STANISLAUS CONNECTIONS
Working For Peace, Justice, and A Sustainable Environment
November, 2000
Living Lightly
By DAN and BARBARA POLLOCK
Dear Friends and Fellow Gardeners,
Are you one those people who, when looking at a garden catalog, begin to grow a garden in your mind, salivating at the possibilities?
When visiting a beautiful garden, nursery, botanical garden, or arboretum, are you thinking, "I love these plants, I have to have them?"
If a plant is dry do you rush to water it? If you see a weed do you have the urge to pull it?
Seeing a rose you can’t resist smelling it?
After harvest, beyond that of the yield itself, you have this wonderful satisfied feeling?
If you answered yes to any of these questions, you have an incurable physical and psychological problem called plantitus.
There is no hope for you; you are destined to live a life of satisfying work, with dirt under your fingernails, sweat on your brow, producing delicious fruits and vegetables, and surrounded by beauty with a happy heart, thinking there is hope for the future.
Why do we toil and sweat to grow a garden? I think, in part, it is a memory full of experiences, pleasure, and satisfaction that fulfills our need to create and be rewarded. That is why, if it is important to you, that you must involve your children in gardening and expose them to gardens at an early age.
Perhaps this love of plants goes much further than our own experiences. We are from the beginning of man and woman, born into this world sharing a place in the sun with all of the rest of life that resides here. Could it be that in our genes we feel the pull of our ancestors who out of survival lived close to the plants. They must have had the same feelings of wonder as they watched a seed germinate and grow into flower and fruit. It is easy to understand why our ancestors worshipped the elements which sustained their lives.
Go ahead, give in to your primeval urges and grow a garden.
Barbara has been attending some classes recently and learned something that is important in maintaining good plant health. A vital element that plants need for growth is potassium. Usually soil tests in California conclude that there is enough potassium to met the plants nutritional requirements. However, recent information from a U.C. Cooperative Extension Specialist, suggests that providing an application of recommended rates of potassium to plants will help in providing pest and disease protection.
This has always made sense to me as potassium in the plant is responsible for building strong cell walls that help form the structure and strength of the plant.
Until next month, Peace and Good Gardening
New Stanislaus Transportation and Land Use Coalition formed
By MYRTLE OSNER
Several local groups have decided that transportation planning needs more input than just planning for more freeways. The intent is to monitor the transportation planning that happens through the Stanislaus County Council of Governments (StanCOG) and to include input there on behalf of pedestrians, bicycles, and "transit-dependent" persons. The new group, Stanislaus Transportation and Land Use Coalition (STLC), has adopted the following principles to guide what they hope to do. Public participation is essential in all planning for a healthy community Sometimes it is necessary to listen to the actual users of a facility to understand their needs. If you ride a bicycle, take the bus or walk to work, or are interested in this work, contact Denny Jackman, coalition chair, at
Dennyj@pacbell.com, or call 522-4967.PRINCIPLES
STLC expects our transportation system to:
1. Provide and Promote Economic Efficiency.
Our transportation system is to provide timely and cost effective movement of people and products within our cities and throughout our county. Review and action to improve the system is to be timely and routine. Improving coordination of services and systems, public and private, is to be ongoing.
2. Fix It First!
Our highest priority is to review, repair, and insure the maintenance of our existing roads, bridges, and transit systems.
3. Create Greater Social Equity.
All people are to be able to travel in a safe and convenient manner regardless of their means of travel. Future transportation investments are to be made through an open selection process that reflects the interests of all our communities.
4. Improve Environmental Quality.
Our transportation system is to reduce substantial adverse impacts to our air quality, water quality, farmland, and open space.
5. Link Transportation and Land-Use Planning.
Our transportation investments are to provide and promote responsible land-use that enhances urban in-fill, avoids costly urban sprawl, and supports public transit, bicycling, and walking options.
6. Inform the Public of the Cost.
Transportation costs are to be clear and complete. Proposals to change our transportation system shall reflect all economic and social costs to the public.
By DON MCMILLAN
In longtime Peace/Life Center supporter Jim Feeney, Modesto boasts a pioneer depaver. In December of 1982 when he bought his home, Feeney wasted no time removing its driveway. "We closed escrow Thursday. Friday I had a Bobcat over here," he said. The Bobcat front-loading bucket went right to work ripping up pavement.
An observation of the driveway’s function was a primary reason for Feeney's conversion of automotive habitat. The 90 x 25 foot strip of asphalt connected the street and the back alley, providing neighbors with a short cut and luring traffic a few feet from the house's side door. Among others, "the paper boy was cutting through," Feeney said. Removing the asphalt promised "more control over my space." Preferring to use the alley to reach his garage, Feeney didn't care to park on the two concrete tracks with a ragged grass strip between that interrupted the asphalt next to the side entrance.
Removing the driveway also enhanced the home's comfort and reduced its ecological impact. The driveway presented the sun a generous stripe of thermal mass. The house would be cooler during the summer without the driveway. Feeney also wanted to increase his property's ability to recharge groundwater. The driveway diverted rainwater into storm drains rather than allowing it to soak in immediately.
Not least among advantages Feeney saw to depaving was additional space to grow food. Restoring the soil's fruitfulness has been an ongoing challenge. Under the asphalt and concrete the Bobcat scraped up was road base, a mixture of gravel and crushed rock, hardly ideal for gardening. The pavement dated from 1939, twelve years after the house was built. Below the road base in a back corner lurked trash buried at least 40 years before. "To this day things don't grow well there," Feeney said.
Even with the road base removed, the soil demanded nursing. First aid came in a truckload of topsoil, 22 yards of it. Feeney remembers his father- and mother-in-law helping spread this soil with shovels. Then came chicken and cow manure and year after year of leaf compost from all around the neighborhood. With raised beds, Feeney now reports that most of the former driveway now has fertile soil with root-welcoming loft.
Tipping the summer heat ledger still further in favor of comfort, a trellis outside the side door spreads foliage of kiwi vines through summer, diverting summer's excess radiation to edible harvests. "They're very prolific," Feeney said.
Although neighbors first complained at the loss of their short cut, the depaved plot now yields community dividends. "We share our garden with our friends and neighbors," said Feeney. The joys of gardening and sharing the harvest validate Feeney's decision to depave.
Would he decide not to depave if he had it to do again? "Never," he said. "It just gives us balance to the property." However, he would approach the task differently if he faced it again. "Basically I would have written a check" and left the task to a contractor, he said. "The pleasure came not in the [pavement] removal but in seeing something grow."
Despite an extensive basement-to-apex remodeling of his house completed in 1999, Feeney ranks his depaving "way up the list" among his home improvements. He esteems depaving esthetically as "a real enhancement."
For others considering opening a driveway to sunshine and raindrops, Feeney recommends "Have a plan in place first." The job is harder than it might appear. He also advises those considering gardening edibles on depaved plots to check for nasty chemicals that may have been dumped there.
In the sidewalk in front of Feeney's house, an automotive umbilicus remains, the apron that once eased wheeled access to the driveway. Such an aperture shouts that there would be an auto-width gate in the low wooden fence Feeney constructed just after depaving. Instead, there's no more than a sidewalk-wide gate testifying to the peaceful fertility of an auto-free yard.
ACTION: Jan Lundberg, a former inheriting partner of The Lundberg Letter, an oil-industry price survey, and founding director of the Fossil Fuels Policy Action Institute, sponsor of the Alliance for a Paving Moratorium, includes actions like Feeney's depaving in his recent "Pledge for Climate Stabilization!" which reads "
... Depave my driveway ... and grow food in depaved land." To download a copy of this pledge, visit www.lesscars.org. Lundberg depaved his Arcata, CA, driveway in 1996.Crosswalks is momentarily back, thanks to Jim Feeney's willingness to be interviewed. The purpose of this series is to publicize experiences of those seeking reduced automotive dependence and to build a sense of community among those who want transportation choices in addition to automobiles. Interviews with people from auto-free households in the Stanislaus-County area are especially welcome. Contact the author at <mcmillan@ainet.com>, (209) 523-8871 or P.O. Box 4501, Modesto CA 95352.
Procreation
By ANN BRIARCLIFFsomehow
humans are
ruled
by these vehicles
we ride around in all the time
did you ever notice that
streets
are too many
are crowded with
driven vehicles
dwellings
have HUGE pieces of real estate devoted to
stored vehicles
stores
have HUGE pieces of land for
parked vehicles
driven stored parked vehicles
make baby vehicles
did you ever notice that
how they multiply
they have birthing centers all up and down
McHenry Boulevard
it begets
red ones
and blue ones
and green ones
and white ones
and grey ones
and once in awhile
a pink one
the big mother vehicles
come in the night and birth
eight or ten vehicles at a time
attendants at the
birthing centers
help them out of
the big mother vehicle
one
at
a
time
like
puppies
feed and care
wash and wear
do it there
or be bare
ride a bike.
