OBUGs, Literacy for Environmental Justice, and Hands On Bay Area

I have been spending time volunteering for a variety of organizations over the last few months through a volunteer aggregator called Hands On Bay Area. I have two goals, to get a (brief) experience of many different organizations offering a variety of services and ultimately to focus on one and take on more substantive volunteer projects. Below are pictures from two recent projects:

Literacy for Environmental Justice:
LEJ work with youth to educate them on habitat restoration and sustainable food production. They have a full scale nursery where they prepare plants to be transplanted in areas like the one we were working on below. They collect the seeds for these plants locally and use them to push back invasive species like fennel.

The youth are teaching us about the grasses and shrubs we will be planting. The area we were working in is one of the more established sites, the native plants have started to take hold again.

Some local municipalities have started to contract with LEJ to provide local plants for open space projects, allowing them to hire some of the students who come through their program. 

Oakland Builds Urban Gardens:

OBUGs works with middle schools in Oakland to convert part of their parking lot or pavement into garden space which they incorporate into the school's curriculum. Much of the produce from the garden goes to the cafeteria. OBUGs teaches kids about how fresh food and activity are part of a healthy lifestyle. 

OBUGs staff staff teach students how to care for the garden. Volunteers also do a lot of garden maintenance on the weekends, including building new beds. 

Tom and Preston building individual boxes so students can decide what they want to grow. It's hard work, you have to rest too :)

You can't do much better than spending the morning working in the garden on a nice day. We also trimmed down a big Rosemary bush and we some home. It was spilling out of my backpack which made us very popular and we traded Rosemary for cookies and pie at lunch!

The parking lot is converted to a growing space by covering the ground with bark mulch and then building raised beds.

Garden Update

About time I update the garden, it is taking off!

Here you can see the three main beds, bottom to top you see lettuce, tomatoes, and eggplant. The buckets have lettuce, it is growing too big for the plot so we are expanding! The raised beds have sage, the a grape.

This is looking through the plum tree at other beds. Fruit on the Plum oh my! The buckets have Rocket, Arugula, Jar Jeer, whatever you want to call it. So does the first bed. Behind that are 5 new strawberry plants. The long beds, from right to left, are broccoli, rocket, and cauliflower. In the seed starters there are pumpkins, lettuce, lavender, brussel sprouts, carrots, celery, and parsley. In the way back you can see our mutant 2 foot tall green onions, they are amazingly tasty.

Looking through one of the apple trees (there are 4) at the olive tree.

These are the massive broccoli next to the massive onions, we need to figure what compost we put on those beds!

We have an almond on our almond tree! Several of the brand new trees made an effort at fruit, very proud of them.

I think this is a peach tree, it is covered with baby fruit. Whatever fruit it is we will feast.

Recycled Products

A few things we do with materials...

Tree rings and planters.

More containers, to keep in mulch and water.

A fine desk from an old glass door and Polystyrene.

Old bricks, polystyrene, and a bigger door. Nice kitchen island, no?

Compost bin/ Recycling Bin

A couple new products from Eyn al Basha...

Can't argue with a recycling bin made of all recyclable materials.

This is the compost bin. The wooden slats on the back are nailed on, each side has removable slats. This near side has the slats out. The bins are set up next to each other so that when it is time to turn the compost (about once a month) you remove the slats on the sides and everything moves right. You use about 4 bins, so after 4 months the final bin is moving right, out of the bins and into the garden! The slats are spaced with small pieces of wood to allow good air circulation.

Compost Experiment

We got together with our friend Ragheda to help her start moving her large and very beautiful garden to be fully organic. She is also working to incorporate organic gardening into a program she runs for mentally handicapped adults.

This is an example of a compost pit.

Oh yeah, she also has gazelle on her property.

Some nice covered vegetable gardens.

Just to add some contrast, you can see Baga'a from the house. I have been told it is the largest refugee camp in the world, home to 250,000 Palestinians. The extreme density of housing characterizes the camps in Jordan.

Harvesting the Pruned Olive

We pruned the olive tree pretty dramatically and that means lots of trimmings full of olives! Check it out.

We pulled them off onto the tarp to collect them.

So nice!

That's about 3 gallons of olives.

Lemons, the Sunset, and Strategic Planning

Today was the most productive day yet. We got a lot of the foundational documents nailed down and we can jump into the business plan with gusto. That is going to be a fun process, woot strategic planning! I basically just read a book on business plans and downloaded it into a planning template, we will see how it goes. It was a very helpful book though, if you are on the market for a business plan book I do recommend "Writing a Convincing Business Plan," Third Edition by DeThomas and Derammelaere. Anyway, I have never worked with a document like this before, it is a very different writing style. I am used to academic writing where you can make much broader claims and dream pretty big dreams and probably even find someone to quote to support it. Now we can only say what we can deliver, that is a little harder. Cut the fluff and reel it in G!


This is the lemon tree.

It really is pretty prolific. I will post more later on all of the goodness in the garden.

Post rain sunset.

When I came to Amman the first time I saw the moon rise over the city. It was the first time I had ever seen moonrise. I will try to capture that sometime, I think it might only happen in the summer.

The Cafe

Things are going well, I have started to read through all of the documents on the internal network and get the lay of the land. I have also spent some time at the vocational training site and spent a couple days digging through dumpsters with the eco-rangers. The program is developing slowly and on a very small scale right now. We do recycling for the Sheraton and we steal (with permision) all of the carboard from a hospital, among a few smaller recycling accounts. Soon we hope to develop the hospital as an account and help them developing sorting processes so we can collect their waste, but we need to refine the community based model and establish a few community depots for sorting before we can go after any bigger accounts. It is a good process, we are learning a lot of ways to be more efficient.
The Cafe is one of our most flexible accounts, we own it. We don't own any of our tools or other facilities at this point, so this is a great place for us to develop ideas. Also it is very comfortable and a short bike ride from my place (my place now has a name, Rainbow House).


Here is the front of the EG Cafe. The first floor will eventually be a public cafe, Philip and Zach live on the second floor which is also where the office is. The whole house is designed for passive solar heating and cooling, facing south to get the low sun in the winter with long overhangs to shade the sun in the summer when it is higher in the sky. Everything in Jordan is built with cement blocks which get cold at night and hold that temperature during the day when it heats up. This means that you shower at night in the winter because it is a little chilly in the morning but during the summer you shower in the morning because you can't get cold water at night since the cold water tank is baking on the roof. The garden is very active and growing, we will add some green growing things on the roof eventually and if we get really ambitious maybe some vertical growing systems. We have figs, apples, lemons, berries, grapes, and all manner of vegitables.

In the corner we have the 'wednesday well.' As I mentioned a LOT of water is lost in Amman. We live on a big hill so a lot of that water runs under us. We noticed a line of plants growing under our wall and found that some of the water collects there. We directed it to the tank in the corner and filled it up in 3 hours. So now every Wednesday the tank will fill up (that is when the municipality fills the tanks on the roofs).

This is taken from the roof, a nice view of the whole front garden. And the truck.

Inside the cafe. We also store and sell some of the crafts from the MPA (Marketing, Packaging, Access) program. It is a women's income generating program in some communities around the vocational training site. We have a TV and dvd player that someone left on our doorstep. The word is out that we like garbage and broken down electronics, so neighbors leave things on our balcony now. Recently someone left a dvd player with an american plug, we have no idea how it got here as even with a transformer it won't work , but it will give the electical training class something to work with next week. Apparently they can convert it to work here.