photos from Haiti this week.

Donate to the children of Haiti now.