Author: jennynazak

Post I just saw in a gardening group:

Any advice for veg garden starting/maintenance for when you’ve got nothing in the tank? When I get done working my shifts I’m exhausted for days it seems.

My take (heavily influenced by permaculture design principles and by my own tendency to be lazy):

Start small. Micro, even! Like, just a tiny bed maybe 4×4. Or even just one pot growing 2-3 greens or lettuces you like.

You can always expand as time & energy permits, and as your successes fuel you to do more.

And, very important for your energy & sanity level (as well as health of the plants) — put the garden pot or bed as close as you possibly can to the main door you use to walk in & out of your house.

Also I really like what a couple of other commenters suggested: Instead of working in the yard, try sitting outdoors and enjoying it first. Put a chair in the garden and sit out there after work. Listen, admire, take deep breaths. If you feel like working in the garden at that point, great; if not, save it for another day.

And: Don’t stress about pulling weeds. Let them be; they’ll eventually die and become fertilizer for your garden.

(Or you can chop-and-drop them for that purpose; chopping and dropping is a much more relaxing and less physically taxing endeavor than pulling out unwanted plants. Anyway, at least some of those wild plants could be beneficial natives that are attracting pollinators who will help your food-garden as well as helping the ecosystem as a whole.)

Here’s a post I made to my neighborhood association about the importance of trees. Feel free to copy-paste and use in your communications with your neighborhood group, local government officials, etc.

Also, to see the graphics I’m referring to, you can go here to view the Facebook post. (Our neighborhood group is set to Public, so you should be able to view the post even if you don’t have a Facebook account. If you can’t see it let me know and I’ll forward the graphics to you.)

Hi all! Here are some graphics to go with the announcement I made at last night’s meeting, about the power of trees and other vegetation.

Trees offer numerous benefits:

• Mitigate heat (look at the temperature difference!)
• Absorb/diffuse stormwater, reducing flooding
• Maintain (or restore) the rainwater cycle, easing drought-flood extremes
• Reduce runoff of toxic substances into waterways
• Provide shade
• Improve public health and safety by making it more comfortable for people to go outdoors
• Provide habitat for pollinators and other wildlife.
• Provide fruit, nuts, or other food for humans.
• Add BEAUTY to the landscape.

To learn more about how we can bring nature into the human-built environment to solve problems and save resources, please follow Permaculture Daytona @permaculturedaytona or contact me anytime.

My house and yard are filled with tests of strength, balance, and endurance. I didn’t plan it that way, but that is how it’s become!

And, I like it this way! I think I’ll keep it.

A lot of people would see my setup and say “Jeez, that’s a lot of work!” Following is a hypothetical FAQ for emissaries from mainstream society who wash up on the shores of my tiny urban pocket o’ green:

Q. There are no sprinklers or hoses so you have to haul water by hand in buckets or jugs or watering cans — are you nuts?

A: No. 1) I like to keep track of exactly how much water I’m using. AND how each individual plant is doing. 2) Also, messing with hoses and sprinklers is a pain! And 3) when hoses and drip-irrigation thingees and such deteriorate they become gross plastic waste, whereas my watering cans when they rust just become yard sculpture. And 4) I get a good arm workout plus some cardio from hauling the cans/buckets of water.

Q. The stepping stones are crooked and uneven.

A. Yeah, I confess I’m just not good at leveling them. Every time I go to fix an unlevel stone, it just seems to go off-level on the other side. But it’s turned into a great way to work on my balance and core strength! As I get older I notice my balance isn’t what it used to be, and I need to work at it. Ditto my core strength. The wobbly stones help keep me on my toes, no pun intended. And who knows, they might help repel zombies or other invaders.

Q. You wash your clothes outdoors in a bucket and then hang them on the line?

A. Yup! Easy-peasy, good workout, no water goes to waste, and the sun and wind is by far the best clothes-dryer. Plus, this method helps me avoid being tempted to have a lot of clothes, or thick towels and such that are a pain to wash. And, I get to be outside while I’m doing laundry, while most people are stuck indoors in a dank “laundry room” that has no natural light.

Q. Your setup’s fine for you. I could maybe do it if it were just me, but I have kids and a husband.

A. Cool! More people means more helping hands! If I had kids or grandkids, they’d be outdoors with me hauling water and doing laundry. Except we’d call it “water fights” and “splashing around in the rainwater pool”. But actually, when kids are quite young, they really want to help and want to be involved with what the grownups are doing. I’d make use of that time-window to get kids in the habit of helping. And if I had a husband, he probably wouldn’t be a huge clothes-horse if he was attracted to someone like me. And maybe he’d enjoy my laundry method! Modern society turns laundry into such a lonely drudge and endless treadmill. Automation, meant to save us time and labor, has actually just enabled us to pile on more work. And since the work tends to be done by one person isolated in their home rather than outdoors, together as a family, in community, it’s lonely. The only time I’ve ever remotely come close to enjoying doing laundry the “regular” way is at a public laundromat, where there were people around to talk to or just listen to the variegated multilingual murmurs of conversation. And preferably a sunny window and a door open to the outdoors.

What if more jobs came with housing? This is a question I have often pondered over the years. And all the more so lately, as many people’s housing struggles and other economic struggles have grown.

Late at night, from way in the wee hours til just before dawn, I hear people talking as they walk by my high-foot-traffic corner. Some of them are obviously just tourists or young folks wandering around after a late night at the bars, but others are equally obviously homeless people who either walk around all night, or just stay in one place a couple hours at a time and then move, to avoid getting busted for sleeping.

The Biden administration has expressed interest in starting a Civilian Climate Corps. Analogous to the Civilian Conservation Corps that was part of FDR’s New Deal of the 1930s, the climate corps would employ young people doing things like planting trees, installing solar panels, maintaining trails. In addition to paying wages it would also provide basic shelter. I can imagine a lot of people I know — and not just young ones! — would find this an appealing gig. Maybe even some people who currently fall into homelessness rather than deal with the seemingly ever-increasing challenges of holding up a “normal” life (security deposits, first and last month’s rent, credit checks, background checks, yadda yadda yadda), would be happy to have this option.

Back in the early 1990s when I lived in Tokyo, a lot of the companies where I taught English provided their employees with dorm housing. It was very basic but more than adequate.

My last apartment in Tokyo, where I lived for the final year of my 5 years there, was in the heart of Harajuku, a supercrowded paradise of pop culture and street fashion. Sprinkled among the high-rise concrete-and-tile buildings were older structures, including small neighborhood Buddhist temples and a pre-WWII wooden house. Also there was some sort of shopfront which appeared to be a headquarters for newspaper delivery boys. (There may have been girls there too but I only saw what appeared to be teen boys.) What was this place where they drank tea and warmed their hands around a space-heater on bitter winter days? Was it communal housing or just the place they went to pick up their papers each morning? I never knew; never asked. I always felt drawn to it though.

Same with the mysterious camp I stumbled on in the middle of a multi-day hike around the island of Izu. On a rocky beach (most beaches I saw in Japan were rocky), people appeared to be sheltering in makeshift structures made of corrugated metal propped against or between rocky outcroppings. I recall having the impression that the people were divers; maybe I spotted some diving equipment or something. They did not look to me like recreational tourists or visitors. Were they diving for pearls? Fish? Was this their housing or just their day-camp? So many things you can only guess at when youre on the outside looking in. (I could have asked, but somehow I felt foolish, not knowing what to ask. “Who are you people? What are you up to? Your vibe is so interesting?” In retrospect, I’d have found a way. My language skills were fine and probably all I needed to do was show polite interest.

I’ve often thought city parks should have caretaker’s huts, where someone could live in return for keeping the trash picked up and trimming the shrubs and cleaning the restrooms and so on.

Lately I’ve been delving into ancestry research. One of our family ancestors, the one who fought in the Revolutionary War, lived to be 91! Quite remarkable for back then. He worked as a carpenter and cabinetmaker and he fathered 13 children — nine by his first wife and four by his second wife. Sounds like a full life. I wonder if he started his carpentry career as a young live-in apprentice somewhere? (His father died at 38.)

What would a writer’s apprentice house look like? Would they have writer’s roundtable chats and serve absinthe?

As a kid, I was obsessed with those giant concrete tubes you see lying around construction sites. A person could take shelter in there, and I often thought I could live in one of those if I had to. Looking back, I wonder if my thoughts were just a child’s fanciful musings, or if I somehow had glimpses of a future time, in my own lifetime, where people I knew personally would face much harder living conditions than what I’d been taught were normal.

I once spent three months on a friend’s farm in Austin, painting signs and helping out with cooking and other tasks. I was welcome to sleep in the house but I mostly slept under an oak tree or on the second floor of the barn, where garlic hung to dry from the rafters overhead and I could look out the open end of the barn and see the city lights twinkling in the distance. I wanted for nothing. It was a sweet carefree period of my life, sandwiched between two very stressful periods when I was feeling adrift and very financially and emotionally insecure.

More thoughts on this topic coming later, no doubt! What are your thoughts on how it would be if more jobs came with housing? Have you ever WWOOFed or done some other gig that came with housing?

Update 9/23/21: Just now I googled “jobs that come with housing,” and found many promising-looking links. If you explore any of them, let us know how it goes for you!

Further Exploration:

• coolworks.com: “Unlike a typical employment situation in a city or town, where you go to work and then go ‘home,’ many of the employers posting jobs on CoolWorks.com are located in resort or remote areas. It would be nearly impossible to have an employee live in the surrounding areas and travel to work every day. Because of this, a large majority of employers you’ll encounter provide employee housing and meals. Housing can range from rustic to brand new, from bunkhouse to private rooms, from dormitories to cabins. Some may even include wall tents or camping out.”

• wanderjobs.com: 20 types of jobs with paid room and board

• According to this page on indeed.com, there are even jobs offering free housing in NYC! And my google search revealed a number of other similar NYC job links too. And if housing-provided jobs exist in NYC, you know they surely must exist in some other urban areas too!

• And then there are the fairly well-known old standbys, workamping and WWOOFing (Worldwide Opportunities On Organic Farms). I know a number of people who’ve done one or both of these.

My email earlier today to an organization that puts on outstanding conferences and webinars. The organization recently sent out an email invitation to its upcoming “shape of our region’s future”-type webinar. Their use of the year 2070 in the event title prompted me to email them this:

I love all the work you guys are doing. That said, it feels shockingly optimistic to see the year “2070” used by a climate-aware organization like yours, as if it’s a given that we humans will still be around that far into the future!!

Do you really feel that optimistic? Or is the use of “2070” in your program mainly to attract the interest and buy-in from conventional organizations, planners, govt leaders etc?

Thanks for all you are doing, regardless.

Jenny Nazak (Daytona Beach Permaculture Guild; Daytona Beach Resilience Task Force)

I will let you know what I hear back from them, if anything.

I just heard back, very quick!

Jenny – My kids often ask my – why do you care? You won’t be around then. LOL. But they will be. We are trying to show that if Florida is to have a future we must start long-range planning now so used a 50-year time frame. But your point is well taken.

Thanks for your interest!

And I responded just now:

Thank YOU. I totally share your viewpoint. Same as you, I care A LOT about future generations. We owe it to them. My point was that I’m just not sure ANY humans will be around by 2070 at the rate we are going. And I worried that when people see 2070 in the title, they might have a false sense of security, like it’s OK to take things for granted and continue with business as usual.

But maybe if we all pull together, and with wise organizations like yours helping people wake up to the need for long-range planning, humans might just live to see that year. And maybe even be thriving, in a civilization that has repented the error of its ways and become compassionate and reconnected with nature.

Thank you so much for undertaking this work! I do look forward to your event! River-Friendly Planning, and human survival on a healthy planet into 2070 and beyond, is a great thing to aspire to.

When it comes to pest control, my practice of nonviolence has sometimes veered from my ideals. The lone garden-spider, ant, palmetto bug, cricket or other everyday critter who has gotten into my house, is routinely escorted outside, using the basic “humane bug-removal toolkit” that consists of one of those shiny junk-mail postcards and sometimes a jar.

One time, when my late sweet kitty Starshine (April 2002-March 2017) brought a live mouse into the apartment, I had to act quickly so I rolled her and the mouse up in the scatter rug they were standing on, and carried them both outside.

But, when it comes to potential infestations of cockroaches or termites, and other less “manageable” critters, I have sometimes resorted to poison or a shoe.

At such times, I always feel sadness and remorse, even while I feel relief at getting the situation “under control” before it becomes an actual infestation. So I am always seeking to expand my toolkit for nonviolently dealing with creatures. I searched and found some good articles. Hope you find them helpful!

• How To Get Rid of Pests and Bugs the Buddhist Way (tricycle.org). “In Buddhism there is a long held and integral tradition of caring for animals and all living creatures. They are regarded in Buddhist thought as sentient beings, different than humans in their intellectual ability but no less capable of feeling suffering, fearing death, and craving life. …” This article offers practical tips, plus helpful background reading on how Buddhists practice an attitude of non-violence toward creatures including those we call “pests.”

• Attending to Insects (Joela Brown; voices.uchicago.edu). “In the West, many of us would describe ourselves as animal-lovers. What we tend to mean by that, though, is that we like to engage only with certain animals — animals for which we have some affection, such as domestic dogs and cats, or ‘cute’ animals like koalas and dolphins, or interesting zoo animals like elephants and sloths. We tend to permit non- humans into our lives and spaces only if they please us, entertain us, love us, or at the very least do not frighten or annoy us. …”

• How Nonviolent Religions Handle Bedbugs (medium.com). “Practically speaking, insects and other vermin are harmful. The mosquito may be the world’s most dangerous animal — it kills far and away more humans than any other creature (as evidenced by the current outbreaks of dengue fever and the Zika virus). Flies and roaches can also spread disease. Bedbugs are lately on the rise. With all that in mind, here’s a look at how spiritual-minded folks have approached the vermin problem …”

Yesterday as I steered my bicycle in to the shopping plaza where the driver’s license office is (I needed to get my driver’s license updated), I beheld the treeless forlorn parking lot and the charmless architecture of the mall buildings. And a thought struck me: that our USAmerican culture is an experiment in what happens when a whole country decides that beauty and practicality don’t mix, and that the latter must always take precedence.

Voilà! We get utterly desolate landscapes that often, adding insult to injury, end up being impractical as well as ugly! (The design of the place made it really hard to see what stores were in there. And, the parking lot with its many different car-paths perpendicular to one another looked like a massive fender-bender festival waiting to happen.)

I will nonetheless be a regular visitor to this shopping mall from now on, because I found this utterly charming and adorable little Russian food shop inside the mall next to the license office. The proprietors have managed to create great beauty amid a desolate setting!

Speaking of beauty and the built environment …

My friend’s son is a carpenter in Japan. Here’s a rammed-earth construction project he is/was working on.

I have done a teeny bit of natural building (helping on other people’s projects), and one thing that always moves me is the beauty of working with quiet hand-tools and in close connection with other people. The reverence for materials & process, and for every set of hands.

What if every building had to be built by hand with non-fossil-powered tools? How different would our buildings look and feel — how much more human-scaled and beautiful?

How much quieter and less jarring would the whole world and rhythm of our days feel? I have come to feel that the default settings of “mainstream business-as-usual” USA have been cheating ourselves of great beauty and meaning, while at the same time trashing the planet. We all deserve better, don’t you think?

But to get it, we have to believe it’s possible. And one way to start is by seeing the beauty of the built environment in other parts of the world. All of our ancestors came from places where beauty and sustainability and integrity went hand-in-hand with function.

On the subject of scale … In the Natural Building module of a 6-month permaculture-based course called Earth-Based Vocations that I took in New Mexico back in 2006 (unfortunately the program is no longer in existence), I joked that we learned the most important principle of natural building as soon as we picked up a shovel or pushed a wheelbarrel: BUILD AS SMALL AS POSSIBLE! How many big ugly buildings could we avoid if we had to build them all by hand?