Are You Chicken?

It was a warm Saturday morning. A good friend and I foisted our children off on our respective husbands and headed out for a Backyard Chickens class at Common Ground. At the Palo Alto headquarters, we were redirected to a house fifteen minutes away. Wending past wildflower encrusted hills and soaring oaks, we arrived at our destination - an old farmhouse roosting on the edge of a cliff. A large hen house lounged in the middle of an edible garden. Bolted lettuce, grape vines and tomatoes sidled up with poppies, apricot trees and lavender. Straw paths slinked between beds filled with soil the color of chocolate.

We wandered through the gardens, reaching to touch a raspberry bush here, savor the tousled beauty of intermingled vegetables, herbs and "weeds" there. Four rows of white plastic chairs fanned out in front of the chicken coop. We scooted into the shade of a plum tree and awaited our host, Jody Main.

Over the next two hours, Jody alternately instructed us on feeding chickens (in addition to their feed all green waste goes through the chickens before landing in the compost pile), building and cleaning a chicken coop, explained how to store eggs, and charmed us with chicken lore. All takers, including yours truly, plucked a dinosaur sized leaf of Swiss chard and ventured into the coop to feed the feathered fowl.

Soon, the two hours were over. Reluctantly, my friend and I finished our homemade egg pate and emptied the ice tea with home grown spearmint. We shuttled past the chicken coop one last time, peering in at the girls as they pecked at chard leaves and comfrey. Jody waved good bye and we trundled back to the car, to our own small yards - where fruit trees don't yet sprawl into the street, wheat doesn't sprout from well manured mounds and the air isn't peppered with contented clucks. On the ride home, my friend vowed to get chicks next spring. She had just the spot - at the back of her property where it borders open space. The prior owners had had chickens there, she disclosed, and her husband was raised on a farm.

A couple weeks later, I visited my sister, who has likewise gone to the birds. She and her family recently adopted three heritage breed chicks and are well on their way to backyard eggs.

As for me, am I chicken? I am afraid I am. A bit. My yard is smaller than my friend's, more narrow than my sister's, my boys more boisterous than any of their children. Can I eek out a corner somewhere, big enough for hens but not so big as to encroach on the little play space we have left in our yard? Will we end up with a backyard farm of our own? Stay tuned.

How about you? Are you chicken?

Apples to Apples

I am an APLS. I spend less money than I have. Haunt thrift stores instead of Target. Cook from scratch instead of order take out. Bike when I can. Give what I can. It feels great to be an APLS. I feel lighter ditching stuff that would only clutter my home and my consciousness. I embrace experiences instead of things, revel in the peace of a bike ride, the meditation of hanging laundry.

As grounding as it is to be an APLS, there have been times when I felt like the only apple in the basket. Those times, being an APLS didn't feel so good. I felt lonely and eco-freakish. The solution, though, was not to abandon APLS-dom but to connect apples to apples. Over the past year, I've slowly found and connected to like-minded folks and have gradually moved from a sense of isolation to a place of belonging and community.

Growing a green community is as easy as picking apples from an apple tree. It requires only a ladder, a bushel basket and the will to pick.

ON THE LADDER:

- Join a group and become active: "Green" organizations, while perhaps the first choice, are not necessary. The PTA for your kids' school, a gardening club, a local mothers' club, a sports league, a church, a bicycling group, a neighborhood bunco group - almost anything will do. The only catch is that you must actually be interested in the focus of the group you are joining and not joining solely to meet others. Research repeatedly demonstrates that we are happier and healthier when we connect with others. The more people you come across, the more likely you are to eventually cross paths with another APLS.

- Go Out on a Limb: Once you are in some sort of organization, you can put your feelers out for other APLS. Offer to start a sub-group - maybe an edible gardening club, a cooking club, a hiking group, a stitch 'n bitch, a local food buying club, a green book club or a simplicity circle. If you are near a school, community education organization, or non profit center, attend a class or offer to teach one. It doesn't have to be an economics class. I recently attended a class on raising chickens put on by a local gardening supply and education center. While there, attendees were clamoring for more classes - ones on canning, edible gardening, composting. The topics are endless as the opportunities for connecting with other like-minded folks and, once we departed, the instructor had twenty new friends.

- Branch Out on the Web: While meeting other APLS in person is great, there is no reason not to connect more via the Internet. If you are reading this, you likely read and/or have a blog. Blogs and Yahoo groups are great for jump-starting communities and the warm, supportive blog community has served as home base to me for nearly a year. But connections can go deeper than posts and comments. They can start as simply as sending an email.

IN THE BUSHEL BASKET:

- Web-based APLS: I count Arduous as a good friend. It started with me emailing her a petition to sign for her Armchair Activism challenge. A month later, she emailed me to ask for advice about a birthday gift for a child my son's age. Next thing I knew, we were emailing regularly, starting a joint blog and eating strawberry crepes together. Not every email sent to a fellow blogger has yielded a breakfast meeting. A good number, however, have yielded a real connection - a collaborative blog, shared ideas on beating blogger burnout or simply common joy in a pair of sustainable flip flops (you might be surprised who bought hot pink ones). Melinda at Elements in Time rightly encourages meeting fellow bloggers. She's done it on several occasions and now regularly hits the farmers' market with same city bloggers. The APLS who inhabit the blogosphere can become more than fellow bloggers. They can become friends.

- APLS in the Neighborhood: CindyW at Organic Picks recently offered up a fantastic list for getting to know your neighbors. Nothing builds sustainable communities like close ties within a neighborhood. As Cindy suggests, it is easy to start small - borrowing a cup of milk, hanging out on your front porch, working in your garden. Everyone in town knows my next door neighbor. She makes the neighborhood a small place by doing each one of the things on Cindy's list. And, the more I get to know her, I realize that she's more apple than orange.

- Community APLS: A year ago, I was a fledgling member of my mothers' club. I lurked on the message board, rarely posting, and fled from anything resembling a physical meeting. I am a bookworm - shocking, I know. After months of rumination, I sent out a tentative email on the mothers' club bulletin board and launched a green book club with a handful of interested moms - none of whom I'd ever met. Over the past 8 months, we added a few members, discussed a number of books, and have moved beyond books to the beginning of real friendships.

PICKING THE APPLES:

Many of us own a ladder and long for a basket overflowing with apples. Sometimes, though, it's downright hard to climb and pick. I recently read Achieving Success Through Social Capital a book not about the environment but about social networking. The author argues that consciously expanding your network "requires a change of behavior on your part. There is no way around it. To implement a practice you have to move out of your comfort zone, change your daily routines, and step outside the normal rounds of your life." (126). He lays out the following motivating tenets:

1) Embrace discomfort: "Most people interpret discomfort as a warning sign telling them to avoid something. The opposite is true for networking. Discomfort is a sign that you are doing something right." (Id.) When I first started my book club, emailed a fellow blogger for the first time, or met the first member of my local food buying club, I felt unsure, nervous, intimidated. Even now, I'll end a book club meeting wondering if I talked too much, gave too many "jam" directions, cleaned my house too much or not enough. I'm willing to bet Eco 'Burban mom was a little nervous when she first launched her Little League recycling program and I'll bet being labeled "The Trash Lady" didn't feel all that comfortable. Discomfort pays off in dividends, though, when you spot a familiar face at a city council meeting or have a friend - whom you've connected with only by blogs and emails - cajole you out of a climate change funk.

2) Act as if: "New attitudes don't precede new behaviors; the reverse is true - new behaviors create new attitudes. . . . [S]tride forth and build networks; only then will you develop the attitude of a network builder." (Id.) I've always longed to be a social butterfly - someone like my next door neighbor who can connect with a stranger at the park and end up having coffee with that person the next day. In trying to connect with other APLS, I've forced myself act more like a butterfly than a moth. I've extended invitations for the book club and pimped my buying club on local boards. Gradually, I've become a bit more comfortable, slightly smoother in my responses, and, as the number of greenies I know expand, more capable of hooking people up.

3) Start small: Send an email to another blogger. Ask a friend to attend a class with you. Find a local business or restaurant, go regularly and get to know the people who work there. Chat with the farmers at the farmers' market. Eat family dinners more. Make connections in your life - even if it is as simple as saying hi to a neighbor or calling your sister.

4) Make a commitment to yourself: "Good intentions don't lead to action; commitments do. Make a contract with yourself . . . [b]e specific and write it down." Keeping a blog, putting your words out there for the world to read, far exceeds any written contract in my book. If I could not write about my community building efforts here, feel answering support in comments and posts, I likely would have crawled back to the couch and the bag of Doritos months ago.

Life is much more delicious this way - with blogger friends to email and visit, book club meetings to prepare for, edible gardening tours to attend with friends, and neighbors with whom to share gardening discoveries. Life is more delicious when you connect apples to apples.

Forget Me Not

I stand eye to eye with a Cosmos. It's fuzzed yellow center winks at me like a cyclops. Watching the pink petals sashay in the breeze, I realized that I've only grown Cosmos this tall twice in my life. Both times I've forsworn the nursery's plastic pots with seedlings neatly tucked inside and tossed a bunch of seeds on to the ground, hoping for the best, the best came.

Snip.

The spent blossom falls to the ground. I watch a bee skim over the Cosmos and bury itself in borage.

Snip.

The day is perfect for gardening, really. The bluest sky. The quiet neighborhood. A tiny blue butterfly drops down onto the Queen Anne's lace for the briefest second, before waving behind my morning glories and disappearing over the top of the house.

Snip.

The four foot stem is relieved of another tired bloom. I am deadheading. It is a practice I was taught years ago to keep flowers blooming and a garden looking nice. Despite the swelling pumpkin mounds and front lawn littered with makeshift cages to keep the deer from devouring the last of the runner beans, my front yard does look nice.

Snip.

My basket is full and this particular stand of Cosmos looks quite tidy. No flagging flowers. No tightening seed pods ready to spill their seeds into the soil and stop my garden from blooming. I want to save those seeds alright but . . . not yet. It's only just July. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Indian summers proliferate, I've got months of blooming ahead of me.

I gather my deadheaded daisies and head for the green waste bin on the other side of the yard. I dump the spent flowers in and close the lid. A movement from the butterfly garden stops me.

Perched atop a waving bunch of cosmos - the next on my hit list - is a small black and brown bird. The stem bends under its weight as it nuzzles its beak into the bare center of a former flower. Determinedly, it pries out one seed, then two and finally three before flitting away into our front yard tree.

My clippers hang at my side, feeling suddenly heavy. Once again, I'm faced with the realization that we need not work harder to open our hearts and yards to wildlife, to live in harmony with other species, to "be green." In fact, we can work less. We can let nature have her beautiful, tousled way with our gardens. We can put away the lawn mower and enjoy the flowers that spring up in its place, that entice bees to dine next to our picnic blanket. We can clear out ornamentals and let our children dig to their hearts content - connecting with nature at each ant uncovered, each earthworm excavated, and each "apple seed" planted.

It seems a difficult lesson to learn. That standards can be adjusted. That perfection is not necessary. That things don't have to be "pretty" by someone else's standards. I sit down under the maple tree, still and shaded, and watch wildlife use the garden we created for them. It wasn't that I hadn't learned the lesson, I realize. The bird hops back down to another flower, foraging for more seeds. I just needed a reminder.

Of Dragons and Baseballs

It was a Wednesday evening. My boys had joined the neighbor children's endeavor to extract money from anyone brave enough to veer near our street. They were selling organic lemonade. They stood on the sidewalk alternately yelling "Lemonade for Sale" or "A customer! A customer!"

While chatting with my neighbor, I deadheaded my butterfly garden, yanked weeds out of the pumpkin patch (e.g., sidewalk strip) and pulled out a dying potato plant. For some reason, I thought, potatoes never seemed to do well when I planted them on the south side of the house. I made a mental note and smoothed their compost hill along the soil and in between the lavender and pepper plants. My hand struck something solid and round - the size of a baseball. I eased out a large red rose potato.

"Is that a potato?" My neighbor stopped mid-sentence. She gawked as I pulled out two, four, five more baseball sized potatoes. "Sure is," I responded with my own awe. "Whoa, I should plant some of those. My husband would love it." She continued.

Bidding her goodbye, I gathered my babies (the potatoes) up and headed inside. I sliced up those beautiful potatoes. The knife slipped through them easily, the interior creamy and yellow. Splattering them with local olive oil, thyme, salt and pepper, I roasted them for a half an hour.

We ate our front yard potatoes with a locally baked baguette, brushcetta made from heirloom tomatoes, cucumber, radish, balsamic vinegar and olive oil - all courtesy of the farmers' market - and the first homegrown Dragon's Tongue beans of the season.

Baseballs and dragon's tongues, from seed to plate? It is not a fairy tale but it tastes like one.

Good to Last Crunch

How great a month was June? The sun shone. The pumpkins in my front yard finally blossomed. My oldest son graduated from preschool. And, oh yeah, the blog community came together to pay tribute to one Crunchy Chicken and to donate cash, time and pads to keep African girls in school.

Again and again, over the past several months, I've written about the importance of community, of connections. With A Crunchy Tribute, we proved that relationships can be forged with people across the country and across the globe. That we can care about one another, support one another and pull off a surprise party for an unsurprisable blogger - all without knowing what one another looks like.

So thank you. Thank you to my partner in crime, Arduous. To the group of bloggers frantically emailing one another a week before A Crunchy Tribute "went live" - contributing ideas, providing feedback and sharing a laugh or two. To every blogger who posted about the tribute, or commented. To people who donated money, sewed pads, offered time to help pack pads (there were 35 that we know about!). To those of you who sent Crunchy Chicken good vibes, who smiled when you read a tribute post, who thought about someone Crunchy-like in your life.

We set out to raise $5,000 for Goods 4 Girls. We came in a tad shy ($1895.91, 92 pads, 21 waterproof bags) but we raised something even better. Something that will give back over the months and year to come. A community.

Thank you, blog community.

Planes, Trains and Automobiles

We make our home on the crowded San Francisco Peninsula. Our houses and shops press together like clothes in a too-full closet. Our streets are a flurry of trucks, cars, bicycles, and buses. Farmers markets abound and a pristine, double decker train, CalTrain, totes us up to the City or down to San Jose. When I worked in San Francisco, years ago, I took the train regularly. On the ride, I'd prepare for work, read a book, or close my eyes and listen to the rails click gently past. More recently, I've turned to the train for regeneration as another year ticked by or loaded my boys on it bound for adventure and ball games.

CalTrain is tame. It is less empty than it once was but the seats are spacious, the upper decks peer over the Bay, green fields and scrap yards as the train lumbers toward San Francisco. In Disney-speak, CalTrain is the Monorail. It is clean, considerate, conciliatory.

If CalTrain is the Monorail, then BART is surely the Matterhorn. At least, that is what my boys dubbed it when we boarded BART for the first time last weekend. BART is dark and jerky. It screams and hollers - like the Abominable Snowman - as it rockets through black tunnels. Riders are stuffed together, packed in like thrill-seekers on a roller coaster ride, jolted at each stop and corner. Stations are dimly lit and hint at the dark, mysterious trip ahead. The tunnels stretch further and further until you are thundering under the opaque waters of the Bay and then, mystically, emerge into daylight. Your ears pop and your children wonder when we can ride the BART train again.

It is difficult, after such adventures, to usher everyone back into the car, the strapped seats, the smooth rolling ride where only other cars, not legendary monsters, lurk out of sight. Here, we are shielded from one another with closed windows and separate lanes. There is no people watching, no shared smiles as a boy on the opposite side of the train waves his Thomas toy in your direction, no reading books with two boys snuggled in your lap. You simply move from destination to destination. The journey is not worthy of mention.

Our trips by CalTrain and BART take only moments longer than by car. They yield much more though: gas saved, carbon emissions curbed, a sense of peace that cannot be located behind the wheel, and days of discussion about planes, trains and automobiles.

Quick Berry, Quack Berry

It is one thing to write about a social green movement. It is quite another, though, to invite eight women into your home to make blackberry jam.

The latter is like reading the book Jamberry to your kids. You pick it up at the library because the bear is cute or you like berries or your little guy likes the colors. You take it home and read it to your kids because you are a good mom. You start reading and, suddenly, you are sucked in. It has nothing to do with how important it is to read to your children or that you are spending "quality time" together. It has everything to do with the rollicking adventure that is the book. The rhythm of the words as they flow over your tongue, the antics of the bear and boy buried neck-high in various berries, the illustrations of waffle flowers and skating elephants. Pretty soon, you find yourself chirpping the words to yourself, to your husband across the dinner table, with a grin plastered across your face. Reading Jamberry feels great.

And so does making jam with friends. It has nothing to do with "being green." Every woman who came cared passionately about the state of the environment. There was some discussion about living lighter, tips traded on pinching back herbs or comparing tomato plants, ideas for planting fruit trees and biking to town. There was a lot more though. We talked about schools, husbands, balancing work and family, activities to do with our kids - all between spoonfuls of blackberry jam. We took turns washing jars, stirring, crushing berries and made something everyone on this planet is looking for: a connection. We'll savor that every time we open a jar of Book Club Blackberry Jam.

Buried in berries,

What a jam jamboree.