Dinner tonight at Mezzacello is a recipe taught to me during my visit to Normandy, France in 1992. So simple and delightful. I serve it with fresh haricots vert and roasted potatoes.

Ingredients:

• 4 pork chops (bone in or butterflied)
• 1 cup applesauce (I used homemade)
• 1 cup Brie slices
• salt and pepper

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 350F.
2. Thaw and dry the pork chops. Sprinkle both sides of the chops with salt and pepper.
3. Arrange the chops on a flat sheet.
4. Place the chops in the oven close to the top burner. Bake for 5-6 minutes.
5. Remove the chops.
6. Spread applesauce on the chops.
7. Arrange the Brie pieces stop the applesauce.
8. Place the chops back in the oven close to the top burner. Bake for 4 minutes until the cheese melts.
9. Remove from the oven.
10. Serve hot!

I am continuing the midsummer harvest from the soil-free lasagna garden beds. Today it was another bushel of red potatoes, a bushel of shallots, and a bushel of red onions. I gathered them all in inexpensive laundry baskets lined with burlap. The burlap is there to hold the peat moss, straw, or sawdust in the basket. This helps keep air and light off the potatoes and onions and preserves them over  the winter. The first year I experimented with preserving dry roots like potatoes and onions, I stored them in sand. It worked for short periods, but I had a lot of potato and onion rot from the sand, which absorbs moisture from the environment. So I switched to peat moss and sawdust. The side benefit is that I can reuse the storage medium in the lasagna beds. #ZeroWaste sustainable self-contained garden.

When I carted my three bushels of produce down I to my cellar, I was met with another surprise. There are still two baskets of russet potatoes in peat moss down there. Granted, each bushel basket only has a few potatoes left, but those potatoes were sprouting! I pulled them out, cut the eyes apart and prepared to plant them for fall. I pulled the burlap back. Mixed the peat moss with bone meal, blood meal, some rabbit droppings, Epsom salt and a bit of algae water from the pond. Voila! A reseeded potato bed. 20 more potato plants for the fall. These beds really are magical.

I post a lot on here about the urban ag technology and methods I employ at Mezzacello. The fact is, I just find it all so fascinating – and counter to everything our society expects. What can I say? I am an iconoclast. I think that the fact that you need to be comfortable with failure, death, life, and ecologies and unlearn everything modern life teaches you is what attracts me so. I am a rebel with a cause; I am Shiva, the creative spark and destroyer of worlds only with a bow tie and a fedora. Yeah, I get a little crazy about it. But it’s wonderful the way social mores, biology, chemistry, engineering, physics, and math just coalesce on an urban farm. There are many days where I swear I feel the joy that the great Enlightenment scientists must have felt when they began fleshing out the roots of the modern sciences from the ruins of alchemy. The age of discovery and all that. Yeah, I identify with that.

Of all the useful items at Mezzacello, trash is one of the most productive. All trash, food and everything else – with a few toxic and material exceptions – is useful in an urban ag ecosystem. You just have to be ready for that reality mentally, physically, and spiritually.

• Mentally because it requires a new and dangerous mindset: You will become a hoarder with a desire to save everything.
• Physically because you will need systems in place to keep yourself healthy and keep nature’s pests at bay.
• Spiritually because you will need courage and fortitude to power through some of the more disgusting and smelly pathways to sustainability.

But the journey is so worth it and absolutely fascinating. It’s akin to alchemy, but you know in your heart there is no cheat against nature. House rules win every time.

This morning I turned some banana peels, used coffee grounds, and discarded egg shells into compost seed starter and fabulous soil amendment. It will have to sit for two weeks at which point I will either add it directly to fall beds or brew it with water, glucose and an airstone to create super rich liquid fertilizer. Add some uric acid and ammonia (urine) and you have liquid gold or all the makings for a bomb. THIS IS NOT FOR USE AS A BOMB. But it is a tour de force of #AppliedSTEM. No waste and the side effect is more life, sign me up! An interesting side note: Amazon’s algorithm actually called me out o some of my purchases for salts and liquid amendments I ordered online. Reminding me that certain combinations of chemicals can flag me due to provisions of the patriot act. So I end up making a lot of my own chemical amendments.

The way all the sciences cascade in this applied science experiment makes me think of one of my favorite XKCD Cartoons:

Use your powers for good – even if they stink. And there will be stink. Wink.

The City/Farm Garden

A Systems Approach to Life

A good system strategy is to break down the system into discrete parts. For me (and the city/farm garden at Mezzacello) I prefer these three: Pattern, Structure, and Process. Mezzacello is an enclosed ecosystem by design with three gardens that reflect, support, and build on each other.

The patterns are farmhouse, urban garden with livestock, and fine urban gardens. Each stands in its own space and occupies its own niche. But the position and access of the pattern of ecosystems is key.

The structure is also three-fold: Farmhouse and service yards, the farm/garden/livestock area, and the formal garden rooms/paths/open lawn areas. There private and semi-public areas and the front gardens serve a different niche than the back.

The process is also (surprise!) a three-part system: The farmhouse provides food/tools/wastes for the urban farm animals and aquatic animals in the urban farmyard which in turn provides compost/manure and biomass for the formal gardens which in turn provide compost/beauty/space for the other two discrete ecosystems and the process repeats.

Beauty in the Details

At street level it might be hard to recognize the three enclosed ecosystems at Mezzacello. There are on Twentieth Street the east-facing traditional gardens that one would expect: the formal gardens that one usually sees in an urban environment.

These begin to blend into the broad lawns that sprawl south to north and include the 2,500 gallon aquatic garden and herb beds. At the southeast of the property behind a simple picket fence lay the food and livestock gardens.

Then there are the built human environments of the house where the humans lived and provided resources to those gardens. The last is the enclosed environments that are comprised of the whole of Mezzacello and how it fits into the neighborhood at large. This last garden was the garden of my neighborhood.

Nothing Exists in Isolation

Mezzacello and its human and animal occupants do not seek to exist alone in this context. Instead, we welcome our neighbors and schools of students eager to learn more about our mission. This is my favorite aspect of the systems approach we take at Mezzacello.

We want our gardens to grow and thrive, and conversely, we want our neighbors and community to grow and thrive. This is a brilliant and thrilling opportunity to celebrate and employ diversity. Diversity is the most powerful tool in nature’s arsenal.

We are proud that our systems approach to life takes great advantage of what is here, what has been and what has yet to grow and thrive. Life attracts life. That is the systems way. Welcome to Mezzacello.