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Seeds are all around you! Gather seeds and create habitat now.

ecohacking habitat: "Doctoring the Land"
rtgarden2019

Different trees and shrubs drop seeds during different seasons. While the bundles of harvest were being gathered up today I led a group of children in searching for seeds from useful plants. If we know the name of them then we label the colorful seed packages that the kids create in our school sessions from recyled paper or old magazines.

 

useful plants are more than just food you can eat. useful plants include plants for fiber and medicine, tree seeds and help restore ravages terrain and can even provide oil fuel and shelter (like Jatropha and Pongomania trees). Often its not apparent that creating habitat for insects and birds is an extension of creating human habitat. Our ark saving ecosystems which provide us with the richness of sustenance here at the glass shop results from decades of careful habitat maintenance including creating spaces for pollywogs and frogs, newts, birds, bees, bats and lizards.

 

One of the most valuable classroom activities that we undetake with the children. They have sharp eyes and they can see and interpret the natural world very insightfully at a very young age. Most people look at a tree or mass of underbrush and just see "greenery".  Its imperative that children and adults understand that these partially wild spaces are actually the margins of our own habitat. Often  valuable plants can be gathered there, and often in turn very important plants can be planted and maintained in these wild spaces using seeds collected other places. Its important to teach children to be literate in the natural world and to be able to identify the trees and birds and butterflies around them as naturally as anything else.

 Decades ago when I first became a second generation *back to the lander* here in Humboldt, I remember reading by lamp light during storms in the huge "Whole Earth Catalog" collected by Stewart Brand. It filled my imagination and  found its way into my dreams. My dreams were also full of the images from "The New Alchemist" and "Shelter", all books I could borrow from my beatnick dad's library. A story I learned of women in China inspired me. These women together had gathered seeds including in towns and cities; and then in their local village they had together planted them and re-forested large sections of the surrounding denuded landscape. This example inspired me at that time to begin ecohacking new habitat here in the logged over land of the silted rivers.

 

Thats when I first started doing the little things. Taping paper straws into  bundles and hanging them our for the bees. Digging in broken crockery at th edge of the garden for the newts and frogs. Planting willow at the rivers edge. The yard became a place where I could work our foot by foot what I could manage to grow that could possible create habitat and even maybe also food or medicine or fiber.

 

Today we teach these methods. In our school we build bird and bat houses and practice taking plant cuttings that can be rooted and replanted. seeds can be gathered and spread in similar habitat.

 Just outside my window is a lovely arcing Japanese Maple that I grew from a seedling that I gathered outside of public health in the cracks in the sidewalk. Remember:  look up! notice how much trees give! Look down and see if you can rescue a struggling seedling today.

 

One of my mentors in this practice was a ninety year old judge who worked a lot of the eastern ridges and owned a lot of land back when. One of the first prudent ranchers to put in a large hydro plant in the nineties. Judge use to call it "doctoring the land".

Oct 10


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  • ARK
    Oct 11
    I would like to encourage you to joint the ARK:NSA superstruct - http://www.superstructgame.org/SuperstructView/68 . You're art with seeds could be of great use.
  • rtgarden2019
    Oct 12
    i found you this morning thanks!
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