The Vision for a SuSol Education Center

By Sustainable Solano

Sustainable Solano has had a vision for a while now: To have an office space that serves as a place of education around the many things we teach about, such as sustainable landscaping, water capture and reuse; cooking with seasonal, sustainable local food; and building community resilience.

We have been lucky to spend the past few years in our office at the Global Center for Success on Mare Island. This office space puts us near nonprofit partner organizations and the beauty of the Vallejo People’s Garden and the Pollinator Pathway garden we installed with them and Solano RCD in front of the building. But as our team has grown in number, we find there are limitations in a one-room office, both for our team members’ needs as well as ways we would like to interact with all of you in the community.

And so we are returning to that original vision.

We would love to find a safe and beautiful place where we can create and exhibit the solutions we’ve been teaching and demonstrating for nearly 25 years. These may include a permaculture garden or farm, sustainable water techniques, solar energy and maybe even chickens. There could be a commercial kitchen space for teaching classes and preparing food (or the potential to add such a space). We also need a shared workspace and a place to gather around a table for large team or partner meetings, and an area to house tools and equipment, promotional materials and office files. The property would need to be zoned to allow for office space and would need to be able to support visitors coming to the site for meetings, classes and demonstrations.

We’ve seen creative and innovative ways individuals, organizations and cities have supported such projects. In Berkeley, the Ecology Center runs EcoHouse, which was founded in 1999 when a group of individuals “collectively purchased and transformed a small, dilapidated North Berkeley home into a demonstration house and garden.” In American Canyon, the city offered up an old public works yard to be transformed into the Napa River Ecology Center in partnership with the American Canyon Community Parks Foundation. Santa Cruz Permaculture now stewards a 26-acre farm under a 30-year lease as part of its operations.

We’d love to hear your ideas and suggestions for supporting this vision! Reach out to us at info@sustainablesolano.org

Even with this active vision for an education center, Sustainable Solano is committed to continuing hands-on sustainable landscaping and resilience-building workshops, cooking classes, and internships within Solano communities, because these are the very heart of our work. Our goal is to bring neighbors together in ways that help them connect with each other, the Earth, and themselves.

Gift of the Generations

By Alana Mirror, creator of This Wonderful World: a musical reality-show where love for ourselves, each other, and the Earth become one

We introduced Alana and her This Wonderful World project when she attended the Pollinator Pathway garden installation and created a series of three songs from that experience. Since then, she’s done a series of songs about the installation of Peace of Eden community garden at City Church Fairfield, and a series inspired by the Vallejo People’s Garden. This is her reflection and the last song in her spring series — it highlights community gardens through SuSol’s Solano Gardens program. We appreciate reposting it here with her permission.

I’ve never felt like I had much of a green thumb. Though I’ve always known that growing a garden is a staple of sustainable living, I never really felt capable. Growing up, we didn’t have a garden. Other than the tomatoes that my grandpa grew, or my great-grandma’s home-dried oregano, I just thought food came from the store.

It wasn’t until I found Sustainable Solano that things began changing. I remember the first time I went to one of their community events — such diversity! All ages, shapes, colors and sizes were represented. There were people who seemed super experienced in the garden, and then there were folks (like me) who found the courage to show up as amateurs.

No one embarrassed us. No one rolled their eyes. Tips were shared with kindness and patience. I felt embraced and appreciated just for showing up. There seemed to be a shared understanding: we’ve all grown up in a culture that’s been disconnected from the source, and we’re all still finding our way home.

Before the rise of industrial agriculture, participating in the cultivation of food has been a human staple. But my great-grandma’s generation tended not to pass it on. Why would she? The Great Depression was hard and the supermarkets were miraculous. All it took was one generation for that long line of ancestral wisdom to disappear.

Fortunately, it wasn’t lost completely, which is evident in the fact that there’s enormous efforts being put forth to help reestablish our most basic connection with Earth: food. For non-home owners (like me — and 44% of California), just having a place to practice gardening is a gift. But when you add education and community to that, the roots really start to grow back. Recently the Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, declared loneliness an epidemic where 60% of us feel a desperate hunger for belonging. His solution: social connection.

The garden not only offers a place to connect, but a way to connect. Metaphors of the earth remind us of our shared human condition where we all know what it’s like to be vulnerable when we sprout and withered when we’re spent. We all know the frustration from pesky weeds and the exhilaration of fruit that’s sweetening. The garden gives us language to connect in where we all belong, through the seasons, in the bird song. Here we are reminded that it’s OK to need each other. Witnessing the bees pollinating, the fungi decomposing, the compost nourishing, we are reassured that everything needs each other, and everything has something to give. We are reminded of the abundance that comes when we work together — how precious the fruit is when our love has nurtured it.

It may sound a bit woo-woo, but it’s true: there’s a vibration that’s inherent. As one of the program managers for Solano Gardens, Jazzmin Ballou, confidently confirmed: “all I need to do is touch the Earth to tune in, and quiet my mind, to give me a glorious sense of sacred belonging.”

It’s truly a gift. As someone who has struggled with my fair share of loneliness, I hardly recognize myself after spending these last few months in community gardening. As much as self-help strategies have served me, there’s been no greater cure than serving. Of course I’m still learning a lot, but I’m not as embarrassed about it anymore. The confidence and connection that comes from growing together has sent ripples through my whole life. It’s an overflow that’s yearning to be shared, a gift begging to be given, a joy to pass on (as our ancestors did not so long ago) to a world that, every day, is rediscovering our beauty.

Thank you for reminding me.

This Wonderful World is the latest production from Alana’s greater work, called The Living Mirror Project, a creative practice that generates peace by seeing ourselves in everything.

Learn more about This Wonderful World here
Watch the whole series here
Sign up for Alana’s newsletter here
Contact Alana at thelivingmirrorproject@gmail.com if there are any service events that you think should be celebrated in this series, or for more info on booking a live musical show.

Sustainable Gardening Intern Reflections

The Sustainable Gardening internship was an opportunity for high school students to learn basic permaculture principles with a focus on waterwise gardening, and engage with community members while supporting community gardens. They were led in their garden activities by SuSol Program Coordinator Jazzmin Ballou and often worked with designer Scott Dodson. These three interns shared their reflections on the program with us, and we are excited to share them with you here with their permission.

Sustainable Gardening interns move woodchips for the First Christian Church garden in Vallejo

Scooping the Wood Chips

By Aldo Michel

This was technically my first official work day with my fellow co-workers. It was on a Friday; I came there running from school ready to get the work done. I get there a little late but I get caught up on what we are doing. We need to scoop up a huge mountain of woodchips, put them in wheelbarrows and then go dump them somewhere in the garden. It was really quiet at first, only the sound of the shovels hitting the ground and the wheelbarrows being rolled out. I knew [fellow intern] Vincent, but he was on the other side of the mountain so I couldn’t talk to him, so I just continued with my work.

As the time passes by I notice that this young fellow with blond-ish hair is working really hard. I mean it’s his first day, I’m sure he wants to make a good impression and he is sure succeeding. After a while I decided to take a little break, drink some water and check out those granola bars. Once there I see that Vincent is also taking a break — perfect now we can talk. We greet each other and start talking about our day. A couple laughs later, the same blond-ish guy comes and takes a sip of water. Once he leaves me and Vincent started talking about him, we want to start a conversation with him, he seems nice and it’s never a bad idea to make new friends. We weren’t sure about his name so we weren’t into our email to check an email that Jazz has sent us. We checked the recipients and our questions were answered, his name is Liam.

We go back to the wood chips and greet him. Our suspicions were correct; he was a nice guy. We mostly talked about school and college and whatnot, not the most interesting topic but I still had fun. I even managed to fit in a couple jokes and for the most part it was accompanied by laughter. I had lots of fun that day just talking with my new friends. I’m very glad we decided to start a conversation and that we got the work done as well, although I was very sore the next day.

Meaningful Work in the Garden

By Liam McGee

I think the most meaningful time in this internship for me was our last work day at the Faith Food Fridays Garden. While it started off a bit sad with Jazzmin and a few of the interns gone, it quickly turned around. I first walked around the garden and accustomed myself with the diverse crops they had growing there.

A Haiku for the Gardening Internship

Shovel the wood chips
Tiring work for my body
Yet I feel fulfilled

-Liam McGee

One thing that especially caught my eye (or more so my nose I suppose) were the chamomile plants planted in multiple beds. They smelled delightful and I’d never seen what the plant looked like before, only the tea in the past. Once a few more people started arriving and a helper from Faith Food Fridays led us through an opening circle, Scott took us into what we’d be doing that day.

For some reason, one of the beds had lots of wood chips in it instead of soil. These chips don’t supply lots of nutrients for the plants unless they are broken down into soil so we had to painstakingly remove all of the chips and replace them with soil. While at first it reminded me of the wood chip shoveling we did at the church in Vallejo, it slowly turned into a more fun experience.

More and more people began showing up, someone started playing music on a bluetooth speaker, and the entire atmosphere changed. One thing that was especially cool to see was the number of kids present. Even if their parents just dragged them there to help, they were eager in planting and watering the entire garden. It was awesome to see how young children were already being inspired to get into growing their own plants, for a more sustainable and healthy lifestyle. It warmed my heart seeing them get to experience the joy of gardening. After a few hours with lots of volunteer help, we finished the once-wood-chip-filled bed and had transformed it into a thriving environment for the new plants. To end the working session, we picked some of the chamomile buds to bring home and dry out for tea. It was a perfect treat to end a fulfilling and effective work day in the garden.

Liam McGee and Aldo Michel rest while working at the Faith Food Fridays garden in Vallejo

My Experience with the Gardening Internship

By Charlie Castillo

Although I had joined this internship a bit late, I was welcomed kindly by the people who run Sustainable Solano. Prior to the internship, we first had to go through certification, which consisted of meetings held with youth from multiple different internships. There, I got to meet a wide variety of people with different dreams of the future and different reasons to do their internships. The most common reason that I’d found with all the kids I’ve met from the certification process was because they had a vision to shape the world into a place that was green and has clean air.

My favorite highlight of this internship was the workday at First Christian Church. I liked this day a lot because I was able to meet all of the other interns and talk about school and hobbies. I found that they were all exceptionally brilliant, some of them holding down several AP classes and athletics, and even attending community college classes too. Although we had only spent a few hours of the day together, I know that the garden at First Christian Church was created with love and compassion from me and friends from Sustainable Solano.

The people of the church were also very friendly in making sure that we did not push ourselves too hard to get things done, and their lighthearted conversations made the mood of the day very calming and peaceful. I also appreciate every time that someone has taken the time out of their day to express their gratitude for us helping with the garden every now and then.

I enjoyed raking and shoveling in this garden a lot and I hope to find an opportunity to do it again someday. Overall, if there is one thing that I learned with this gardening internship, it is that teamwork creates beautiful gardens.

 

This intership was offered as a collaboration between SuSol’s Solano Sustainable Backyards and Solano Gardens programs. Solano Sustainable Backyards is funded by the Solano County Water Agency, and Solano Gardens is funded by Solano Public Health. We are grateful to both funders for supporting our work with youth.

2023 Vacaville Demonstration Food Forest Tour: Featured Gardens

Scroll through the list below to read about the Vacaville gardens that are featured on this year’s Demonstration Food Forest Tour!

Gardens will be open from 10 am-1 pm Saturday, June 3. You can pick up your itinerary for this self-guided tour at the Vacaville Farmers Market from 9-11 am.

Register for the June 3 tour here!

Vacaville Demonstration Food Forest Gardens

Blooming Beneficial Biome

This Food Forest Keeper was inspired to transform her lawn into a garden full of healthy soil with microbial diversity, having installed a swale and berm and started the transformation when SuSol selected the site for a demonstration food forest. The garden thrives with a diversity of plants that support one another and manure, worm castings and compost inoculation to nurture the soil, without additional amendments and inputs.

Plants share nutrients courtesy of the underworld super highway delivery system of microorganisms and mycorrhizal fungi. Plants feed microorganisms excess simple sugars in this interdependent environment, who then co-labor to source and deliver what each plant requires. Each row has a diversity of vegetables and beneficials that serve to confuse bugs and disease. It should not be necessary to adopt a rigid practice of crop rotation with this integrated method of planting.

See amaranth, asparagus, beets, blueberries, bok choy, broccoli, carrots, cabbage, cauliflower, kohlrabi, lettuce, parsnips, Swiss chard, spinach, strawberries, peach, apple, pear, cherry, nectaplum, apple, microclover, blooming beneficials and more on less than a tenth of an acre. The Food Forest Keeper has before and after posters and a reference binder of almost every plant.

Learn more

Healthy Futures

This garden has eight thriving fruit trees in a small front yard, as well as a plethora of herbaceous and shrub plants. The vegetation is watered through a combination of swales that collect rainwater, greywater from the laundry, and (rarely utilized) drip irrigation. The yard has, like any good forest should, taken on a life and energy of its own, constantly changing and morphing year over year, but never failing to provide the residents, neighbors, and several local food banks with fruits and vegetables.

Learn more

Vacaville’s Westgate Wonderland Neighborhood

(These next three gardens are within walking distance of each other)

Mangía

This four-year-old front yard garden welcomes the neighborhood to pick as they please. The yard extends to the backyard with pollinator plants intermixed with edibles, chickens, repurposed items, a native sedge field and so much more. This yard integrates systems to benefit the whole property.

 

Learn more

Our Shepherd’s Heart

This front yard garden was installed in May 2021 with the focus on growing food and a desire to share with neighbors. A large swale in the front wraps around the yard and supports fruit trees and pollinators.

Learn more

Orchid Lily

This small, beautiful, low maintenance front yard garden offers easy access to culinary herbs and three fruit tree guilds supported with yarrow, comfrey and borage.

Learn more

Inspired Garden

Homeowners Mike and Sherry participated in SuSol’s DIY Sustainable Design course after working with SuSol to create a demonstration food forest garden and laundry-to-landscape greywater system at the family home that has housed four generations (Healthy Futures, also on this year’s tour). With that inspriation and guidance, Mike and Sherry now have converted their front and back yards, turning lawn into an edible garden filled with pollinator plants that includes swales to capture rainwater, an herb spiral, espalied apple and pear trees and drip irrigation. The garden now yields enough fruit and vegetables to share with neighbors.

Tour their yard to see how you can apply these principles at home!

We are incredibly grateful for the generous support of our funders. The Solano County Water Agency continues to support the Sustainable Backyard Program throughout the county. Solano Sustainable Backyard Program short videos: Waterwise and Building Gardens and Community. Occasionally we combine funding from other programs to make larger projects possible.

2023 Fairfield & Suisun City Demonstration Food Forest Garden Tour & Healthy Local Food Showcase is May 6!

Join us for the Fairfield-Suisun City Demonstration Food Forest Tour and Celebrating Healthy Local Food: A Culinary and Garden Showcase on Saturday, May 6!

Sustainable Solano’s self-guided tour of vibrant, waterwise gardens in Fairfield and Suisun City will start with check-in from 9-11 am at Jardin de Esperanza, the garden on Armijo High School’s campus. Park and follow the signs to the garden, where you will be able to sign in and receive an itinerary of gardens to visit. Then tour Jardin de Esperanza and visit the Showcase in the Armijo High School library before heading out to tour the other gardens between 10 am-1 pm!

The tour highlights private and community gardens that use sustainable, waterwise practices to create spaces that provide food, habitat and beauty while capturing rainwater and, in some cases, reusing laundry water in the landscape. Some gardens also show how to make chickens part of a backyard ecosystem. Register here.

In the Showcase, students who participated in the Armijo Healthy Local Food program will share multimedia projects that highlight the importance of growing, cooking and eating healthy food and the importance of local food. Students in the Healthy Local Food program spent weeks learning about the importance of healthy, seasonal, local food by learning culinary skills and how to cook with local produce and meeting in the school garden to connect with growing and understanding our relationship to food. They used their experiences to create multimedia campaigns that include videos, interviews, podcasts, blogs and more!

Explore the multimedia campaigns at your own pace while talking with the students about their work and the program.

We hope to see you there!

Scroll through the list below to read about the Fairfield and Suisun City gardens that are featured on this year’s Demonstration Food Forest Tour!

Gardens will be open from 10 am-1 pm Saturday, May 6. You can pick up your itinerary for this self-guided tour at the Armijo High School “Jardin de Esperanza” from 9-11 am.

Register for the tour here!

Fairfield Demonstration Food Forest Gardens

Magical Garden

This garden was a front lawn conversion in 2019. It is filled with vegetables, fruits, herbs and more, building healthy soil and harvesting water from the roof.

Home to hummingbirds, bees, ladybugs and other beneficial insects, the garden sparks conversation with the neighbors and offers bountiful produce to share.

Learn more

Mom’s Delight

Installed in 2017, this backyard food forest has 21 fruit trees pruned annually to 5 feet, making it easier to access the fruit. The majority of the trees are watered by rain funneled into a swale, while others are watered from the laundry-to-landscape greywater system. An automatic drip system is used during the dry periods. All the fruits are shared with neighbors, friends and family. Additional plantings of salvia and calendula draw in honey bees and hummingbirds.

Laundry-to-Landscape greywater & backyard chickens

Learn more

West Winds

This garden was just planted in January 2023 as a collaborative project between Sustainable Solano and Solano 4-H. Youth members learned about permaculture and designing within the homeowners’ needs, then applied their new knowledge to a plan that includes fruit trees, pollinators and edible annuals. This site is especially susceptible to the western winds, which have annual summer gusts up to 40 mph. The garden is a work in progress as a learning space for 4-Hers for years to come.

Backyard chickens

Learn more

Suisun City Demonstration Food Forest Gardens

Caisteal Termonn

This garden is a demonstration in community and environmental resilience. Homeowners Heidi and Mitch had dealt with a wildfire taking their home in 2020. The garden was designed around a large maple tree, the only thing that survived the fire, and was named in Gaelic to harken back to Mitch’s native Scottish roots. It was installed December 2022.

Learn more

El Bosquecito

Installed in 2021 to mitigate the effects of flooding, this food forest garden is complete with chickens and a laundry-to-landscape greywater system. This yard has multiple fruit trees and pollinator plants.

Laundry-to-Landscape greywater & backyard chickens

 

Learn more

We are incredibly grateful for the generous support of our funders. The Solano County Water Agency continues to support the Sustainable Backyard Program throughout the county. Solano Sustainable Backyard Program short videos: Waterwise and Building Gardens and Community.

Armijo High’s garden is supported through our Solano Gardens program and by Innovative Health Solutions. 

The Healthy Local Food Program is run through Sustainable Solano, with funding from Solano Public Health and a CA Department of Food and Agriculture grant. Innovative Health Solutions is also a partner that supports the program and receives funding through the CalFresh Healthy Living Program administered through the Nutrition Services Bureau of Solano Public Health. The program is in partnership with Armijo High School and the school’s Multimedia Academy and Garden Club.

Pure Black Gold: A Love Song to Compost

By Alana Mirror, creator of This Wonderful World: a musical reality-show where love for ourselves, each other, and the Earth become one
We introduced Alana and her This Wonderful World project when she attended the Pollinator Pathway garden installation and created a series of three songs from that experience. Since then, she’s done a series of songs about the installation of Peace of Eden community garden at City Church Fairfield, and a series inspired by the Vallejo People’s Garden. This blog comes from her reflections from one of her songs inspired by the composting going on at Vallejo People’s Garden. We appreciate reposting it here with her permission.

No doubt something magical happens to life when we embrace the process of turning “what has been” into “what will become.” This is the mirror of composting.

Making this important soil amendment can be a smelly, dirty and all together gross process, but only when it’s out of balance. Healthy compost plies, in fact, don’t smell much at all. The microbes who break down the compost into soil need a balanced diet, just like the rest of us. You gotta work with it. If it starts getting smelly, there’s probably too much nitrogen-rich material (like kitchen scraps). But it’s an easy fix: all you gotta to is add some carbon-rich material (like dried leaves). If there’s too many insects, it probably just needs to be mixed a little better. If it’s taking too long to break down, it might benefit from a little more moisture. With attention and care, the transformational process of turning “what has been” into “what will become” doesn’t have to be gross. But, if it is, there’s always a way to correct it.

At the Vallejo People’s Garden, Ravi Shankar has been the head composter for 14 years. Trained as a “master composter,” I’ve never met anyone more enthusiastic about roly polies, worms, and microbes! Every week Ravi spends a few hours tending the compost, and he’s all in, literally! In his 60s, he jumps right into the compost bin as he uses his pitch fork to mix and turn it all up. He assesses what it needs to be balanced by gathering materials from the garden and by organizing the larger community’s contributions (such as shredded paper from a local office, coffee grounds from a local coffee shop, grass clippings from the neighborhood lawns, and even some folks’ kitchen scraps.) He absolutely loves it and swears that the work he does with the compost is the secret to what’s keeping him so fit, and so happy.

But he’s not the only one that benefits from his compost magic: the garden loves it! In fact, the compost is one of the Vallejo People’s Garden’s main tricks to growing so much good food for their community. It’s such magical stuff they sell this “Black Gold” to other gardeners.

It’s a reassuring metaphor for me as someone who’s going through my own personal transformation. In our rapidly changing world, it seems like every day I’m realizing parts of my life that aren’t serving the same purpose that they were meant to anymore. But, to have such a joyful metaphor of composting helps me to remember that change can be a process that enlivens and enriches life. Ravi’s enthusiastic leadership helps me to jump right into the transformational process where stinky and buggy doesn’t mean failure, it’s just a call to adjust. Everything that we’ve done in our lives (even the bits that we regret ) can serve a larger purpose when we embrace the messy process of change with the same vigor that Ravi takes to his beloved compost. No doubt change can hurt sometimes, but at least there’s hope in what can come of it.

May we all find the gifts in our discarded bits.

Follow the Vallejo People’s Garden on Instagram here and on Facebook here

This Wonderful World is the latest production from Alana’s greater work, called The Living Mirror Project, a creative practice that generates peace by seeing ourselves in everything.

Learn more about This Wonderful World here
Watch the whole series here
Sign up for Alana’s newsletter here
Contact Alana at thelivingmirrorproject@gmail.com if there are any service events that you think should be celebrated in this series, or for more info on booking a live musical show.