Spring 2021 and the Brunerform

It was 14C in Ohio yesterday and this is my observation of spring 2021 and the Brunerform. Rick and I decided to go out and talk to Mezzacello and see what she might be needing. We saw a lot of trash (hidden beneath the snows) and many signs of life! It was a nice little jaunt.

Rick checked on all of his formal garden beds to encourage them. I checked on the pond, the potager herb beds and my #ProjectMartian beds. Oof! They need love, but they are thriving.

I let the poultry into the potager vegetable beds. They went crazy and TURNED everything over for me. Thanks! Mental note: Don’t spend $50 on mulch to make the walkways between the beds look clean. Those birds turned EVERYTHING over. LOL!

But that is a natural sustainable system for you. The compost beds look terrific! I have 2,000 Liters of additional compost cured in the #ProjectMartian BioReactors. That will be added into the potager beds and into parts of Rick’s gardens.

It’s only fair, since his gardens provided a lot of the biomass. I snapped this quick photo of Rick and I. As per usual I am in my “Brunerform”.

The Brunerform

One question I get asked a lot about sustainable #AppliedSTEM bio-engineered gardens is why I am always wearing a dress shirt and bow tie while I am gardening. It’s an important question that deserves an answer; It’s because I want to.

Everyone assumes that I wear expensive clothes. WRONG. That bow tie costs more than everything else I am wearing in this photo – including the hat and shoes. I wear Thrift Store clothes.

I prefer natural fibers that can be shredded and added back into the system or at the very least, re-donated. I am not insane. I am just aware that nature recycles everything, even beauty.

This is what I fondly refer to as my “Brunerform” You’ll rarely see me out of it. In fact, amongst my friends and neighbors, they loudly complain when they see me out of it. It is my style and it has become my brand.

Every time I use the Hashtag #GentlemanFarmer I mean it. What is your impression you want to make on the world? Mine is classy and always #BattleReady in a boardroom or in a garden room, take your pick.

Here at Mezzacello one of the greatest gifts besides the food, the joy, the work, and the peace, is getting to watch life survive and thrive for its own merit. We forget in a mass produced world that life is in fact a miracle. I do not discount miracles. It’s a big word and a strong word and loaded with culture subtext, but sometimes life is about little miracles.

Case in point when I was burning down weeds and dying plants at the end of #ProjectMartian. I had some extra green bean vines (ironically named “Kentucky Wonder”), so I threw those in the Brazier as well. Beans being what they are – vines – dropped six of their beans outside of the Brazier. They did not want to perish, nor did they want to become potash for the rest of the plants here at Mezzacello. They wanted to be green beans. So these are my magic beans. It may seem silly or frivolous, but I’m going to plant them in the spring. Who knows? Maybe there will be a great big beanstalk that grows up into the clouds and I will find a goose that lays golden eggs?

Probably not, because science rules here and there’s not enough biomass to grow something that large, I don’t have a permit to grow something that tall, I could never get enough power for the lighting system it would require, I am afraid of heights, I know my farm is an airport flight path and I KNOW what is in the clouds and in lower Earth orbit. But a boy can dream! And that is one of the other miracles of life; we dream. Dream on people it’s good for the soul.

When I was a young boy I would watch the reruns of “Gilligan’s Island” every afternoon. I would laugh and enjoy the larger than life characters and situations. My favorite and most despised character was the professor. How could someone so smart, so creative, and so well versed in the practical application of bamboo NOT get them off the island – but he could make a bamboo and salvaged outboard boat engine hair salon, complete with hair dryers and sinks, on a desert island? It was maddening to me. This week our neighborhood friend Eva Knutson gave us 12 branches of bamboo. Well, I have always been in MacGyver mode here at Mezzacello, so I figured out a creative use of that strong, lightweight, and flexible bamboo: potato plant stringing matrix.

This is my third batch of potatoes this season at Mezzacello in the #ProjectMartian planting beds. I grew Yukon Gold, then Redskin potatoes. The plants and tubers grew very well in the amended growth substrate. The problem was always that the plants would start to wither and lay about. Soon after they looked so miserable I had to harvest them. Well now I have a stringing matrix that is #ZeroWaste and much more robust than jute stringing alone. Thanks Eva!

I would also like to thank my neighbor and fellow #UrbanFarmer Simon LaBozetta. Simon is a #WorldClass potato horticulturalist. It was Simon who convinced me that I could grow multiple generations of plants in my #ProjectMartian compost and regolith substrate. I just had to insure the spuds had the right amendments and nutrients and then the detail about supporting the plants. So the Ray Bradbury bit, that’s a nod to Simon. On Mars, those plant’s leaves are going to need all the sunlight they can get!

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.

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.

At Mezzacello, the various ecosystems always need tending. When we know that a garden bed will need to sit fallow for a season because we either don’t have time or money to get it done, I will intentionally plant nitrogen-fixing crops like clover or hairy vetch to promote nitrogen and moisture in the soil. The parterre gardens were finally ready to be planted. All of that clover, hairy vetch, dead leaves and twigs needed to be collected. Call it guerrilla composting if you will. But it’s a great way to amass one cubic meter of biomass quickly.

To all exterior perspectives, this seems preplanned. What the general public doesn’t know is that this strategy started because Rick is too lazy to haul all of his waste to the compost bins on the western edge of the gardens. So I just started collecting wastes in the right balance. I intentionally placed and distribute the dead leaves and twigs in the bed with an approximation of the amount of greenery that I am most likely to harvest and commensurate brown materials and manure waiting to be mixed in. I needed to balance out the greens with browns. It’s not the prettiest way to do this, but it really works well in a pinch. All my neighbors and friends know that we are building Mezzacello as we go. I have systems. I document those systems and modify them as I go along to maximize learning from failure and success. I have found this pop up compost to be really useful.

All I have to do is collect it, mix it, and move it back to the compost bins and it’s ready to go. If I harvest it in the right season, I’ll mix in some more manure, mulch, added greens, and peat moss and voila! Instant lasagna garden! Of course Rick bought 64 boxwoods for the parterre do the lasagna garden isn’t happening this summer, but there is another garden ecosystem that can use this bounty.

Peas Porridge Hot, Peas Porridge Bold

Children have sung this little nursery rhyme for centuries; Peas Porridge Hot, Peas Porridge Bold! Although they usually sing it cold. LOL!

Peas Porridge has been a staple of western culture for centuries. It’s a super well-balanced meal: a bit of dairy, vegetables, grains, protein, good fat. Add a slice of rye with some butter and boom!

This is a power meal. You can go all day on this meal. It’s delicious hot and cold.

Fry it in butter in the morning! Eat it on a winter night! Be your best self with this super simple hearty, and delicious meals!

INGREDIENTS

• 1/1 ratio of peas to water
• or chicken or vegetable broth
• sprig of mint, minced
• 4 Tbsp butter (use heavy whipping cream and make your own butter!)
• 4 Tbsp flour
• 1 cup milk or cream (reserve 1/2 cup of heavy whipping cream and mix with 1/2 cup milk)
• salt/pepper to taste
• Tbsp caraway seeds or 1tsp ground
• Mint or Parsley for garnish

DIRECTIONS

1. Add water/broth and peas to a Dutch Oven over medium heat. Bring to boil, reduce heat. Add mint. Cook for 30 minutes.
2. Add milk. Roll butter into a walnut sized ball. Roll butter in flour and pepper. Add butter/flour ball to soup. Increase heat for 15 minutes until milk, butter softened peas start to gel. Cook for another 15min or until done. Let the soup rest for 15-20 minutes.
3. Serve hot (or cold) with a sprig of mint or parsley and a flourish of caraway and a slice of rye or pumpernickel bread with butter.

The Perfect Cover Crop for Unsightly Chain Link Fence

How do you hide an unsitely chainlink fence and an emerging urban farm? It turns out we found the Perfect Cover Crop for Unsightly Chain Link Fence! It is a fast growing euonymus specimen called, “Manhattan Euonymus” and chain link fencing!

Building a Perimeter

Mezzacello was a property with some fences but with big missing gaps — Like a toothless insecure smile.

Jim Bruner

When we started building Mezzacello, we first needed to secure Mezzacello. The perimeter is 360 linear feet. The front elevation that fronts North 20th Street came pre-fenced with a wrought iron fence circa sometime in the 20th Century and still highly functional, but we had to be practical.

The west elevation (the back alley) had an existing 36″ high and 70′ long chain link fence from late in the 20th Century. The west fence was missing a 10′ section, probably opening onto a driveway or garage at some point. Mezzacello was a property with some fences but with big missing gaps — Like a toothless insecure smile.

Our immediate problems were that people were driving their cars through the property. Homeless transients were pitching camp on the grounds. Drug addicts were using the bushes for getting high.

Neighbors were walking (and relieving their dog’s waste) randomly through the yard. And most distressing and immediate, we had no security, privacy or safety from the south facing Broad Street elevation.

Many times when we first moved in, we had people brazenly walk from the COTA (The local Bus line in Columbus, OH) bus stop (we called it the party stop) or from the run down “Chips-n-Go” gas station, across the parking lot to the south of the property and right into the yard to ask us for money or some of our food.

If another human soul ever asks me for food, they will get it. That is a baseline of human dignity. But if they ask me for money, they need to accept no, or be willing to work or trade a service and dignity for it.

The strangers walking across our yard (and through our plantings and visits with guests) were too erratic. We needed a barrier. We had a 150′ stretch that needed a fence. And a replacement 10′ span where the back gate once stood.

Wrought With Costs

We soon learned that wrought iron was right out as it would have been too expensive. There was already a span of chain link on the western edge. Chain link it was.

For the past two years, Rick has been trying to conceal the chain link behind a cover of hearty Manhattan Euonymus which he has all been grown entirely from cuttings. He inherited the clippings from our neighbors on Miami Avenue to the west of us, Joshua Snyder-Hill and Steve Snyder-Hill.

This method of propagating Euonymus was taught to us by our neighbor, Ms. Elizabeth Pryor. Sadly, Ms. Elizabeth passed away just last year. She was a great promoter of all things Mezzacello, and a great neighbor.

Propagation and Protection

All the plants at Mezzacello are clones of those initial clippings #AppliedSTEM #Ecology #Sustainability. For the most part it has worked well. Each winter we run into a problem with euonymus dying because the lot attendants of the parking lot just to the south of us choose to pile all the snow onto our fence line and this kills the euonymus in the process.

Rick is seriously considering planting some 6′ steel poles 4′ deep with 2′ sticking out (like you see at Walmart or Target to discourage people from driving their cars into the store front). But the city has rules about who can construct barriers right up on a city right-of-way…

Keep On Plugging

So Rick just keeps plugging cuttings into the ground and I keep occasionally watering and fertilizing them. We do have one problem area. On the southwest corner of the lot, there was apparently a garage and an apron drive that emptied into Avon Alley.

Nothing will grow back there with the exception of vines and scrub weeds. We may have to excavate that driveway at some point. Another project, another time.

Watering an Urban Garden Efficiently

The 2019 garden beds of Mezzacello. After five years of trial and error, research and learning from failure and success, this is the optimal configuration of garden beds for the potager gardens at Mezzacello.

There are some lessons learned along the way:

• The strong southern exposure of light is optimized.
• The main axis north and south has a wider access path.
• Situated directly adjacent to the poultry and rabbit yard.
• Clean pathways for ambulation, planting, harvesting and weeding.
• Beds no wider than an arm’s reach.
• Zones along the fence line to manage invasive weeds.
• Microclimate bedding with permaculture structures for maximum water retention.
• In place lasagna gardening and soil amendments.
• Structured edging to make weeding and mowing easier.
• A central east west access route wide enough for a truck.
• A north west walkway wide enough for carts and tools.
• Burlap mulching to control and manage weeds.
• Modified paths to make fence-adjacent beds accessible.
• Weed cloth and hardwood mulching in pathways.
• A complete picket fence to enclose the garden.
• Rabbit proof fencing behind pickets to deter wild rabbits.
• Electricity to power security lights to discourage human invaders.
• Vertical trellises and structures for optimizing vining plant yields.
• Tomatoes have been relegated outside the main beds to control seed drop.
• Garden beds optimized for easy to grow/store rooting vegetables.
• Leafy vegetables grown vertically, or using hydroponics

Lessons Learned

I have learned many lessons over the past four seasons. I believe this garden to be the optimal configuration for this environment. My last hurdle is proper irrigation.

I told them I promise to not use gravestones to denote what crop is growing where, as gravestones cast a shadow.

Jim Bruner

That is this summer’s experiment. Wish me luck. Especially since the police are concerned that I have so many apparent grave sites situated on my property. I told them I promise to not use gravestones to denote what crop is growing where, as gravestones cast a shadow.

My main challenge now is watering these garden bed configurations properly. I am already monitoring the weather and programming the automatic watering system to not water if it’s raining

The tractor I use to disperse the 30′ radius watering circle along the 24′ path is not very efficient. It needs to be reset twice daily, and sometimes loses water pressure as I live in downtown Columbus. The city does not adequately pressurize the water supply. Another challenge, but I am up for it.

Living the life of an Urban Farmer in the 21st Century and having a full time job is stressful. You work at a full time job during the day, and then manage a household, a full house remodel, a farm, food gardens, infrastructure, and a formal garden in the evenings and weekends. Oh and factor in your social life and commitments to the community, the various boards you sit on, your social life, requests from friends to go see the 3 hour Marvel Avengers “Endgame” movie or just hang out and have a drink, and you are out of time. This is where gratitude comes in.

There is no way to get all of this done. But if you reframe the problem it is easier; be grateful that you have so many opportunities to connect and see your impact in the world. The issue isn’t that you are so very busy. The issue isn’t that you don’t have the time to be a professional at your job, an engaged citizen, a good friend, a farmer, and a homesteader. The issue is that you have the resources, capacity, desire, and opportunity to do all of those things.

When you get the opportunity to disengage a bit from the chaos, take it. There is no shame in that. Learn to say no graciously. But the rest of the time, do some research on optimization of your farm infrastructure, invest in security features, be willing to get up earlier and manage chores, keep your calendar up to date, and be willing to live in a home 150 years old and still under construction. None of that is going to change in the short term. But your attitude can change. The next time you are out connecting with a friend and you know you should be back home making sure those crazy ducks aren’t breaking into your garden enclosure and destroying your kale and lettuce; Stop. Take a breath. Make a note that you are living in fear of scarcity in that moment. You actually have abundance and just need to learn to build better systems and reframe opportunity.

Be grateful that you live a life packed with opportunity. A life where when someone asks you what you “do” your answer never will be a single sentence answer that doesn’t inspire you. This is gratitude and it will change your life, your mood, and your biochemistry in your brain. Now practice it.