Mezzacello: Home Is Where The Lab Is

It never occurred to me that people might think that Mezzacello is a place that I go to do my work. Increasingly I meet people that ask me where Mezzacello is and then are surprised to learn that My home and Mezzacello are the same place. Mezzacello: Home is where the lab is.

How This Came About

I have written on this topic before. I fell into an opportunity to build a series of gardens to explore growing food and developing ecosystems and systems that would make that easier. I also am employed by the PAST Foundation and it seemed mutually beneficial to create an Applied STEM laboratory to explore the intersection between food and community.

I credit PAST Foundation for inspiring me to start Mezzacello. It was when I began working with PAST in 2014 that I began to see the disconnect young people had between food and how it’s made and the wider disconnect between education and how what when we teach kids about food. I just copied what PAST Foundation was trying to model to schools and I never stopped.

Growing America to STEM Outdoor Innovation Lab to Mezzacello Urban Farm

PAST Foundation has been innovating in this space for over a decade. They ran a successful program in the mid 2000s called Growing America which sought to teach Applied STEM ideas to inner-city kids in the hopes that it would improve diets and understanding of food. And it did, but there was still a missing component.

Then I was hired to run the SOIL program alongside Kat Deaner (who was the PI for Growing America at PAST) and it was my job to help schools make good choices in implementing spaces for outdoor and food innovations. That’s where I learned that systems integration and commitment to seasons was key. It was that realization that drove me to create the learning lab at Mezzacello.

Complexity and Dependent Systems Integration

Very much like my job at PAST Foundation, it is not always easy to explain what I do here at Mezzacello – so I will make this easy. I live here and explore here to try to make the world a better place to live in and to find balance. The city is a dangerous place to be hungry and vulnerable in and I want to be a positive change for good in that space.

I love living in a place that inspires people and allows me to really manifest my mission of Grow, Maintain, Sustain, and Explain. During COVID19 lockdown, Mezzacello literally saved my life and my sanity. It was a beacon of hope and purpose for me in a world gone mad.

The key to success is a relentless commitment to iterative teaching and learning. Here I have failed – alot. But I learn from that failure.

The real innovation here is to not fear change and failure, but to treat it as a data point. I do hate failure, but I hate hard work even more. If I can develop a more robust and sustainable system via that failure, then that is a success in my book.

Here’s to continuing to push through and create a better world. The next steps are building my charity presence and non-profit status and finding new partners and sites to expand my mission. Wish me luck, I’ll probably need it.

Robots, Chickens, and Ducks

Since the start of Mezzacello there have been chickens and rabbits integrated into the system. That was my original plan all along. Later I expanded to include robots, chickens, and ducks.

I came across this photo on the cloud from March 21, 2019. It was captured by a motion and heat sensing camera mounted on the water tank in my chicken run. The system also included a hacked Arduino controller that used IFTT architecture to send the photo to my phone.

Yes, I captured my own self herding poultry with an automated sensor. But the other thing this photo shoes is my ignorance about bird flu and sanitation. My Robot Chicken sensor caught me in the poultry area without boots.

While this is a fun early example of my push to leverage automation, robots, sensors, and data in my urban farm. It is also an indictment of my naivety and the fact that one should always be learning, improving, adapting. I am sure I was just securing chickens so I could go to work, but I am NOT wearing wellingtons.

Breaking Barriers and Rules

The cases of Avian Flu are on the rise in the US in 2022, but is not yet in Ohio. This kind of silly reckless behavior is exactly why it is on the rise though. I want to believe I sterilized my shoes after, but truth is I don’t remember and that is bird flu spreads.

There is no direct evidence that the strain of avian flu prevalent right now out west is transmissible to humans, we did just go through a pandemic. Honestly, this is not about the humans, but the birds. I developed all of this tech to keep these vital members of my ecosystems safe.

Flash forward to today and I always sterilize my boots and shoes. I have gotten sick, my fault, for this mistake. This simple mistake is also responsible for killing millions of birds and is why I have three sterilizing stations and four sinks at Mezzacello.

Why Boots are a Requirement at Summer Camps

Last summer, I hosted two summer camps at Mezzacello. I rotated groups of four kids through the BioTech portion of the camps. Only students who could fit into my boots, or brought their own could be part of the biotech team.

There were a lot of bummed out kids who could not interact with the animals safely. That was a learning moment for me. And a teachable moment for those kids.

Jim Bruner

In this summer’s camps, EVERY kid will be required to wear sterilizable boots. It is a necessity and it is the Law here at Mezzacello. Live and learn it may be, but adapt and thrive is a better mission.

Building Mezzacello In Stakes, Strings, and CAD

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Now that Mezzacello is finally at its complete Phase 2.0, we should take a moment to discuss style and vision. This the blog entry that discusses Building Mezzacello In Stakes, Strings, CAD and Bursts and reveals how the two minds of Mezzacello think and work.

Background is Key

Rick is a child of the south. He was raised by decent hard-working family with strong roots in America’s east coast. He was with a military influence in established and historic towns with names like New Bern, Alexandria, Washington DC.

The Architect

Rick’s early training was in drafting and architecture. He was exposed to culture, style, proportion, and grace. He learned survey skills early and applies those skills rigorously.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the formal gentility of the East-facing gardens at Mezzacello. The gardens are grand, spacious, elegant, and graceful. There is a strong sense of place there and they are well-built.

The Wolf

Jim in the other hand was raised by wolves in the middle of the Mojave desert in California. A transplant to Ohio as a teen he grew to adulthood in Appalachia as a stranger in a strange land. But he was creative and resourceful, but mostly feral.

Every project in the West-facing gardens at Mezzacello were meticulously designed in CAD and planned to be part of an overlapping systems engineering and agricultural ecosystems master plan. Laser aligned, but poorly executed. The systems fit in a box, but they are not precise; you can see that from the air as well.

Why Is All This Important? Diversity

Mezzacello is both an ecosystem and an organism, a place and a machine, and a learning lab and a home. It is diverse, robust, sustainable, structured, and chaotic. Great things happen here and bad things happen here, but the diversity is the key strategic innovation to promote adaptability, flexibility, and stability – and life!

Oh! It would be even more wonky if I wasn’t there to pitch a fit!

Richard Riley

Raising The Stakes and The Great Shift

The real shift in the mission and vision of Mezzacello came around 2018 when we mutually decided that the 5 meter wide stretch of lawn that splits the property north and south should be a shared resource. At the time the only resources that were there were the pergola for shade and outdoor meals, and the grass, to allow the chickens and ducks to roam in the chicken tractor and destroy grass pests and grubs – and improve the soil!

We had an original vision for this stretch of yard; The DMZ. In fact we even referred to the gardens as South Korea to the east and North Korea to the west. You can see it defined on the east by the straight lines and formal geometries of the formal gardens and on the west by the line of picket fencing that denotes the urban farm components of Mezzacello.

However by 2018 we quickly began to realize that this strategy was unsustainable and reckless. We added the pond the year earlier and we loved having this new aquatic ecosystem and resource – along with all of its headaches! But we KNEW it was a folly to not maximize this space in the service of our mission to Grow, Maintain, Sustain, and Explain.

Where Worlds Collide

It started with the pond. We needed water, and algae and fish, and the related systems integration that would afford both gardens. The pond was the first concession, well built and designed and still a bit chaotic. A true collaboration.

Then came the herb gardens and the parterres. We poured all of our design skills and bio-ag research into those beds. Strong, sustainable and drought-resistant soil, and a formal boxwood parterre that neatly holds a variety of herbs and pollinator beneficials as well as provides the perfect micro-climate to extend tender seasonal herbs well into winter.

Those two new ecosystems became the integral innovation that really united Mezzacello and it’s multiple sustainable and self-enclosed ecosystems. From this reality we adapted our motto of “Poor Boys Have Poor Ways” to include “Every System Should have three inputs and Five to Eight Outputs“. And we never looked back.

Rick’s formalism and sense of style and proportion and Jim’s insatiable curiosity and love of science and research reinvigorated Mezzacello and launched the first formal Learning Lab partnerships. These qualities make Mezzacello unique and the diversity allows life to flourish and it encourages communities to grow. Diversity is the key strategy in a garden and in a marriage — in fact, it is key in any collaboration of any sort.

Stay tuned, there will be more to come. In the meantime share with me ways that you create diversity and sustainability in your gardens and discourage and optimize waste? Do you compost, reuse and recycle? Do you integrate animals into your gardens? You know I am curious, but far less feral these days! LOL!

Mezzacello is an enclosed urban garden ecosystem. There are many gardens on the property. One of the most important is the gardens of people and ideas.

What do I mean when I say a garden of people and ideas? Well, Mezzacello is just too big for me to do on my own. I need help occasionally from friends and neighbors. I use social media, my blog and my contacts at the PAST Foundation to help gather those people to help me at the farm. I also call on my neighbors around Mezzacello. In return for food, flowers, eggs, compost, and manure they provide me the occasional volunteer or perform ESSENTIAL neighborhood watch efforts for me. I provide eggs and food to young mothers and the elderly along my street, and in return they watch out for me. I have on many occasions had a neighbor text me to tell me your chickens are out, or there is someone in your yard.

You may not think of this as a garden, but if you reframe the problem you see that it really is. You tend these relationships. You make them healthy and sustainable. You feed them with grace and kindness and they return a yield. Rick’s formal gardens give them something beautiful and peaceful to look at or aspire to. A garden is a place for the mind, soul and body.

The whole point of Mezzacello is to reframe the idea of what it means to be sustainable and healthy in the 21st Century. There’s no app for that. It requires hard work, novel ideas, good people and meaningful, rich and rewarding relationships. All of these are tended to – like a garden.