La Casa Grande Colectiva

Category: projects

  • Satellite Images Updated for Urbana

    Up until yesterday, every time I checked out our town on Google Maps or Google Earth, I was frustrated by the low-res images that were in the database.  Well thats changed and now there are great images for Urbana, although they’re a year or two old.  (You can see the veggie-diesel truck in the yard from a former housemate)

    Satellite view of our yard, with labels
    Satellite view of our yard, with labels

    There are a lot of sweet GIS tools that Google offers through Earth and Maps that allow you to play with the images and add your own content layers.   I drew a path that shows my bike route to work everyday. Then I made a screen capture.

    My bike route to work
    My bike route to work

    GIS (geographic information systems) is an exciting field that has many possible community applications. La Casa member, Jacob, made this map last year that shows where all the fruit trees are growing in town. This is a form of community asset mapping. Pretty sweet.  What else can we do?

  • an urbana community garden

    My great friend Drew, an environmental philosopher, has been working hard on getting more community gardens started in Champaign-Urbana.  Over the weekend I helped out at one of the locations for an eco-ecumenical group that formed this year.  Here’s some phoneCAM photos that I snapped to document the day.
    Mulching watering

    Raspberries were planted along the wall.  A generous amount of straw mulch was put down.

    Planting

    Peas, and flowers were planted along the front rows.

    Planting tomatoes

    A variety of tomatoes were planted in the middle of the plot.

    Mulching approved

    Nice mulch, Gretchen approves.

    Drew and Brian

    Drew and Brian, the site organizers.

    Workdays are Saturday mornings from 9-12 at different sites around town.

    To learn about how to get involved visit:  http://www.ecoecumenical.org/

  • OPEN FORUM ON BROADBAND IN C-U

    There was a very inspiring event this weekend where a group of community members got together to talk about getting broadband to the entire C-U community. YES!  I believe internet access is an important factor for inclusion in the emerging 21st century culture, especially a sustainable culture.  The forum was built off of a project already underway by CITES (the campus technology department) to apply for stimulus money (read: Obama money).  The stimulus package included 9 billion for getting broadband to rural and low-income communities and CITES is writing a proposal that will ask for $25-30 million.  Here’s the current draft of the map that was passed around by Mike, the project lead and panel member for the forum.
    Urbana Champaign Big Broadband version 7

    The yellow, blue, and pink areas north of campus are the low-income neighborhoods that the plan is specifically targeting. Although much of the talk during the forum focused on creating access models that include some sort of FREE access (as in beer) Mike was very clear that the proposal that he is writing won’t be FREE because the stimulus money stipulates that the plan must be “sustainable”. This is where the meaning of sustainable means different things to different people. It is still unclear what the final proposal will look like. A lot of the community members, church leaders, teachers, etc, were very clear that the digital divide is stopping many sectors from fully embracing online resources. For example, a teacher couldn’t assign online homework if they couldn’t be sure all students could get online. The librarian from Urbana Free also got up and lamented that her public access stations were constantly backed up; a sign of the times…

    Open Access Forum
    From left: Danielle (from UCIMC), Mike, (CITES), Anne Bishop, (GSLIS community informatics), Abdul (GSLIS), and a church organizer (can't remember her name, sry)

    I can envision a compromise being a network of free wireless nodes that reach every home. The wireless would have some bandwidth limit if needed. If you want your own wired connection, you’d have to pay a certain amount. This would enable everyone to have some sort of access, and also allow people to have the super-sexy-mega-bandwidth. The mega-access really makes the whole project enticing to a lot of the more affluent parts of town already getting screwed by Comcast, but don’t realize it.  Mike was saying he wanted 100 MBPS… damn.

    There is a website up to coordinate the whole effort.  (Champaign Urbana Open Access Coalition) Anyone interested in OpenAccess for Urbana-Champaign should think about signing up.

  • don’t mind me, just a little mushroom in with the plants

    mushroom in with the seedlings

    A couple tiny mushrooms popped up among our seedlings the other day. I was unable to accurately identify them using our field guides, and I’m still wondering if mushrooms are some sort of indicator that we’re doing something wrong. Either way, I thought they were interesting.

  • perennial emergence

    Would anyone like to trade some images for some words? How many words are these pictures worth? ~JP

    I meet your five pictures with five poems.  Brownie points to those who guess th constraint. ~AndR

    bamboo shoots
    Bamboo Shoots

    blasting aggressively, my bamboo oozes out,
    striking hard only once: three shoots

    hops coming up
    Cascade Hops

    “climb! a skyhigh clamor! away, dread earth!”
    (how ordinary: pursuing sun)

    Apple buds blossom
    Apple bud blossoms

    a plump pink leafy existence
    but under drunk
    billowing laughter of some smiling ovary: my spectacle

    older asparagus bed
    Asparagus

    aerodynamic sunfed plant, arousing rustic “awwww’s”: give us splendor

    stinging nettle
    Stinging Nettles

    spines touch. i never go in nighttime gowns
    never ever tattle try like embers: sigh

  • Beer Dig

    Yo! La Casa hosted a BEER DIG yesterday, which means we bribed our friends with alcohol to help get our pit ponded!  Something like 40 people showed up, some of them with shovels, for a muddy-fine time digging, grunting, drinking, heaving, hoeing, and drinking.

    Some La Casans went out round about 10AM to imagine a desirable curvy shape for our pit-pond to take, wiggling our garden hose and some electrical cords around until everyone ok-ed it.  Maria threw down some white spray paint to make it official.  “Dig here.”  We made a design with two shallow, wiggly fingers and a mound in between.

    Pond shaping up

    In the picture above, Liya (purple shirt and fabulous overalls) stands in front of the mound and between the two fingers. You can see how high the water table had gotten from the night before!  We bailed out the pit more than once, and it quickly filled back in with fresh water from the ground.

    Towards the end of the day

    Above: Towards the end of the dig, you can see even the new fingers filled with a bit of water.  The north finger is the close one, and on the other side of that soggy mound, you can see a bit of the south finger.  We made a lot of progress, and we have more digging to do yet!

    Bonnie in the low contrast of the sunshine

    Anna, Brett, & Bonnie in a dramatic pic!

    Many beds were prepared as well

    Above: Meanwhile, some of us worked on digging new garden beds and raising them up with soil from the pit-pond.  We carried sod to the front yard to replant it in a strange patchwork under a tree, hence Vinnie with a wheelbarrow of sod.

    The hungry laborers

    Post-dig din: whole wheat macaroni with tomato sauce, quinoa, (leftover) delicious chili, and home-made bread-machineless bread.  The sun going down, and the crowd dwindling a bit.  The alcohol finally catching up with me….

    Post dig bonfire

    And finally, as we digested our elbows and beer, we enjoyed a big-ol’ bonfire, the first of the season.

    Post dig bonfire 4

    Thanks for digging with us, those of you who did!  I, for one, thought it went swimmingly, pit-ponds, garden beds, soddy jigsaw puzzles, bowls of quinoa, and raging fires considered.

  • Grafted Golden Delicious

    My friend and band-mate Sam generously gifted me this piece of M-7 rootstock with three golden delicious apple buds grafted onto it.  Sam’s horticulture class at Parkland College was doing a unit on grafting and he wanted to share what he was learning with me and La Casa.  We grafted on two dormant buds in Sam’s kitchen Friday afternoon and I biked home with it all smiles.  I’m keeping it in the sunny room with the seed starts until its ready to move outside.

    The golden delicious graft with the seedlings in the background. Three buds were grafted onto the rootstock. I did the top bud and Sam the middle. After the buds grow the green on top will be cut off.
    The golden delicious graft with the seedlings in the background. Three buds were grafted onto the rootstock. I did the top bud and Sam the middle. After the buds grow the green on top will be cut off.

  • Make Mountains

    Last Friday I made it to the U of I quad during an event by local artist Bonnie Fortune called Make Mountains. Participants were instructed to assume a stance similar to downward facing dog.  I participated as long as my wrists would let me, and then went on my way after snapping this photo.
    Make mountains

    We don’t have any mountains here, and the flat land seems boring and barren sometimes. This performance gesture was a nod to those communities suffering from mountaintop removal practices.

  • Domebook 2, Geodesics: futuristic design meme of the past

    A geodesic dome made of glass
    A geodesic dome made of glass

    The Library of Radiant Optimism is a project by Let’s Remake, a group of local artists/activist that live in our hood. They write: “The Library was begun to catalog a groundswell of optimistic and visionary activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We gathered a handful of books that embrace grass roots exchange of information and themes of self and community empowerment.” They put up a PDF of a book titled Domebook 2 and I’ve been fascinated with it the last couple days.

    Domebook 2 was published in 1971 by Lloyd Kahn, at the height of geodesic dome excitement within the counterculture.   Geodesic domes were evangelized by Buckminster Fuller as being cheap, easy to construct, and structurally superior.  Sounds super-cool, right?  After spending some time reading through the book I did a bit of background research on domes, this book, and the author.

    It turns out that Domebook 2 was taken out of print by Kahn a few years after publication after continued frustrations with dome building.  After building some 19 domes, Kahn abandoned domes altogether and shifted his inquiry towards elegantly built homes made from local material.  This new work was published in the books Shelter (1973) and Shelter II (1978).  However, he had created so much hype about domes that he continued to be asked about their construction for years and years.  He finally wrote up this piece, Refried Domes, along with a comparison of dome/rectangle construction.  His arguments against domebuilding are many and seem to have been earned through the pain of experience.

    Reading Kahn’s later words killed some of the excitement I had upon discovering the book.  Over a hundred pages of beautiful people trying new and exciting ways of living resonated with my current view of the world.  Domes might make bad homes, but they certainly seem appealing when the rest of the world is so square.  I also love the idea of starting with a stack of triangles and a group of friends and building an object of wonder together.

    Kahn, now 72, lives outside SF, CA.  He has a blog and wrote a new book, Builder’s of the Pacific Coast.

  • modeling the La Casa permaculture garden in 3D

    Here’s a 3D model in that I’m in the process of building to document our permaculture garden. It includes a mock-up design for the pond that attempts to maximize the amount of perimeter. I’m still learning how to use Google Sketchup so I haven’t added too many bells and whistles.

    Garden Model

    I sense an interesting utility in 3D modeling software when building permaculture designs.  I’m already comfortable using photoshop but it was a conceptual leap to start working in the third dimension. Google made Sketchup very user friendly and they have online tutorials to explain each tool. Here’s a good place to start if your interested. The killer feature that google implemented is the ability to download and add models to the 3D Model Warehouse. That is where all the trees in my model came from. Other users have already started adding their own permaculture designs.

  • Won’t you join us?

    beer_dig

  • quick-post, bat houses

    I found this great webpage that has collected a bunch of free plans for building bat houses. I built a birdhouse over the weekend, when that’s finished a bat house is next. I like this one.