Help us Shape Our New Doing Good Business Awards Program!

Jan 26, 2024

By Sustainable Solano

Image source: PermaculturePrinciples.com

We know that there are Solano County-based businesses that make a difference in their communities, and this year, Sustainable Solano plans to launch an awards program to recognize those businesses that stand out in their efforts to support people and planet.

And we’d like your help!

The Inspiration

Sustainable Solano has spent 25 years working to strengthen our communities through urban agriculture and community gardens, supporting the local food system, building community conversations and action around environmental and climate resilience, and youth engagement and empowerment.

Our work is informed by the practice of permaculture, which at its base level applies to creating environments that support a healthy, thriving ecosystem. This can apply to landscapes, but also to people, communities and businesses.

We are inspired to recognize businesses that, in their own ways, embrace the three ethics of permaculture: Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.

For businesses, we see these ethics materializing in different ways:

  • Earth Care — A dedication to authentic sustainability practices that comes from direct intent, rather than greenwashing or government mandate
  • People Care — A dedication to outstanding treatment of employees, both in policy and in action.
  • Fair Share — A dedication to giving back to employees or the community.

How You Can Help

We want an advisory committee that will help to guide what this program looks like in our community. We want input from business leaders on how to define meaningful efforts in these three areas, and how to judge which nominees are head and shoulders above the rest. Ultimately, an advisory board will review and select the recipients. 

Help us to envision and shape a program that recognizes, celebrates and supports Solano County businesses that are striving to do good!

Want to help? Contact us at info@sustainablesolano.org. We will start the planning process in early March.

Garden Design Templates Simplify How To Start Your Sustainable Garden

Jan 22, 2024

By Sustainable Solano

Want to learn how to apply a waterwise garden template in your own yard? Join Heath Griffith of Grow with the Flow for a Waterwise Garden Design Lab from 10 am-1 pm Saturday, Feb. 24, in Benicia. Learn more and register here.

Creating your ideal garden space can be daunting. Even with piles of garden books, maps of hardiness zones, seasonal planting charts and catalogs spread out on the table, it can take an expert eye to know where certain plants will thrive and how they will work together.

A template can be that little lift needed to get you started on reshaping your yard into something beautiful. (And the perfect activity for this time of the year when cold, rainy days staring out of the window give us an opportunity to think of spring!)

That’s why we reached out to Joshua Burman Thayer with Native Sun Gardens. Joshua is a local landscape designer and horticulture consultant who creates ecological landscape designs, has done extensive work with native plants and organic farming, and community-based work around plants and food. He wrote Food Forests for First Timers, an introductory guide to permaculture in the garden.

Joshua shared these four templates, which we are sharing with you in this blog and will include in our plant resources. These free templates give you a quick way to get started, with the basic layout and selection of appropriate plants for each design.

The templates are designed in 100-square-foot “tiles” that can be combined in various ways to create a larger design.

Joshua shared four approaches: desert, edible, Mediterranean and tropical. The desert and Mediterranean designs are waterwise and drought-tolerant, which is appropriate for Solano County summers. Below each design, Joshua offers a brief description of each as well as where in the county these options could thrive best.

Desert

Desert: For those gardeners wanting to try their luck with only minimal hand watering and no weekly irrigation, desert plants can provide a robust plant palette. These plants can acclimate in 2-3 years and then get by on 1-2 waterings by hand per month in the dry season by year 3. Desert plants evolved to withstand great solar intensity and can thrive in sunny parts of Solano County. (Vacaville, Dixon).

Edible

Edible: If you wish to maximize food production in your urban lot, the edible template will show you how to prioritize food for humans at each level of the food forest. This system takes a good amount of water and care, but can also reward with the most food per acre if water is not an issue. (All of Solano County).

Mediterranean

Mediterranean: Mediterranean plants generally do rather well here, because both the Mediterranean region as well as California are between 32 and 38 degrees N latitude and have similar marine-influenced climates. As such, expect many of the Mediterranean edibles to thrive with the seasonality of California’s wet and dry seasons. (All of Solano County).

Tropical

Tropical: Solano County residents near sea level have the blessing of being able to grow food frost-free 12 months of the year. Some winters do test that ability, but generally low lying areas near bodies of water will allow for a microclimate perfect for growing tropical crops. Try the tropical template for fun varieties to your garden. (Suisun City, Benicia, Vallejo, Rio Vista, Fairfield).

If you are interested in learning how to apply a waterwise template to your own yard, join us for the Waterwise Garden Design Lab taught by Heath Griffith of Grow with the Flow on Feb. 24 in Benicia. Registration is free, but seats are limited.
Heath got their Permaculture Design Certificate with Vital Cycles Permaculture, through a course sponsored by Sustainable Solano. Since then, they have worked with Soilogical BioSolutions and Designs, become a Qualified Water Efficient Landscaper, and earned a nationally recognized certificate in Water Harvesting. Heath is driven by a deep passion for reconnecting humans with the landscapes that live and breathe all around us, beginning with water harvesting and sustainable water use.

There are other templates out there. For native plants, we recommend the California Native Plant Society’s Regional Guides, which include plant lists and design templates. You can download the one that suits your environment here.

Have a template you’ve used? Share it with us at info@sustainablesolano.org so we can add it to our list of resources!

Building Backyards (and Front Yards) of Hope

Dec 20, 2023

Sustainable Landscaping Steps to Transform a Lawn and Life

By Alana Mirror, The Living Mirror Project

You may have met Alana at one of SuSol’s events and workshops, or seen some of her music videos or blog posts from those experiences. Here, she shares with us about her journey and talks about transforming her lawn to a sustainable landscape within the budget of the lawn conversion rebate she received. Learn more about that process during her free online talk on Jan. 23. You can register here.

Alana’s finished lawn-to-sustainable landscape project

Over the last year, I single-handedly transformed my entire front lawn into a native plant habitat and edible garden — all for less than $1,000 out-of-pocket! With financial support from the Water-Efficient Landscape Rebate program from the Solano County Water Agency for converting a lawn to a waterwise landscape and educational support from Sustainable Solano, not only have I been able to save water, support the ecosystem, and grow my own food, but I’ve also grown a tremendous sense of purpose, empowerment and hope. My mental and physical health have never been better. My heart has never been fuller. Indeed, transforming my lawn has transformed my life.

This blog is an invitation for you to join me in the great joy of serving the Earth within the intimate comfort of our own homes. You don’t have to be an expert. You don’t have to go into debt. I’m here to prove that a thriving world is right at our fingertips.

But, before I dive into the story of how that came to be, I want to acknowledge you. If you’re reading this blog, there’s a few things that I already know about you:

  1. You care deeply about the Earth.
  2. You are bravely willing to take responsibility for your part in creating thriving communities.
  3. You still have hope for what’s to come.

With that in mind, I hope my story will nourish the seeds that you have already planted within your own heart. Whether you’ve already begun making changes to your home and lifestyle, or you’re brand new to sustainable living, this blog is your affirmation: We can make a big impact in our own backyards; anyone can do it; and it’s an absolute joy.

Let me take you back to a time when I wasn’t so optimistic: I was a junior in college when An Inconvenient Truth shook the world with its warning that if we don’t change our ways, the world as we know it will come to a tragic end. It was a rough way to enter adulthood, to say the least. So rough, in fact, that I tried to sweep it under the rug. I tried to keep it all at bay: “It’s far away,” I would say.

But when the drought began to dry up our state, and the fires began to rage, it became clear that the future had arrived. It’s been three years since the day that the sun didn’t rise (remember that smoke-filled, eerie orange morning, summer 2020?). Now, after years of debilitating depression and anxiety, I’m happy to say: I finally found some natural lighting.

It all started with a podcast I was listening to by Greg Sarris (chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria) with Obi Kaufmann (author of the California Field Atlas). They were discussing different ways that folks can support indigenous people’s environmental efforts and one of the suggestions was to transform your yard. “Claiming a space as home means being responsible to it by doing things like taking out your lawn and learning indigenous plants,” Obi said.

A bell rang. Chills moved through my veins. I didn’t know how I’d do it, but I’d find a way. I’d turn my lawn into a sustainable landscape.

First I talked to my uncle who had recently transformed his yard to be drought-resistant. He told me about the Water-Efficient Landscape Rebate Program that offers a rebate of $1.50 per square foot up to $1,500 for sustainable yard transformations. But, he had hired a landscaper who charged him $25,000! I didn’t have that kind of money! I would have to find a way to do it myself.

This was a tall order! I didn’t know anything about landscaping at all! So, I started by volunteering with the Putah Creek Council, a local nonprofit that does habitat restoration and protection of our watershed. There I learned about native plants. Eventually I even did an internship with them. But how would I translate all that to home?

That’s when I found Sustainable Solano, whose backyard program teaches folks how to incorporate elements of habitat restoration in their own backyards! By volunteering with Sustainable Solano, I started to learn the basics of the transformation:

  • taking out your lawn with sheet mulching
  • permaculture principles of design
  • sustainable gardening
  • and harvesting and storing rainwater in the ground!

In talking to one of the program managers, Nicole Newell, about my intention to transform my yard as close to the budget of the rebate program as possible, I expressed an interest in paving the path for others to be able to do the same. Being environmental stewards in our homes is something that should be accessible to everyone! In that spirit, she and I collaborated with sustainable designer Joshua Burman Thayer of Native Sun Designs to create a design template that any Solano County resident can use as a starting point for their own yard transformation.

Designer: Joshua Burman Thayer, Native Sun Designs

Through applying the principles that were modeled to me in the Sustainable Solano volunteer days, and by using the design template we created, in less than two hours a week, I was successfully able to transform my entire lawn into a native plant landscape and vegetable garden all within the $1,000 offered by the rebate program. The project took a year, and I bought most of my plants from El Rancho Nursery in Vacaville. This summer, 90% of my veggies came from my garden.

It felt like a miracle! Prior to this project, I had hidden my black-thumb and was embarrassed to try to grow herbs in pots! Now I was sharing surplus veggies!

The benefits went far beyond what I had expected: the garden was a magnet for all kinds of goodness: Neighbors would stop and chat. Lonely meals were supplemented by the satisfaction of knowing that I played a part in growing something so delicious. Plus, the wisdom of the Earth and the peace of the garden ended up being a tremendous companion while processing the grief of having recently lost my grandmother.

There was a hole being filled that I hadn’t known needed filling: For the first time in my life, I found my belonging. Hands in the soil, I reclaimed my place in the ecosystem.

And the more I learned, the more my hope grew! Did you know that 26% of greenhouse gases come from growing and transporting food? 70% of freshwater is used for food production? 50% of habitable land is used for agriculture? 78% of nutrient-overloaded water pollution (called eutrophication) is from farms?

Just imagine how the world would heal if we could grow, at a minimum, our own veggies!

It wasn’t long ago that most people had kitchen gardens right outside their front door. Before the mid-1800s, home gardens and wild food cultivation were a staple of human survival. Though gardens became more of a leisure activity as lawns took center stage and folks started moving into urban areas for manufacturing jobs, during World War II, “victory gardens” made a major comeback to fight food shortages, producing 40% of American produce in 1943. That means that there’s still people living today who remember what it was like to make a mass effort to grow our own food in a short period of time. If our grandparents could do it, so can we.

With 40,000 acres of land being used for lawns (that’s about half the total acreage of all the national parks), just imagine how our world would change if we simply made the switch from water-hungry and pesticide-prone green blankets to native flowers, trees, fruits and veggies?

With just a little help from each other, it’s all within reach. That’s why I’m here.

You can read my blog where I wrote original songs and told stories about how the process of installing the garden helped me to not only serve the Earth, but to make peace within me at The Living Mirror Project.

Then join me on Jan. 23 for Sustainable Yard Transformation on a Budget, a free online class with Sustainable Solano. I’ll share more of the nuts and bolts of what I learned in my journey of transforming my lawn, and how you can grow joy and hope with home sustainability. You can register here.

Winter at the Pace of Nature

Dec 13, 2023

By Jazzmin Ballou, Solano Gardens Program Manager

Every winter I find myself overwhelmed with the need for rest. This comes regardless of how busy I have been, how much sleep I have, or what my calendar looks like for the next week. It shows up as an inherent, unignorable need to slow down and retreat. When I process this in the context of the human world, I feel kind of crazy. Everyone else is continuing on as normal, working and attending social gatherings … and some people are doing even more of those things considering the holidays are upon us! It all seems so surreal to me: the way the human world never seems to slow down, often appearing to just move faster and faster. And then I look to nature. Nature, with her ability to tune in directly to her needs and move at a pace that serves all of her inhabitants. When did we lose touch with this process?

In the winter when I tune in to the pace of nature I find myself face-to-face with myself in all of my slowness. The fog soon clears and I realize my body as a member of nature is asking to move at the pace that the rest of the natural world is moving at. This need for rest is not necessarily because my body is tired from my life, but because my body is taking the hints from the natural world that this time of the year, winter, is intended for slowing down, hibernation, and stasis. I’m reminded of a quote from the book Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times by Katherine May, who writes “In winter, I want concepts to chew over in a pool of lamplight — slow, spiritual reading, a reinforcement of the soul. Winter is a time for libraries, the muffled quiet of bookstacks and the scent of old pages and dust. In winter, I can spend hours in silent pursuit of a half-understood concept or a detail of history. There is nowhere else to be, after all.”

As we enter into the holiday season, a time that for so many of us signals travel to see loved ones, time off of work and school, and cozy time spent indoors, I wish you rest. Rest that is so sacred and full of ease, it mimics the process of the leaves surrendering to the wind, carrying them from their host tree to be composted back into the Earth. Rest that is so intentional it allows space for your own internal composting process, preparing you for the rebirth of spring.

The Vision for a SuSol Education Center

Oct 26, 2023

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.

How to Compost at Home

Sep 15, 2023

By Patrick Murphy, Program Manager

Backyard composting often feels like a hobby reserved for those “in the know.” Like sourdough starter and beer brewing, the process seems both too simple and too complex to get started. How do you get from wheat and water to become bread? How do you turn yard waste and food scraps into compost? The answer is planning and time (and bacteria). With a little preparation and some patience, you too can compost your food scraps at home.

Composting requires a little forethought, some dedicated space, and the diligence to do regular light maintenance. If you can keep a houseplant alive, you should be able to get a compost bin started. The most important thing with backyard composting is to choose a system that will work best for you, which you feel you can sustain long-term. There are two common options for at-home composting, “hot pile” and “vermicompost” (or worm bins).

A stereotypical “hot pile” composting system uses a large bin and regular aeration to convert organic materials (i.e. food scraps) into compost. This system works very well when it receives a regular supply of organic materials, and is turned often. However your pile will begin to work less and less efficiently if the bin ever has less than a full cubic yard of material in it. Hot pile systems require that you maintain a specific ratio of high-nitrogen/high-carbon scraps in order for the bacteria to break down the material. I would recommend these systems for larger families, or organizations looking to get into composting. Learn more about hot pile composting here.

A vermicompost system relies on worms to digest and process organic matter to create compost. These systems offer more flexibility compared to a traditional hot pile system. Vermicompost systems can be made in any size, allowing them to fit into more spaces (some people keep their bins under their kitchen sink). Vermicompost systems do require more careful planning than a hot-pile system. While worm bins do not need to be turned, bins need to be emptied more regularly and the worm populations need to be divided to prevent overcrowding. Worm bins also typically cannot be added daily: worms eat in “batches”, so waste needs to be collected and added all as a single, larger quantity. I would recommend worm bins for smaller families, or people who might lack the space or volume of material needed to start a hot pile system. Learn more about vermicomposting here. 

There are multiple options when it comes to composting at home, make sure you check out multiple methods and choose the one which you feel you’ll be able to maintain the easiest. Consider alternatives to compost like indoor bokashi fermentation, or an outdoor green cone digester. Compost alternatives allow you to avoid most of the emissions created by throwing away food scraps while still allowing you to return nutrients to the soil. Focus less on the total volume of compost produced, and more on ease of use for yourself.