Guerilla Gardening: Why We Think It’s A Good Idea To Plant Some Preps Along Your Bug-out Routes

Guerilla Gardening is not done by gorillas.  In fact it is usually done by little old ladies who sneak into people’s yards when no one is home.  At least that’s what I do.
Plant fruits and vegatables along your bugout routes

My first act of gorilla gardening was for my friend Joe.  He’d worked for many years on building a home whenever he had money available and help from friends.  The place was a cluttered construction site for a long time.  But as the building was nearly completed, and the construction debris cleared away, there was room in a sunny spot for a small garden.  I knew Joe wanted to grow some of his own food and where he intended to put a garden so when he left town for a week, I made my move.

I collected some discarded 4×4’s and some left over fencing and piled them into my station wagon along with some garden starts and headed over to Joe’s.  It’s a lovely place at the end of a dirt road.  I got to work with my digging fork and turned sod, weeded and formed beds.  I dug holes and erected the posts and fencing.  Then I planted the seeds and starts, salad greens, squash, peas and beans to climb the fence and a bed for perennials like rhubarb, herbs and raspberries.  I watered it all from the rain barrel.  When Joe came home and found it he was delighted.  Since then his garden has expanded to 5 times the size of the original.

I live on a small lot in town.  The previous owner traveled often so his landscaping was concrete and grass.  Now after 5 years, there’s a native plant garden on the shady side of the house with vine maple and crabapple trees, salal, Oregon grape, red flowering currant, columbine and wild ginger.  In the sunniest part of the yard, right up against the sidewalk, I have my espaliered fruit trees with 10 different kinds of fruit grafted on to 4 trees.  There are 2 blueberry bushes and strawberry plants.  In the beds there are potatoes, squash, peas, salad greens, broccoli, cauliflower and winter greens.  A stately rhubarb fills out one corner and cosmos bloom by the fence.  What a delight to grow my own produce.  I planted greens last August to winter over so I’m eating chard, collards, kale and beets year round. The chard with their red and yellow stems brighten up the flower beds.

Gardening on a small lot

It took a while for me to figure out what grows best here in the Northwest and in my yard.  Then I had to get used to eating what I grow.  But now I’m totally addicted.  I take some with me when I travel.

This spring my elderly neighbor said she wasn’t going to garden this year.  My ears perked up.  I asked, and she said to “Garden as if it was your own.”  That garden has been under cultivation for decades so mostly what I’m doing is weeding and uncovering the volunteers.  There’s lettuce, chard and garlic in abundance.  I added a few squash and beans and covered them with a floating row cover to keep the deer and squirrels at bay.

Another friend is moving from Whidbey where he’s lived for thirty years.  He has a well-established landscape.  I’ve been weeding with him there getting his house ready to sell and hearing about his projects restoring an old house in Port Townsend where he’s planning to move.  Last week while in Port Townsend, I put a couple of big pots on his porch, filled them with potting soil and added salad starts and a couple of squash.  A friend 2 doors down said she’d keep them watered. My friend was touched to find them the next day.  I love guerrilla gardening.

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Researcher Find That Plant Has Water Purification Properties: Cilantro

A simple illustration of why we should keep trees and plants living on our soil…

Why we should keep trees and plants living on our soil…

Researcher Find That Plant Has Water Purification Properties: Cilantro

Commonly found in Mexican and Asian dishes, the leafy, bright green leaves of the cilantro plant might not only be tasty, but also help to purify polluted water. Scientist have recently discovered that, in developing countries, cilantro might actually help to absorb some heavy metals found in contaminated ground water.

Students, along with Professor Douglas Schauer of Ivy Tech Community College, were searching for a cheap and accessible way to filter ground water. They dried and crushed numerous wild plants while conducting their research, and found that cilantro was the most effective.

“And then we put that into a solution that has a known amount of lead in it,” Schauer said. “That’s the metal we used as our test metal. Shake it up for a little bit, and then we let the particles settle out, and then we test the water to see how much lead is left behind.”

The researchers found that their cilantro filters were successful in removing many of the pollutants, especially nickel and lead.

Biosorbents are used in environmental cleanups, and help to remove contaminants like lead, arsenic, and other harmful metals. According to the research, the outer wall structure that makes up the cilantro plant is what makes the plant perfect for absorbing the metals.

“The organic toxins we can take care of pretty easily with a number of different methods, but the only way to really get rid of those heavy metals is to treat them with filtering agents like activated charcoal (like what’s found in a Brita filter), but those types of materials are kind of expensive,” said Schauer to CNN. “They are a little expensive for us to use, but they are very expensive to the people living in that region.”

One method of purification using the cilantro filtering method is grinding up cilantro and passing water though it using a tube, which allows clean water to trickle out of the opposite end of the tube, ultimately leaving even cleaner water. Another method involves drying cilantro and putting it in tea bags, which are then placed in a pitcher of water, helping to take out some of the toxic metals.

Schauer believes that, since cilantro is a common herb in poor countries, it could substantially and positively affect access to water in many developing nations.

“Our hope is for somebody who lives in that region to simply be able go in their back yard and grab a handful of cilantro, maybe let it dry out for a couple days sitting on a rock in the sun, and then maybe a handful of that would purify a pitcher of water,” he said.

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How To Build Your Own Aquaponic System With Garden Scraps

You can turn a small yard, a corner in a community garden or an unused space in your home (or Bunker) into a thriving vertical farm for vegetables and fish. A household-sized vertical aquaponic system can fit into a 3ft by 5ft (1m x 2m) area and feed a family year-round.

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Sean Brady, the aquaponics projects coordinator at the Center for Sustainable Aquaponics and Nourish the Planet in Loveland, Colo., showed us how to build a system from scrap he found around the greenhouse.

This is how to build Sean Brady’s low-cost vertical aquaponic system. All the photos are his, and if you have questions for him, you can contact Sean Brady here or email him at 

Materials:
You can use the following materials or swap out anything for whatever you have on hand. Brady built this system from scrap he had around the greenhouse. We’re including pictures of other, fancier systems that he built out of similar materials to show the diversity that this kind of build affords. Measurements are in feet and inches. Sorry, rest of the world.

*Pipes
15-20 ft. of 4-in. diameter PVC or ADS
Four 4-inch elbows
Four 4-inch T connectors

*Two 50-gallon drums
*15-20 ft. of pex tubing, or aquarium tubing
*Plastic cups
*Strips of cloth, such as burlap sack, cable ties or another fastener
*Scrap wood
*Two rolls of electrical tape

*Pumps
One water pump – the size depends on how much flow it would need. An aquarium pump is enough to keep the flow going.
One air pump (optional). The system can aerate itself but it can produce more if it has an air pump.

Tools:
*Power drill or hand drill
*1-in hole saw
*3-in hole saw

Build time: About two hours.

Recommended plants and fish:
Leafy vegetables, tomatoes and herbs do well in these systems. So do flowers. You can experiment to find which do well and fit your needs.
Tilapia and trout do well, they grow quickly and they’re delicious.

 

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Cut the pipe into six 1ft. sections for the sides and two 14in. sections for the ends.
Drill two 3in-diameter holes in each of the 1ft side pieces.
Drill a 1in-diameter hole into the side of one of the end pieces.
Tip:You can use any kind of durable plastic or pipe, not just what’s pictured.

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Assemble the pieces with electrical tape.

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Cut the vertical pipes to the length that suits you. Drill 1in-diameter holes in the vertical pipes, evenly spaced. Insert the vertical pipes as shown.
The photo on the right shows the mostly finished structure to give you an idea of how it looks.

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Perforate the bottoms of the plastic cups and place them in the holes you drilled in the side pipes. Cut a piece of 1in-diameter pipe to insert into the 1in hole in the end pipe to make a drain. The drain should pour into one of the 50-gallon drums.

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You can use two 50-gallon drums like these or any other kind of container that holds water for fish. You could even scale this down and put it on top of an indoor aquarium.

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Cut the tops off below the rims.

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This is the assembled garden structure on top of the drums, seen from two slightly different angles.

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Adjust the structure’s balance and support its joints with wooden boards. You could tilt the structure slightly toward the drainpipe to improve the water flow. Most systems will have vertical columns of equal height, but these are cut at different heights to show the range of options available.

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Seed the plants in these. Put them in the cups and the holes in the vertical columns.

The final steps are not pictured, but easily explained. Cut strips of burlap or some other material, fasten them to the tops of the vertical pipes and drape them down the inside of the pipes. Stuffing the pipes with cloth like this will give the plant roots something to latch on.

Next, cut and assemble the tubing so that you can pump water from one barrel up to each of the four vertical pipes. You could also pump water from the barrel that receives drainage to the barrel that feeds the system.

 

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These systems can scale up to commercial size, too. Brady and his colleagues at the Center for Sustainable Aquaponics set up this greenhouse for leafy vegetables, herbs and fish.

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Another view of the commercial greenhouse.

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This arrangement portrays some of the creativity and even the beauty possible with an aquaponic system. Among its features, there is a rocky waterfall into the fish tank and a drip-irrigation system watering soil-free plants in a rock bed.

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These are different views of the above system.

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Our guide Sean Brady shows what these systems can produce. He’s holding a trout here.

Now go plant your own survival garden.

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